Chris24601

The only thing that makes sense regarding the old accounts is like the person hinted at above with the “I had a toon with all the badges” toon; i.e. they accomplished something they feel is notable on live and want the ability to show it off here. It’s basically bragging rights because every mechanical part that was account locked (vet awards, benefits purchased with Paragon Points, etc.) is now available for either free or for a token amount of in-game currency. I mean, you get all costume, power sets (including the sorcery pool) and EATs that were account restricted immediately. If you stop by the P2W you get most of the vet/prestige powers free. If you take the 15 minutes or so to run the three Atlas Park arcs you’ll get 9 merits you can turn into 27 converters that you can sell for about 2 million and change to buy several of the other vet powers (ex. Reveal, a self-rez and say, magic carpet/rocket board). If it’s not your first toon you can just mail yourself the inf and skip that step entirely. Even the Vet Award badge titles got placed as exploration badges so getting them is just a matter of downloading Vidiot maps and going there. There is nothing other than elitist bragging rights one could get from the old accounts... and for that, just brag already. We’ve no reason to doubt you. If you got every last badge on live, allow me to say “congratulations.” But I don’t actually care; no one cares that much about other people’s toons or in-game accomplishments unless they’re an actual friend. The only thing they cared about on live if they weren’t in the group who got the Vet awards first was how long they’d have to wait to get those awards for themselves. And waiting for them is no longer a thing, so now I care not at all. I’m glad the old database is gone. I hope it wasn’t just deleted; I hope they bleach-bitted it and then shattered the drive with a hammer. That version of the game designed to extract profit via catering to the vanity of offering exclusive goodies to hold over other players is dead (and one thing that’s massively obvious looking at a lot of the later arcs now after seven years is how they showcased NPCs employing those power sets and options you could pay to acquire... basically their new content was made into product placement ads). The non-profit version where everyone can accomplish anything with just time and effort is the City of Heroes we have now.

Frankly, I don't know WHY you'd want the old database back anyway. I've already re-rolled every toon I care to have back and between the P2W store and all the options you had to buy using the VIP/subscription coins (power sets, costumes, emotes, signature story arcs, etc.) are now given to you for free. Other than some sort of elitist hope of proving you were actually a member since live beta or something there's nothing in the account database of any value and plenty that spells massive legal jeopardy for anyone who has it. You want your old 50 back? Find a server where the name is free, roll it up, go into a fire-farm, wait an hour or two... BOOM! They're back with all the credits and Incarnate stuff you'll need to be re-equipped in a few more. Better yet... PLAY it again. It's been seven years, there's been some tweaks in the code since live, and a refresher course in what it can do and experiencing old content as if it was practically new because of sever years away is its own reward. Speaking of, my actual job for the day where I'm stuck on a machine that can surf the web, but not handle CoH is done... so why am I am still here? See you all online.

There’s an old, but fitting, maxim when it comes to interpreting the actions of a large group like a business; “never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.” If you really want to know what’s going on inside NCSoft (or any large corporation) just read a week or two of the Dilbert comic strip. The humor/despair for the human race is more when you realize it’s NOT actually all that exaggerated (mostly the exaggeration is that all the incompetence and flawed logic of an entire corporation is displayed using just the same recurring cast of five to six characters instead of the bad management and employee decisions throughout the actual thousands of employees). Odds are the original decision to shut down got started by an accountant who’s never played a video game since the 90s (and wouldn’t even know that killing support would actually take the game away from players... because Legend of Zelda still plays just fine on an NES and they haven’t made it in decades) looking at profit margins on a big list and selecting one to be cut. This renewal is probably the same sort of automatic process they have for all their properties. If one comes up, file the paperwork and move on to the next file. I wouldn’t be surprised if the application was a “form letter” they print out with the IP name inserted in a blank and the person who filed it doesn’t even remember doing so.

If they were to do snowy landscapes in more areas let me suggest though that it be more like Atlas currently rather than pre-New Years, because the falling snow is actually a temp aura that even shows up in the costume designer screen and persists in areas it really shouldn’t and is overall just not all that enjoyable after the first five minutes (kinda like the solid MONTH of night during Halloween was about two weeks too much... to the point I sought out story arcs that had outdoor missions because those still had the day-night cycle). Grant the falling snow temp power as a toggle for those who want it if you must, but please, don’t make me have to spend the holidays in the shadow shard because you want falling snow everywhere in Paragon City. Also worth noting in terms of winter in the Rogue Isles is that while instant zoning makes it feel next door to Paragon City in Rhode Island, the Rogue Isles are much further south (more in line with Virginia) and in an Oceanic climate to boot... meaning they pretty much don’t ever have snow. Any sort of holiday spruce up for the Isles should be looking at how Florida, Bermuda and the Bahamas decorate for the season.

To be fair, one advantage in terms of the negotiations now is that, because an unused IP and code is worth $0, then ANY license that brings in even a dollar would technically count as “increasing profits” relative to its value a year ago. The short version is that ultimately there’s virtually no upside to any endgame that isn’t a licensed server. First, CoH is not in competition with NCSoft’s other properties (the audiences are practically mutually exclusive) so allowing it to continue does not impact their profits, but shutting it back down brings negative PR and doesn’t actually shut it down; it just drives it to smaller, better hidden or even personal use only servers where any potential customers will be even less likely to listen. Second, because all the work NCSoft was ever going to do has already been done years ago and another business entity is offering to bear all the costs of operation/future development, there is zero cost from NCSoft’s end and free positive PR gained from a license deal. Third, a valid licensed server maintains their trademarks at no cost. The situation now with the game shut down for years and the code now in the wild is vastly different than the situation at shutdown. In the cold calculations of maximizing profit, a third party offering to do your work for you and increase the value if your IP at no cost to yourself is something you can’t pass up.

Which is why the ideal for me would be a completed license agreement with one or more servers to operate legally and a push by community leaders to support those legalized servers over the alternatives.

Since NCSoft never needed the Trademarks to shut the servers running CoH down, I'm going to treat this as neutral-to-good news. Neutral would be that trademarks in the US are use-or-lose with a seven year window (i.e. after seven years of disuse someone else can claim the trademark... for an actual comic example, see Captain Marvel/Shazam). On November 30, 2019 we reached the seven year anniversary of CoH's shutdown when the clock for disuse would have begun so an application to keep the trademark filed just a few days after it would have lapsed could just be a default IP-protection practice from their legal department that happens to occur while negotiations regarding a license for private servers are ongoing. Bolstering this possibility is that the renewal was filed in the US, while Homecoming is based out of Quebec, Further, Canadian trademark law's use-or-lose period is actually 15 years so, presuming NCSoft's trademark was registered in Canada while CoH was live, then the one from 2012 would already still be in force with no need to re-apply for it to use Trademark infringement against Homecoming. If its good news then it means NCSoft is actively securing their IP trademarks in advance of issuing a license to the Homecoming team to make these servers official and legal (just making Homecoming an officially licensed service would also reset the Canadian trademark use clock).

Honestly, I think people need to get over this "NCSoft is forever the enemy" attitude because its NOT helpful to the negotiations at all. The fact they've taken zero action against any of the CoH servers when they could legally have them all shut down tomorrow is not the actions of an enemy. It is also worth noting that the decision to shut CoH down was made seven years ago. Do you know if the people who made that call are even still working at NCSoft today? For example, shortly before the shutdown, the Nexon corporation acquired 15% ownership of NCSoft. They sold their share in 2015. Did they have a say in CoH being shutdown? Also in 2015 several of their officers were spun off into a subsidiary (Iron Tiger Studios). Did the person in charge of that decision end up there instead of in the position to determine the outcome of negotiations with Homecoming? A more recent turnover was their chief development officer being replaced in mid-2018, It'd be counterproductive to label people who didn't even work for the company at the time as "evil" for their non-existent role in ending City of Heroes... particularly if those people are willing to negotiate now.

The trick though is that Homecoming rests a bit on the shoulders of giants in the sense that the vast stores of content here were developed by a fairly good sized staff of paid employees and the game had a previously established fanbase. It’s one thing to get by on monthly goodwill donations and devs working on small additions in their free time when the total works out to a dollar or so per player because you’ve got a large group of players with plenty to keep them occupied. It’s another entirely when that costs jumps to tens of thousands per month split between an initial playerbase of a few hundred because it’s just launched and the only way to churn out sufficient initial content is to pay several people to work on the game full time (we’re talking expenses in the range of $5k per month for each full time programmer/graphic artist/animator on staff on the low end). In other words, Homecoming is a great model to sustain/slowly improve an existing game, but probably not all that great for developing one from scratch. But there’s two interrelated aspects that makes CoH much more of a perfect storm that would be difficult to copy for other games. First, CoH isn’t really in competition for market share with anything else in NCSoft’s wheelhouse. It’s a relatively non-grindy MMO themed around the distinctly American concept of superheroes. There is basically no overlap in the audience for CoH and NCSoft’s other games... which means it’s existence isn’t costing NCSoft any revenue. In short, it’s not in competition with it’s parent company the way the WoW emulators were before the release of WoW Classic. The second factor is that CoH’s IP isn’t owned by a third party and, in fact, isn’t being used in anything more than a token capacity by NCSoft. This is why you’ll never see an official server for Star Wars Galaxies or Marvel Heroes (in addition to ticking off The Mouse, the former is also semi-competition for current license holder EA/Bioware’s SWTOR). As much as I’d like a more community focused approach, the amount of work to launch and grow a community coupled with typically being competition to the owner’s business and the prospect of third-party IP rights makes CoH very much the exception that proves the rule rather than revealing some previously unrecognized path.

Yeah, I don’t even play WoW (never even tried it), but I have to agree that the 800 lb. gorilla of MMOs committing sepuku is probably the bigger story of the year (that said, I still voted for CoH just out of loyalty). Frankly, one of the biggest problems a LOT of MMOs have had for the past decade is that they set out to be WoW-killers and, for some reason that also means aping 90% of WoWs mechanics (ex. SWToR with its massive gear grind and cookie cutter classes and focus on “progression raiding” guilds). The related problem is the perception that a game with tens to hundreds of thousands of active players is a failure (because it’s not millions like WoW) and leads to pulling all the development resources out of the title and putting it towards the next WoW-killer. The point being; if WoW weren’t such an 800 lb. gorilla, then the AAA game producers wouldn’t have felt the need to spend the last decade grinding out and then dropping support for the slew of WoW-clones we got. While this really made games like CoH shine as a contrast, I think the MMO field as a whole would have been better off if WoW hadn’t exploded like it did. Maybe if it ends up killing itself there will be enough room for fresher ideas to flourish.

So I’m looking at rolling up an archer concept and was wondering about the pros and cons of... 1) Archery/Tactical Arrow Blaster 2) Archery/Trick Arrow Corruptor 3) Trick Arrow/Archery Defender 4) Archery/??? Sentinel Not really looking at pet classes; but if there’s anything notable about Ninja/Trick Arrow Masterminds, that’d be on point (ba dum bum) too.

The wild is hardly ideal though. It’s hard to have much of a community if there’s a server being shut down every week because NCSoft changed it’s mind about going after “public” private servers at a later point. The benefit of licensing the IP is that you get yourself legal protections (it’s a contract), certainty for our devs that all their hard work isn’t going to have to be dumped due to changing legal winds because the whole thing is legally dubious, and, most importantly, the ability to really let people know that City of Heroes is back (right now it’s all word of mouth and articles that are now 7-8 months old and moving further down the search results all the time). It might sound cool to “stick it to the man” but the legal no man’s land that results isn’t all that great for long term health of the game and community. I’d much prefer to see a fair deal worked out that gives Homecoming the legal protection to make significant further development worthwhile.

Pinging off a comment I made in the general forums... back in live (I think it was around the time First Ward was added) the devs ran a one-time event involving a Devouring Earth invasion of Atlas Park that culminated in Hamidon showing up and needing to be beaten back. My suggestion is... dig through the spaghetti code to find it and maybe trigger it every so often (or write a trigger akin to the Rikti raids where completing X spawns it... say the Eden trial or a Hami raid) so it can be another option for zone events at (hopefully) less resource cost than having to code a brand new one from scratch.

I wouldn’t be opposed to it either. Heck, there could even be something like a community contest to swap out the signatures for trainers and TFs with player-created ones. That said, the characters as they existed up to shutdown would probably be able to remain as is... its more that if something like that were in place anything added by the HC crew wouldn’t be able to change the status quo of the current signature characters. The main effect this would likely have would be that they’d essentially have to drop the “Coming Storm” as planned and create a story of their own. I honestly wouldn’t mind a change of direction from the storm being a singular force of aliens to it instead being a period of great upheaval with a series of crises in close succession (one of which could be an alien invasion). In the dev AMAs post-shutdown they discussed how the story was ultimately going to ramp up to absolutely cosmic levels (from Battalion to the Dimensionless to whatever was past them) where it’d be nearly impossible to actually continue the game as a practical matter (in the, why are beings on par with Marvel’s Galactus or DCs Monitor/Specter still dealing with mundane human threats). A series of overlapping crises though... we’ve already had the Praetoria War with Mot in the middle of that. So add in a smaller scale Shivan/Battalion vs. Kheldian war (with the Nictus wanting both sides dead), a resurgent Primal Hamidon (I seem to recall the devs running a DE zone event that culminated with Primal Hami spawning in Atlas Park; so there might already be some code for that hidden in the spaghetti somewhere) and Malta using underhanded means to try and re-start the metahuman draft because of all these crises and, finally, a major Arachnos scheme going off. There’s your perfect storm of events that could throw the world into the chaos that the Dream Doctor and Mender Silos are trying to prevent (though if it were up to me I’d make the actual threat be all the instability resulting from those two’s temporal war against each other... because time travel to prevent something leading to that something actually happening is one of the best tropes ever). But before any of that comes to pass... we pretty much need the assurance of a deal with NCSoft to make devoting the sort of effort necessary to do more than the work we’re seeing now.

Tax write-offs don’t work that way. Profits and losses are assessed on a fiscal year basis. There’s no retroactive penalty if a product that lost value in year X then gains value in year X+Y. Instead the current year’s taxes will just be assessed based on the current value of the product. If the IP is sold or licensed from some quantity of money, taxes would be assessed for the current year (and future years if payment is ongoing) based on the revenue from that activity.

They are. And it’s important to note that a license to use the rights and owning the rights are not the same thing. NCSoft could license the rights for any price (including free if they wanted) and still retain ownership of them and pursue legal action against anyone other than the licensee who uses them. My hunch is that one of the reasons they’re willing to talk now is that, after seven years, all the NCSOFT personalities involved in the original shutdown have moved on (i.e. up or out) so there’s no longer any personal honor involved in keeping it shut down (and appearing magnanimous is honorable in Korean culture). Likewise, City of Heroes/costumed superheroes is such a decidedly American franchise that there’s little likelihood of the IP ever being used again outside of things like a character cameo in a MOBA. Licensing it out for any price though would help preserve its trademarks though (c. seven years of disuse is when US courts start treating a copyright as abandoned). Honestly, we have to remember that it’s not even been a year yet since the private server reveal and launch of Homecoming. Deals like this often take a long time to fully hammer out (not just things like license fees, but the rights to modify the original game going forward also need to be negotiated... and the client (HCs 64-bit vs. default 32), rebalancing existing elements, pre-shutdown beta content, new power sets/archetypes, new costume parts/assets, and new story content are all different factors to be negotiated since they can add or detract from the value of the brand. For example, given their use of Statesman recently, NCSOFT might put restrictions on using existing signature characters in any new content (which might be just as well... Homecoming is a new lease on life, starting new stories seems like where it’d be best to take it anyway).

So, having now tried it for a bit I feel fairly comfortable saying that a VPN (a proxy server might work too) seems to fix the problem. I used ExpressVPN and their closest server (New Jersey) for my connection and via the in game /netgraph I can confirm no loss of ping while doing so. What WAS interesting in the /netgraph report was what happened with a lost packet. Prior to this there'd be zero lost packets then it'd just mapserve and eventually dump to the login screen. WITH the VPN running I got the occasional lost packet (denoted by a red or yellow line on the graph) but the game kept right on running past what I suspect would have been a mapserve for me otherwise.

I like the idea of having a personal villain; however, I wouldn’t go automatic opposite by default. Plenty of heroes have signature villains who are more dark reflections than direct opposites. Arrow had the Dark Archer (aka Malcolm Merlin), Flash has a whole set including Reverse Flash, Professor Zoom, Savitar, etc. Superman has Zod, Doomsday, Darkseid, etc. as dark reflections. Spider-Man has Green Goblin (who in later versions uses a variation on the process that gives Peter his powers), Venom, etc. The point is... elemental opposites is far from the only way to go in having a signature villain. If it were up to me, I’d have them built more in line with the AE custom mobs so you can pick whichever powers and appearance best fit your concept of an arch-nemesis.

I don’t respec much at all so my IOs generally get slotted in A) the order I can buy them and B) if it’s already slotted with SOs they go into whichever slot least impacts performance (i.e. I don’t drop a dam/end IO on top of an acc SO unless I’ve already got enough Acc in the power).

I created a second account as part of trying to figure out the comtinual mapserver issues I was having (since it seemed to affect only some accounts and not others). Now that the solution seems to have been found (use a VPN or similar proxy server to route around whatever bad intermediate stage is causing the problem) about the only thing I can using the second account for would be for some RP where I want a main’s significant other or friend to also be present.

If VPN is actually a solution (and not a placebo like the "play a video in the background" above) then I'd be very curious about two things... First, which VPN service you used and where you set your location to while using it. Second, where you're physically located. Why where you're located is relevant (and everyone else experiencing the glitch is) is that the particular route taken by some data might be the problem. For example, I'm in Fort Wayne, Indiana. If everyone else experiencing the problem is located in, say, the American Midwest, that would explain some things (i.e. they're running into the same network that has an issue with the CoH data stream). The main reason the VPN might be the solution is that the issue is in the routing. Your computer to your local ISP, to one or more intermediate networks then finally to the HC server. The VPN channels your signal to the location you choose before the internet routes you to the HC servers. So if everyone experiencing the problem passes through one of the same intermediate networks where there's a glitch, THAT could be the problem and the route to the VPN exit point (the thing that makes it look like you're in some other part of the world) changes the route in a way that bypasses the glitchy intermediate network. For a rough visual... You -- Your ISP -- Bad ISP -- HC's ISP -- HC Server ...................\___ VPN -- Good ISP __/

I suspect your solution may be psychosomatic, because I tried the video and it made zero difference whatsoever. I mapserved less than 5 minutes after logging in. I think I'm going to have to try one of the other servers for awhile just because this is unplayable for me and anyone saying its not something broken by the Black Friday patch is kidding themselves. No one was reporting this problem before the patch turning on the Holiday Even went live. Immediately thereafter some computers started getting constant mapserve crashes. The absolute lack of Dev response on this is disheartening. Since I haven't been able to play for more than about 10 minutes at a time (and thus have barely logged in this month at all when I could have really used some fun stress relief) and can't even reliably finish a single instanced mission there's no reason for me to donate this month.

Still no change on the constant mapserves after the latest maintenance. I can’t even finish a short door mission without a mapserve kicking me to the login screen. It’s absolutely unplayable as is and there’s nothing more I can even think to do on my end. Would it be too much to ask for the pre-Thanksgiving build to be put up on a server for, say, four hours? Just long enough to confirm whether this error is related to whatever got changed in the Black Friday patch or if it’s an issue independent of that. Because if nothing changes, I may as well just uninstall and check back after the holiday patch is gone.

I can also confirm that the mapserver effect has ZERO to do with activity or graphic settings (since the restart didn't fix things I went back to my original testing regimen). I put the settings to minimum and just sat in a lifeless area (just inside a door mission) while working on something where I could keep on eye on the screen and just nudged the toon every couple minutes so an AFK wouldn't happen. After about 10 minutes (so a typical period of activity before a mapserve) and a minute or two after my last nudge (so literally no activity from my end) the "Lost Connection to Mapserver" message popped up and a minute later I dropped to the login screen again. So that leaves trying a VPN to force a different route... but at this point I really don't think its the route. I don't see how it can't be something related to the "Black Friday" patch. That's when the game turned basically unplayable.

Welp, you're right. Dammit. Played for over an hour yesterday afternoon before posting with zero issues. Logged in this afternoon and Mapserved within 5 minutes. Devs, please roll at least one server back to Pre-Thanksgiving because this is unplayable. I can't make plans to play with anyone. I can't even finish most door missions without having to start from scratch and HOPE this time it doesn't mapserve until I get the last objective. I don't really want to go looking for another CoH server to play on because most of the others don't sound that hot to me... but playing on one of those is better than not playing on yours which is what's happening right now.