Hypothetical Scenario If the Deal Succeeds

[Abraxus]

So, if the negotiations with NCSoft are successful, and legitimacy allows for full-on advertising of the game's re-emergence, do you anticipate a large influx of new players?

 

Games like WoW classic, KoTOR, and older games of this type certainly still have their strong followings.  I wondered if anyone other than myself thought that same kind of thing could apply to CoH in the future?  Especially in this world where super hero appeal has never been higher than it is right now.

 

If so, what effects do you think it would have?

Edited August 29, 2019 by Abraxus

[Widower]

We do believe that a deal would result in quite a large influx of new players, yes.

[PaxArcana]

A large influx of players here, could also convince a publisher or developer that there's room for a modern Superhero MMO to succeed, even if only modestly.  Especially with the advent of the MCU and MCEU (and to a lesser extent, even the DCCU) making superheroes "mainstream popular" nowadays.

[Frostbiter]

Hypothetically, could we see access to our old accounts restored from Live?

[Redlynne]

36 minutes ago, Frostbiter said:

Hypothetically, could we see access to our old accounts restored from Live?

In a word ... NO.

Reason for that is that NC$oft would have needed to curate all that data since the shutdown ... and they had absolutely no financial advantage to do so (and plenty of financial incentives to just wipe the drives and repurpose the hardware for other projects).  The odds of NC$oft still having the original server databases is Limit --> 0 type integrals using calculus stuff.

Edited August 30, 2019 by Redlynne

[Abraxus]

Plus, with the changes that have taken place with the game itself, re-integrating the I-24 version of player databases would likely be a conversion nightmare, and the more changes that are made, the less likely that amount of effort would be worthwhile.

 

[PaxArcana]

44 minutes ago, Frostbiter said:

Hypothetically, could we see access to our old accounts restored from Live?

Oh, how I wish that could happen.  But I'm not going to spend any energy actively hoping for it - because, as Redlynne and Abraxas have already pointed out, there are some serious hurdles to overcome for it to even be a possibility.

 

If a miracle occurs, I will rejoice.

 

If it doesn't ... eh, I'll just do what I always do ... and roll another alt.  😄

[JnEricsonx]

God I miss Marvel Heroes Online.   But wait....what deal with NCSoft?  Is this just pie in the sky talk, or has something happened?  

[PaxArcana]

The Homecoming team, and NCSoft, have been in talks for weeks now, maybe a couple months, about legitimizing the servers.

[justicebeliever]

31 minutes ago, JnEricsonx said:

But wait....what deal with NCSoft?  Is this just pie in the sky talk, or has something happened?  

 

 

[JnEricsonx]

Oh, ok.

[Black Zot]

9 hours ago, PaxArcana said:

A large influx of players here, could also convince a publisher or developer that there's room for a modern Superhero MMO to succeed, even if only modestly.  Especially with the advent of the MCU and MCEU (and to a lesser extent, even the DCCU) making superheroes "mainstream popular" nowadays.

 

Oy vey, I hope not.  Marvel and DC have tried their hands at the whole MMO thing before, and every offering has been a miserable failure.  Like I really want to pay more money to Di$ney to try out another half-baked joke of a product that'll either die or become microtransaction hell within a year.

[Marine X]

11 hours ago, GM Widower said:

We do believe that a deal would result in quite a large influx of new players, yes.

I think we have already seen the beginnings of this. It is almost a daily thing where I see questions being posted by people who had never played on Live and are enjoying COH for the first time. Ran into 2 people in Game that I met when on Paragon Chat ( thank you Codewalker ) that had never played the game, but loved using PC for role play and were now in Awe of the game. I really think that word of mouth and the gaming community are already creating a bit of passive advertising otherwise it would only be Veterans here for the most part. Most of the comments from these new players is how much they are loving the game and community. We saw a huge surge in players at the beginning, then it slowed a bit, now it is building back up, albeit much more slowly. I think time will tell, but I foresee it getting back closer to peak population over time. Plus I think a lot of that initial surge was a lot of Multi-boxing and Power leveling by those that didn't realize that a lot of the best parts of the game are not at the end.

Edited August 30, 2019 by Marine X

[Frostbiter]

9 hours ago, PaxArcana said:

Oh, how I wish that could happen.  But I'm not going to spend any energy actively hoping for it - because, as Redlynne and Abraxas have already pointed out, there are some serious hurdles to overcome for it to even be a possibility.

 

If a miracle occurs, I will rejoice.

 

If it doesn't ... eh, I'll just do what I always do ... and roll another alt.  😄

Remember when the game shut down and for years everyone said there wouldn't be any private servers because the server code supposedly wasn't out in the wild? Then there were persistent rumors for years about a private server and everyone said they were just rumors? Yeah, good times.

[Redlynne]

2 hours ago, Black Zot said:

Marvel and DC have tried their hands at the whole MMO thing before, and every offering has been a miserable failure.

The biggest reason for those failures (I'm thinking) is because they all bound you, hand and foot, to playing THEIR characters in THEIR IP ... rather than letting you play your OWN characters that you create and identify with from scratch.

 

Oh look, another Spiderman clone ... yay ...

/logoff

[PaxArcana]

100% agreement with Redlynne on this.

If CoX can succeed (again) where DCO and MUO both failed, it's possible that a developer and/or publisher out there - maybe even NCSoft - will realize that it's important for players to be able to make their OWN hero.  (And perhaps they will also see what CO did wrong, and avoid repeating the error ... hey, a guy can dream, can't he?)

[Skyhawke]

I'd settle for NCSoft releasing some buried stuff that never got leaked into the Homecoming team's hands. The Coming Storm?  Moon Base?  A guy can dream. 

[Abraxus]

2 hours ago, Marine X said:

I think we have already seen the beginnings of this. It is almost a daily thing where I see questions being posted by people who had never played on Live and are enjoying COH for the first time. Ran into 2 people in Game that I met when on Paragon Chat ( thank you Codewalker ) that had never played the game, but loved using PC for role play and were now in Awe of the game. I really think that word of mouth and the gaming community are already creating a bit of passive advertising otherwise it would only be Veterans here for the most part. Most of the comments from these new players is how much they are loving the game and community. We saw a huge surge in players at the beginning, then it slowed a bit, now it is building back up, albeit much more slowly. I think time will tell, but I foresee it getting back closer to peak population over time. Plus I think a lot of that initial surge was a lot of Multi-boxing and Power leveling by those that didn't realize that a lot of the best parts of the game are not at the end.

And this without any real, active advertising that the game is back.  It's all basically word of mouth, and a few articles in Massively, which not all gamers even read.  Imagine when the game can come out of the shadows, shout from the rooftops that it is back, and that all are welcome in Paragon City once more!  I think it has the potential to be big!

Edited August 30, 2019 by Abraxus

[quixoteprog]

12 hours ago, Redlynne said:

In a word ... NO.

Reason for that is that NC$oft would have needed to curate all that data since the shutdown ... and they had absolutely no financial advantage to do so (and plenty of financial incentives to just wipe the drives and repurpose the hardware for other projects).  The odds of NC$oft still having the original server databases is Limit --> 0 type integrals using calculus stuff.

Not to mention the liability of keeping any personally identifiable information on the players who owned those accounts. Imagine the uproar if they got hacked, which happens to EVERYONE, and data on user of a game shut down 6 years ago go into the wild.

 

There is a small chance they have the data, because people screw up and forget to purge backups, especially in large companies. But there is 0% chance they would admit to having it. If anyone even knows it is there.

[Abraxus]

You hit on something I had forgotten to mention.  The old user database would have included more personal, and financial data than the current one does, since it was a pay subscription game for most of it's original run.  I personally would not want to risk having that readily available for someone with the inclination, and necessary tools to harvest for nefarious purposes.

Edited August 30, 2019 by Abraxus

[Frostbiter]

It's been 7 years. The amount of useful financial information would be limited since credit cards expire every 4 years. That's not saying the information wouldn't need handled with proper care and lawful diligence but in reality the information left would be necessary to have in order to get those accounts back into our hands.

Edited August 30, 2019 by Frostbiter

[MunkiLord]

If somehow we were able to gain access to old accounts, influence on those old accounts should be set to zero. This game definitely doesn't need all that influence flooding the market.

[ShardWarrior]

Not so sure it will given that there are other superhero games on the market now and the rise of the MCU hasn't seem to have affected them greatly.  But you never know.

[justicebeliever]

19 minutes ago, Frostbiter said:

It's been 7 years. The amount of useful financial information would be limited since credit cards expire every 4 years. That's not saying the information wouldn't need handled with proper care and lawful diligence but in reality the information left would be necessary to have in order to get those accounts back into our hands.

It’s never going to happen...how do ensure that the right person gets access to their stuff and not someone else’s?  What are the optics the first time someone accesses someone else’s account because of something missed in setting this up?

 

How do you ensure that a large enough body of people and not just a small elite minority can recover their information?  I sure as heck remember neither my username nor password from Live.

 

And the amount of work for HC to retrofit i23 accounts to i26?  The amount of work to create a recovery process and a merge process (because you’d have to move the characters from the old account/shard to your HC account/shard).

 

And then the Help desk support for people trying to navigate a recovery process for what might be 15 year old information in some cases.  They don’t have the manpower 

 

I’m not worried about payment information because that would have to be scrubbed before handing it over to HC (or it was already tokenized and it’s gone anyway).  But it’s too big an effort for too little reward, and if only a few are rewarded then sadly it’ll feel to many others that they were punished (that’s not true, but we know the internet, it’s still what’ll happen).

 

Move on, let the old die, and enjoy the new.  

[Frostbiter]

This is a friendly discussion. I have no idea why you'd be telling someone to move on. That doesn't seem very friendly.

Edited August 30, 2019 by Frostbiter