Hypothetical Scenario If the Deal Succeeds

[justicebeliever]

22 minutes ago, Frostbiter said:

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

Discuss away....I wasn’t trying to tell you to stop talking, just suggesting we move on (emotionally) from the old...why invest energy (emotional) in something that is likely a pipe dream at best, and a nightmare at worst?

 

You’ve been polite and civil and by no means am I trying to dictate what we can talk about on this thread...

 

[Frostbiter]

4 minutes ago, justicebeliever said:

Discuss away....I wasn’t trying to tell you to stop talking, just suggesting we move on (emotionally) from the old...why invest energy (emotional) in something that is likely a pipe dream at best, and a nightmare at worst?

 

You’ve been polite and civil and by no means am I trying to dictate what we can talk about on this thread...

 

What else did you mean by forget about it and move on? I'm really curious.

[justicebeliever]

5 minutes ago, Frostbiter said:

What else did you mean by forget about it and move on? I'm really curious.

I just answered that...and are you really curious (if so, read my response) or are you trying to pick a fight because I disagreed?  As I already said, I wasn’t trying to be rude...

[Frostbiter]

How am I am supposed to answer that? I'm going to let this drop but I'd like to point out that offering unsolicited advice about what someone should or should not do is generally considered to be rude. So is telling them to go back and read a post that they did. It's an assumption and assumptions are also rude.

[Abraxus]

I think we are in agreement that it was a subject considered by the Devs just prior to, or shortly after Torchbearer came online.  There were a variety of reasons they opted not to go there, and those reasons have likely not changed in the ensuing months, and probably won't be changed if the deal is successful.  I suppose anything is possible, but I would consider it very unlikely.

[Frostbiter]

Funny, I have a notification that someone mentioned me but I don't see anything here.

[justicebeliever]

21 minutes ago, Frostbiter said:

I'm going to let this drop

+1...It's rare that anyone does this (myself included)...kudo's!

 

5 minutes ago, Frostbiter said:

Funny, I have a notification that someone mentioned me but I don't see anything here.

I had a response, but decided it would not be in the spirit of letting it go, especially in a public forum, and I deleted it...I PM'ed you instead...feel free to ignore/respond.  

[billy2hawks]

I am kind of curious of how server loads will result in horizontal and vertical scaling (The servers are hosted in Azure, correct?). With the funds as donation only right now, and keeping with in a specific financial limit due to legal concerns, how will the team deal with sudden influxes?

 

I don't know the hardware limitations based on the software running on the servers, but i am sure that a sudden influx of several thousand players might make a significant difference in the cost of the cloud resources. I know in Azure you can scale horizontally based on settings, and vertically based on settings and hardware limitations. I just wonder if the farms can handle a sudden large influx of players without going BOOM! 🙂

 

Sorry, but the tech in me is being forward thinking about resources and budgeting.

[Tsuko]

18 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.

It's not likely : Bob Iger and Disney dont believe in Video Games.

 

We just have to see the mess that was Marvel Heroes (Online from the microsoft project to the terrible end of Marvel Heroes "Gazilion")

[PaxArcana]

2 hours ago, Tsuko said:

Bob Iger and Disney dont believe in Video Games.

It doesn't have to be a DC or Marvel game.  CoX wasn't.

 

I'm just saying, right now "superheroes are BIG" ... and if a game that's been dead and buried for almost a decade, a game that came out in 2004, can draw lots of gamers to it ...

 

... then maybe someone, somewhere, will decide to try making a modern superhero MMO, again.  🙂

[EverStryke]

Yes there will be a large influx of new players if this occurs.

[biostem]

23 hours ago, Abraxus said:

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?

My concern would be the same that I have for any truly F2P games - too many trolls/griefers and not enough GMs/moderators to wrangle them in.  I am truly appreciative of everything that the volunteer devs & GMs/mods do, I just don't want to see the game widely publicized, only to have a bunch of haters coming in to ruin other people's gameplay.

[Abraxus]

I would think that there are plans for exactly those kinds of things.  Anyone working so hard to make a future possible for the game, would also be making plans for that future.  I sure would be, and these guys are a lot smarter than I am.

[Tsuko]

17 hours ago, PaxArcana said:

It doesn't have to be a DC or Marvel game.  CoX wasn't.

 

I'm just saying, right now "superheroes are BIG" ... and if a game that's been dead and buried for almost a decade, a game that came out in 2004, can draw lots of gamers to it ...

 

... then maybe someone, somewhere, will decide to try making a modern superhero MMO, again.  🙂

Sure, but CoX was far from perfect too.

 

NC soft closed the game to have servers for theirs "so called" perfect game with Richard Garriot, Tabula Rasa.

 

But still, we now see the end of the "reborn honeymoon" time.

 

The deal will bring lot of people, but lot will not stay or just leave too.

 

People who didnt play CoX back in the days will not play it now, just for "old scholl" feelings 🙂

[Redlynne]

25 minutes ago, Tsuko said:

NC soft closed the game to have servers for theirs "so called" perfect game with Richard Garriot, Tabula Rasa.

I played BOTH games.  Tabula Rasa was shut down BEFORE City of Heroes was shuttered.

 

Cart vs Horse

Round 1

OOPS!

[PaxArcana]

39 minutes ago, Tsuko said:

NC soft closed the game to have servers for theirs "so called" perfect game with Richard Garriot, Tabula Rasa.

This is not accurate.

Tabula Rasa launched on 2 November 2007, went free-to-play on 10 January 2009, and closed for good on 28 February 2009.

 

Issues 9 and 10 were released during the closed Beta of TR.  Issues 11, 12, and 13 were released while TR was Live.  And Issue 14 released less than two weeks after TR shut down (meaning, it was in development while TR was still in operation).

At no time during this period were any CoX servers closed, to the best of my recollection.

And afterwards, issues 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23 were released.  Issue 24 was in development, when City of Heroes/Villains closed down in November of 2012 ... just over three full years after Tabula Rasa shut down.

To quote Mark Twain, "Get your facts straight first, Sir; then you may twist them to your heart's content."

Edited August 31, 2019 by PaxArcana

[HelenCarnate]

20 hours ago, PaxArcana said:

It doesn't have to be a DC or Marvel game.  CoX wasn't.

 

I'm just saying, right now "superheroes are BIG" ... and if a game that's been dead and buried for almost a decade, a game that came out in 2004, can draw lots of gamers to it ...

 

... then maybe someone, somewhere, will decide to try making a modern superhero MMO, again.  🙂

https://cityoftitans.com/

https://www.shipofheroes.com/

https://valiance.shogn.net/

http://www.heroes-and-villains.com/phpb/home.php

 

There are a few someones out there.  The first 2 seem to be the most likely to actually be released the 2nd 2 may take a while.

Edited August 31, 2019 by HelenCarnate

[PaxArcana]

2 hours ago, HelenCarnate said:

 

There are a few someones out there.

... none of whom have especially-deep pockets, AFAICT.  Now picture if one of the bigger publishers came up to them and said, "we'd like to invest" ... 🙂

[HelenCarnate]

2 minutes ago, PaxArcana said:

... none of whom have especially-deep pockets, AFAICT.  Now picture if one of the bigger publishers came up to them and said, "we'd like to invest" ... 🙂

True.  All are currently running on donations and their own funds.  I would love to see a company with experience and deeper pockets do it right.  I love the power combos in Valiance but I am not sure that one will make it.

[RikOz]

On 8/30/2019 at 8:24 AM, justicebeliever said:

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).

Not to mention that I've recreated several of my characters from live, and the new versions of some of them are higher level than I ever got them on live. We'd need the ability to pick and choose which specific characters to resurrect so that a lower-level old character doesn't overwrite their higher-level new version, and I'm guessing that would be a whole lot of work for somebody.

[PaxArcana]

Presuming the database even existed, and could be accessed without the privacy concerns proving true (no small feat, that) ... one assumes that the mechanic to reclaim characters would be similar to transferring characters from one server to another, here.

 

Of course, even if all of that happened ... you'd still have to remember your old login credentials.  No credentials, no luck, sorry.

[srmalloy]

On 8/29/2019 at 6:17 PM, 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.

NCsoft might -- and that's an extremely sketchy and vague 'might' -- have retained the NCsoft master account information, particularly if that master account was linked to other games. I'd tried and given up on both Aion and Tabula Rasa myself, so I had both of those games linked to my master account. However, NCsoft has gone through at least one realignment of its core account information -- I remember seeing a number of emails about having to log in and convert my account over to the new format that I ignored because there was nothing NCsoft was doing that I was interested in -- that I'd be surprised if even the master account information was retained after this long. Redlynne's right; unless someone actively saved all of the game account information from the live servers prior to shutdown -- and, if there is some movement to restore it, can prove that it's untouched, to avoid the inevitable claims of the databases being hacked to give certain people unfair advantages (IOs, levels, etc.) -- then I would expect that the entirety of the player information from the game survived no farther than the end of December 2012, a month after shutdown.

[THEDarkTyger]

On 8/30/2019 at 10:06 AM, ShardWarrior said:

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.

Those other superhero MMOs are terrible, though.

[Abraxus]

4 hours ago, THEDarkTyger said:

Those other superhero MMOs are terrible, though.

Exactly this! 👆

[jubakumbi]

The very thing that makes this game different goes against the current mass-gaming market - personal creativity.

Even if you can make a custom character, it is typically no more than cosmetic in most games.

These days in the mass market, people pick characters to play, they don't make them.

 

Look at all the Spines/Fire Brutes.

That's new players looking at the forum, listening to Broadcast, and finding the most detailed premade they can that makes a profit.

 

New players want builds, they don't want to find them.

In a game this old, all of the meta builds are well known, so they can be found, bit to modern gamers, that feels like work.

 

So, while I think a number of new players will show up, it will be very interesting to see how many stick around to actually play.

For example, saw someone in chat have a meltdown after hitting 50 that they had to do all this 'complicated work' to gain Incarnate powers.

 

While I would love for a new Supers MMO to make a great game, exactly what makes it great will be the key for me...