A Call for a little transparency, just a touch.

[ShardWarrior]

2 hours ago, biostem said:

The code is already out there.  Even if Homecoming gets a C&D, CoH will continue to be playable.  Do I want Homecoming to be shut down?  Absolutely not!  Let's not act like the lack of NCSoft's blessing means the sky is falling, though...

The code being in the wild does not mean NCSoft cannot shut the game down wherever it may crop up should they choose to do so.  Once word is out, hosting providers may not even allow it to be run on their servers.  Until the game gets an official legal blessing from the owner, it is in danger.  I tend to agree the main focus should be on getting legal permission before looking to anything else.

[Abraxus]

2 hours ago, ShardWarrior said:

The code being in the wild does not mean NCSoft cannot shut the game down wherever it may crop up should they choose to do so.  Once word is out, hosting providers may not even allow it to be run on their servers.  Until the game gets an official legal blessing from the owner, it is in danger.  I tend to agree the main focus should be on getting legal permission before looking to anything else.

I agree completely that legitimacy is, and should be the preferred scenario. 

However, I disagree a little with the latter part of your post, about the feasibility of shutting things down wherever it might show itself.  Yes, they could choose to pursue every pop-up that shows itself, or work to bar hosts from allowing it to function.  But, all that costs money, and corporations don't like spending money on anything that they don't deem high enough priority.  It all cuts into the almighty bottom line, which is, of course, their number one priority.  Always has been.  Always will be.  There are a lot of variables that would go into calculating whether it would rise to the level of priority to devote any significant resources.  Especially when one considers that the ingenuity of the combined population of the web is practically limitless.  There would be ways of playing, albeit perhaps more limited if they decided to really be aggressive.  But, it would all be rendered moot if the negotiations are successful, so let's hope that's the way it goes, so we never have to find out for sure how the alternative plays out. 😎 

[DR_Mechano]

As is often pointed out WoW private servers are STILL up and running after all these years and ActiBlizzard is notorious for going after private servers. For example there was a private vanilla server that got huge numbers and was, partially, the reason why they went back on their "you think you do, but you don't" thing with regards WoW classic. At its peak this server was kicking out around 800k players. It was big enough that, at least in the spaces I was in, people were just ditching their WoW sub to go and play on this server. Not only that but it was being covered by major news outlets (and I do mean major, ALL of the gaming spaces were filled with news about it because it was people basically pointing to it going "See, you're wrong Blizzard") It was only when it got big enough to actually hurt their bottom line (especially considering rumours put then current WoW retail sub count at around 2.5 million or less, so it was really doing a number on their bottom line) that they send a C&D letter since most other private servers never get one.

 

So yeah Nostralrius was HUGE, probably the biggest private server for an MMO we've ever seen and, even after they got shut down, the devs just put the sourcecode for their server out on a Russian website which caused it to spread like wildfire and, to this day, there are still free to play Classic WoW servers out there in the wild. The thing is it would cost more for Blizzard to go after them and have to constantly try to shut down every single private server, especially now that they're offering a directly supported product with WoW classic.

 

I mean just look at it:

https://www.dkpminus.com/wow/private-servers/

 

Still quite a few up and kicking as well as some quite fairly well known ones like the Ascension Classless private server that got a fair bit of coverage and RetroWoW which has been up and running for 5 years.

 

Now lets take at look at NCsoft. Currently they have virtually no presence in the western sphere outside of Guild Wars 2. From what we can tell NCsoft really couldn't care less about their games succeeding in the west anymore, they're focused very heavily on their Korean market. They tried time and time again to port over their successful Korean MMOs to the west. Aion required a MASSIVE rework because western MMO players and Korean MMO players are two very different beasts and even then it actually bombed fairly hard for them. Ever since then they've made token gestures at best towards the western market if they bother at all.

 

City of Heroes is an IP which is pretty much dead to them, they can't use it in their own home country because unlike say Lineage it has zero brand recognition. It is a niche MMO even within the western sphere and has been out of the gaming loop for so long that its got no major brand recognition of its own. The money it would cost to try and constantly stamp out private servers even if they COULD stamp out private servers (most will get hosted in Russia which has notoriously lax laws about this and any company trying to sue which isn't Russian usually just gets ignored or told to get lost) means the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

 

Sure they CAN do it but why would they? Protecting their IP is basically a lost cause now that the sourcecode is out in the wild. This was probably one of the big mistakes the Tabula Rasa server team did, they kept everything to themselves but if all this had been released into the wild you'd probably find at least one private server kicking around still to this day.

 

I mean just look at this, a WoW private server is EVEN giving cash money for tournament prizes..

https://www.dkpminus.com/wow/news/warmane-announces-a-5000-3v3-tournament/

 

If they can continue to survive, I think CoH can.

Edited January 29, 2020 by DR_Mechano

[Abraxus]

I'd love to know the thinking on their part, regarding not just divesting themselves of the IP for cheap, and being done with it.  I'll probably never get the satisfaction of knowing that, but it does seem counter intuitive that they would resist any efforts to sell the IP when the offers have come (and there have been a few), when they clearly see it as a western-player only kind of game.  Why not sell it to a western-based group who had a genuine interest in making something of it in the only area(s) of the world where it could succeed?  They could have washed their hands of all of this years ago, but didn't.  There is a business reason for it.  I just can't fathom it, because I don't have all the information at hand to do so.  But, I'd dearly love to know before it's all said, and done.

 

[Haijinx]

I want to know how come my neighbor doesn't have my brand of beer in his fridge.  Its totally inconvienent to have to drink some other brand when I hang out over there and watch the game at his place.  

[Abraxus]

1 hour ago, Haijinx said:

I want to know how come my neighbor doesn't have my brand of beer in his fridge.  Its totally inconvienent to have to drink some other brand when I hang out over there and watch the game at his place.  

Perhaps, someday the answer to that mystery will be known as well.  Though, it sounds like about the same odds as the question I asked, so don't be in too big a hurry. 😂

[Haijinx]

3 minutes ago, Abraxus said:

Perhaps, someday the answer to that mystery will be known as well.  Though, it sounds like about the same odds as the question I asked, so don't be in too big a hurry. 😂

I wonder if some jenius middle manager suggested many former COH players would switch to Lineage 2 or something. 

[Haijinx]

Didn't they have some combo pack for a while?

[Queen Nefertiti]

1 hour ago, Haijinx said:

I wonder if some jenius middle manager suggested many former COH players would switch to Lineage 2 or something. 

I think they thought we would switch to Champions or Aion. I know they were pushing Aion for ages but nobody was even slightly interested. A lot of the stuff shoehorned in like PvP was to try to appeal to the Korean market which is massive and hugely profitable if it takes off. They wanted WoW numbers but didnt get that that would never happen. It's the same reason futurama was cancelled. They wanted Simpsons numbers and couldn't get them. Some companies look at market leaders and get annoyed that their product is profitable, but not through the roof profitable. WoW and Simpsons are anomalies you simply can't compare anything else to. You may have a better product, but they have a far better marketing budget and strategy. WoW tied itself to the Simpsons in the UK. They sponsored the show and had ads everywhere. City of Heros was almost non existent. The advertising was extremely poor and ncsoft had little interest in promoting it. They also had almost no idea of the market. When superhero movies took off they had the perfect product in their back catalogue to take advantage. All they had to do was dust it off, give it a bit of a graphical upgrade and buy ads in the cinema. By the end of marvel phase 1 they could have had it ready and cashed in big time, but not do much as a flicker of interest. Its interesting that Champions and DCO both failed to market their games to cash in on the trend. I will never understand companies planning and marketing execs. They are paid a fortune to spot trends and to increase market share. Not to sit on the perfect IP and ignore the chance to print their own money.

Edited January 29, 2020 by Queen Nefertiti

[DR_Mechano]

6 hours ago, Abraxus said:

I'd love to know the thinking on their part, regarding not just divesting themselves of the IP for cheap, and being done with it.  I'll probably never get the satisfaction of knowing that, but it does seem counter intuitive that they would resist any efforts to sell the IP when the offers have come (and there have been a few), when they clearly see it as a western-player only kind of game.  Why not sell it to a western-based group who had a genuine interest in making something of it in the only area(s) of the world where it could succeed?  They could have washed their hands of all of this years ago, but didn't.  There is a business reason for it.  I just can't fathom it, because I don't have all the information at hand to do so.  But, I'd dearly love to know before it's all said, and done.

 

This one has a shockingly simple but rather surprising answer. It's the way Korean companies handle things. You see admitting failure is a massive loss of face so they never do it, they'll just quietly shutter games instead. At the time NCsoft were worried that someone, whether it was the devs themselves (who offered to buyout the IP for probably more than it was actually worth to NCsoft, even at the time, rumous float around that they offered anywhere from 1-3 million dollars) or another company entirely will turn that failure into their success. The worst kind of loss of face is seen if you're company sold off the product to another company since it wasn't working for you and then that other company having a massive success with it. It is basically admitting that you failed and the failure was ALL you because clearly this other company knows how to make it work. 

 

Because of this fear Korean companies will cling to IPs like their life depended on it, even if it's not making them any money and they have no future plans for it to make any money. I suspect the reason NCsoft are willing to talk now is because A) They'd still technically be in charge of the IP but the work would be done by someone else so it doesn't actually cost them anything whilst offering a return on cost because said cost to them is basically zero, which is a win/win to them and B) The code is out in the wild, if they can have at least one legitimate server it means they can try to go after others. This was the other reason for the WoW classic server, it meant that Blizzard could not only service a clearly very large playerbase that was out there with an official product but it meant that any private server who go too big for their boots could be easily shutdown if they were within the US or Europe (again, apart from Russia, Russia is a very different beast to the rest of Europe and is quite proud of its private server culture running on home soil).

 

CoH is beyond dead as an IP for them in Korea, it was never alive to begin with so it's not threatening any of that market and considering it's totally alien to Guild Wars 2 it's not going to be threatening that market either since that's pretty much their only game in the west with any major presence and, as said, the cost to them to OK a single legitimate server cluster since its upkeep is paid for by the fans and our numbers aren't even pocket change to NCsoft, they're lint I imagine it should do them no harm.

 

The other thing is that the MMO genre as a whole is nowhere near the juggernaut it use to be. WoWs sub numbers on retail were in a spiraling decline with the disastrous release of Battle for Azeroth (speculation and some insider knowledge put the sub numbers at 1.5 million after just three months of the expansion and continuing to fall) which was buoyed up by the release of WoW Classic which caused a million people to sub back up again at launch BUT we don't know how many are still playing it and whether the dreaded six month curse struck hard (the usual sub loss of about 50-70% once the new and shiny has worn off) .

 

Guild Wars 2 keeps ticking along because it's free and if you bought the boxed game at launch all you have to pay for is the expansions once a year, nobody knows its player numbers but it is seen as the last remaining 'big three' with WoW and the next MMO mentioned.

 

Now the real surprise success story is Final Fantasy. At launch a terrible MMO which bombed hard, taken out back and actually given the treatment it needed to survive instead of getting shot (there is an excellent documentary about it on youtube with the horrendous crunch the devs inflicted on themselves, through their own choice, to get the MMO good again, at the time SE were willing to just ditch the whole thing and write it off but the dev team worked their asses off). Now, with the failure of Battle for Azeroth quite a large chunk of the playerbase migrated to FF to the point it's now second of the big three and capable of even challenging WoW for the top spot these days.

Edited January 29, 2020 by DR_Mechano

[Gulbasaur]

32 minutes ago, DR_Mechano said:

CoH is beyond dead as an IP for them in Korea, it was never alive to begin with

Your whole post is pretty excellent and summarises a lot of the (quite sensible) theories, which are often reduced to "NCSoft bad". 

 

To the Korean NCSoft bigwigs, City of Heroes was this niche softy-softy overseas MMO that didn't really act like an MMO as they saw it (low competition/aggression between factions, little focus on grind mechanics, high focus on alts, low gear treadmill, different attitudes to cash shop in Eastern and Western audiences) and bombed really hard in their main target area before it even left beta, even after a fairly substantial localisation effort introducing characters that touched on a variety of Korean superhero tropes. 

 

City of Heroes was financially a low value IP and to NCSoft it was something they spent money on that failed on their main target audience. Korea was, at that time, their primary focus and they had a very clear idea of what a successful MMO was in their target audience and City of Heroes was just some weird foreign genre game that they didn't really get and was taking up resources they could use elsewhere. It was turning a profit, but those resources could be freed to turn a bigger profit elsewhere.  

 

I had some friends who worked at the NCSoft offices in Brighton doing QA stuff ("running into every wall we could and trying to break everything" was how they described it) as part of an apprenticeship scheme that got some positive press coverage, which completely collapsed when NCSoft made everyone redundant and shut down all non-sales operations in Europe (as far as I know). I remember speaking to my friend and he summarised it as "they just fired everyone and closed the office", which means redundancy and restructuring. 

 

I do expect them to eventually licence the product, but I also expect the cost to be fairly high and part of me wonders if some things are best left alone. The lack of news isn't something I'd take as a negative - talking too much about how the deal is going could potentially jeopardise it and comes off as quite unprofessional. It's likely the lawyer(s) they are using has advised them against discussing it publicly. 

Edited January 29, 2020 by Gulbasaur

[Haijinx]

1 hour ago, Gulbasaur said:

I do expect them to eventually licence the product, but I also expect the cost to be fairly high and part of me wonders if some things are best left alone. The lack of news isn't something I'd take as a negative - talking too much about how the deal is going could potentially jeopardise it and comes off as quite unprofessional. It's likely the lawyer(s) they are using has advised them against discussing it publicly. 

No need to rush it - it hasn't even been a decade yet 😆

[Pixie_Knight]

Didn't the game that NCSoft shut down CoH to fund also bomb fairly hard at least in part due to people boycotting it over the CoH shutdown? Not to mention it not doing well in their target audience either?

[DR_Mechano]

21 minutes ago, Pixie_Knight said:

Didn't the game that NCSoft shut down CoH to fund also bomb fairly hard at least in part due to people boycotting it over the CoH shutdown? Not to mention it not doing well in their target audience either?

Pretty much. I get the feeling, since they were pushing Aion so hard at the time that they somehow thought we'd all migrate to that game...when nobody did. We moved to Champions Online which is run by Perfect World these days and unfortunately is currently in long standing maintenance mode with just loot boxes being slapped into it every six months.

 

As mentioned CoH's marketing budget seemed like it was non-existent. WoW was slapping ads before EVERYTHING, from TV to Films. NCsoft didn't even do token marketing by putting a City of Heroes ads before the Spiderman films, hell they didn't even do it for Champions Online. NCsoft was basically completely out of touch with their western market and pretty much still is.

Edited January 29, 2020 by DR_Mechano

[ZacKing]

12 hours ago, Abraxus said:

Yes, they could choose to pursue every pop-up that shows itself, or work to bar hosts from allowing it to function.  But, all that costs money, and corporations don't like spending money on anything that they don't deem high enough priority.  It all cuts into the almighty bottom line, which is, of course, their number one priority.

yeah it's also in their best interests to protect their property from theft.  A C&D letter doesn't cost huge bucks and why would they need to go after every pop up?  All they need to do is go to the courts and have it decided illegal once to put the law on the books.  Cloud hosts aren't going to permit any future pop ups to run pirated software on their servers and are basically enforcing the law for NCSoft at no cost to them.  sure, they won't stop everyone from running a private server in their home or parent's basement, but that isn't going to have a huge community of people.  more likely be a secret underground operation just like this one was until someone spilled the beans.

[Gulbasaur]

1 hour ago, DR_Mechano said:

NCsoft was basically completely out of touch with their western market and pretty much still is.

Their handling of Guild Wars 2 marketing recently is pretty wild - they did a massive announcement, complete with countdown on twitch, which turned out to be the sort of content we were used to already and also some new funko pops and some cool new merch. The amount of hype they drummed up for what should have been a blog post was absurd. 

 

Now, GW2 is not likely to be at risk in the same way City of Heroes was (Guild Wars 1 is still live), but their marketing team doesn't seem to know what its target audience is meant to look like. Now, I'm glad they're not nickel and diming us like EA and the Sims 4, but a large portion of the playerbase had expressed that they'd pay for a full-size expansion so when the massive event turned out to be "we're rebranding what we call something and also please buy merch", that was an audience-alienating move. 

 

They seem to make their Western market decisions based on Korean market expectations, whereas actually the two markets are quite different. 

[DR_Mechano]

9 minutes ago, ZacKing said:

yeah it's also in their best interests to protect their property from theft.  A C&D letter doesn't cost huge bucks and why would they need to go after every pop up?  All they need to do is go to the courts and have it decided illegal once to put the law on the books.  Cloud hosts aren't going to permit any future pop ups to run pirated software on their servers and are basically enforcing the law for NCSoft at no cost to them.  sure, they won't stop everyone from running a private server in their home or parent's basement, but that isn't going to have a huge community of people.  more likely be a secret underground operation just like this one was until someone spilled the beans.

As pointed out WoW private servers are still up, they've been up and running for a LONG time and some are even offering cash prizes. Let me put it this way, if ActiBlizzard who owns King Games which make Candy Crush are rake in the amount of money to make a small nation blush EVERY YEAR aren't bothering to go after Private servers as long as they're not hurting their bottom line and getting huge press about them, I doubt NCsoft who don't rake in quite as much money every year can be bothered to pay the cash to do it.

 

 Also different countries have different laws or at least different respect for said laws and outside firms. A lot of private servers for MMOs are hosted in Russia which essentially tells all non-Russian business to GTFO if they try anything. So yeah if a company that makes almost ten times the GDP of the nation of Lichtenstein can't be bothered, I doubt NCsoft can.

 

As for @Gulbasaur yeah that sounds about right...they really have no idea what they're doing marketing wise in the west.

Edited January 29, 2020 by DR_Mechano

[ZacKing]

6 minutes ago, DR_Mechano said:

As pointed out WoW private servers are still up, they've been up and running for a LONG time and some are even offering cash prizes.

That's great.  Has zero involvement with NCSoft who might choose to act differently with their property. 

[DR_Mechano]

2 minutes ago, ZacKing said:

That's great.  Has zero involvement with NCSoft who might choose to act differently with their property. 

Not really as pointed out by other people it would cost them money in order to pull off the things you're mentioning and if a company bigger than NCsoft can't be bothered to spend the cash to do it, I doubt NCsoft could be bothered.

[ShardWarrior]

13 minutes ago, DR_Mechano said:

Not really as pointed out by other people it would cost them money in order to pull off the things you're mentioning and if a company bigger than NCsoft can't be bothered to spend the cash to do it, I doubt NCsoft could be bothered.

Cease and desist letters do not cost a fortune. 

[DR_Mechano]

Just now, ShardWarrior said:

Cease and desist letters do not cost a fortune. 

Not they don't but now the code is out in the wild they're also the least effective form that's cheap. Like I said a lot of servers can switch their hosting services to Russia which DGAF about companies like Blizzard or NCsoft. I have no doubt that even if HC was lost Thunderspy, COXg, Rebirth etc. would relocate to areas that are essentially outside the law.

[ShardWarrior]

Just now, DR_Mechano said:

Not they don't but now the code is out in the wild they're also the least effective form that's cheap. Like I said a lot of servers can switch their hosting services to Russia which DGAF about companies like Blizzard or NCsoft. I have no doubt that even if HC was lost Thunderspy, COXg, Rebirth etc. would relocate to areas that are essentially outside the law.

Servers might be but the people running the pirated software on them are not unless you are suggesting they all up and move to Russia or wherever too.  Just my own opinion here - I think it a far, far better solution to focus on becoming legally legitimate than worrying about having to constantly look over ones should and move around to "avoid the law".  I would much prefer knowing that the game will be here tomorrow, the next day and years from now.

[Abraxus]

7 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

Servers might be but the people running the pirated software on them are not unless you are suggesting they all up and move to Russia or wherever too.  Just my own opinion here - I think it a far, far better solution to focus on becoming legally legitimate than worrying about having to constantly look over ones should and move around to "avoid the law".  I would much prefer knowing that the game will be here tomorrow, the next day and years from now.

Which is exactly what Homecoming is doing, and probably the main reason why NCSoft has not launched any legal efforts to close things down thus far.

[ShardWarrior]

1 minute ago, Abraxus said:

Which is exactly what Homecoming is doing, and probably the main reason why NCSoft has not launched any legal efforts to close things down thus far.

I agree.

[Doc_Scorpion]

3 hours ago, DR_Mechano said:

WoW was slapping ads before EVERYTHING, from TV to Films. NCsoft didn't even do token marketing by putting a City of Heroes ads before the Spiderman films

WoW was also a cash cow with money to burn.  CoX was not.  WoW was (is) connected with a massive, long running, multimedia franchise.  CoX was not.  That is, WoW didn't get big because of marketing - WoW got big because it had a massive fanbase for it's existing media products.

CoX was, and is, a niche game.  (One with a steadily declining playerbase.*)  Ads with Spiderman films wouldn't have changed that significantly.  Marketing isn't a magic wand.


*People seem to have forgotten this.  CoX's numbers, never all that great to begin with, fairly steadily declined from launch.