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A Secret Server For the Dead MMO 'City of Heroes' Has Players In an Uproar (vice.com) 163

Posted by EditorDavid from the oh-her-majesty's-secret-servers dept.
eatmorekix quotes Vice: In 2012, Paragon Studios announced it was shutting down City of Heroes, a massively multiplayer online game where a community of players created their own superheroes, went on adventures together, and formed lasting friendships.

The news was crushing to the game's devoted community because they could no longer play and hang out in the virtual space they loved, and today, years after the game's shutdown, the community is in an uproar again. As Massivelyop first reported, a group of City of Heroes players called the Secret Cabal of Reverse Engineers (SCORE) had created their own, private server where they could continue to play the game for the last six years, but kept it relatively secret.

"I like the rest of you have been lied to," Reddit user avoca wrote in a thread titled "BE ANGRY" on the City of Heroes subreddit. "I have been told City of Heroes has been shutdown. Today, I learn I have been mistaken. For all of these years, City of Heroes has lived on. In secret. For every passing day and every withdrawal symptom, a person is playing on this secret server, and they are gaining xp, leveling up, performing task forces and forming supergroups."
In 2004 the game's lead designer answered questions from Slashdot's reader.

15 years, a member of the emulator team tells Massivelyop that they'd tried to keep their City of Heroes server a secret for over six years because they were worried about getting a cease and desist notice from the game's publishers.
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A Secret Server For the Dead MMO 'City of Heroes' Has Players In an Uproar More

A Secret Server For the Dead MMO 'City of Heroes' Has Players In an Uproar

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  • Be angry? Lied to? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 21, 2019 @09:40AM (#58466984)

    If it's not the company doing it, there's nothing to be outraged about. And it sounds like it's hardcore players. Good for them. A little sad that someone spilled the beans. Being afraid of the cease and desist is appropriate for what they're doing.

    • Re:Be angry? Lied to? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Sunday April 21, 2019 @10:37AM (#58467136) Journal
      And that’s where copyright law should be applied as intended: for the public’s interest, not the publishers’. In other words: if you are no longer running the service (under reasonable conditions) you don’t get to stop anyone else from running one. Copyright should be use-it-or-lose-it once you’ve published.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by mlyle ( 148697 )

        Does that extend to every asset you use? If you publish a game, and license 50 bits of IP to put it together, and then stop providing the game, should people be able to copy all of those other things from other people that they use in trade elsewhere? If you'd licensed it on a royalty basis, do those people lose their royalties? Etc.

        Much better is copyright with a reasonable term and a couple of expensive "renewal" checkpoints in the middle (which someone only pays if they expect to benefit from the IP).

        • Renewable copyright still leaves the issues of royalties for licensed IP in a finished work.

          Considering that preservation is in the public interest, I am not convinced that there is an issue as long as the licensed IP is only distributed as part of the finished work.

          And I am also not convinced that we shouldn't disallow licensing that is temporary or only permits distribution on a certain medium, so long as the negotiated royalties continue to be paid.

          • I am of the opinion that it should go one giant step forward, in that if you are providing a copyrighted service such as a game and cease to continue to provide it to paying customers, that within reason, it should immediately enter the public domain. And by within reason meaning, at most a five year gap between the end of production servers and the entire thing entering the public domain, from code and music, all of the way to artwork and any customized documentation and toolchains used to create it.

            Denyin

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Boronx ( 228853 )

        Good idea.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        Generally agree, copyright should never be used to prevent people from enjoying creative works they paid for.

        In much of the EU copyrights holders could (pre-article 13) only sue for damages so far as I know and if you're not making any money from copyright then there would be no point in taking legal action to prevent any form of copying. I might be wrong but either way, this is the way it *should* work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ChoGGi ( 522069 )

      Very appropriate, since NCsoft has a history of C&D'd defunct MMO servers.

    • That's what happens when you trust Reddit and the Internet to tell you the truth. You will always feel betrayed.
    • they pretty much spilled it because it was done and they didn't wanna release it.
  • I've fond memories of that game ... always wished for a sort of 2.0 version, with updated graphics or something

  • Reddit Blowing Up? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Joviex ( 976416 ) on Sunday April 21, 2019 @10:00AM (#58467024)
    If that thread is what you consider an "uproar" i.e. 12 people bias confirming their anger -- you have bigger problems than missing your favorite MMO.

    • Re:Reddit Blowing Up? (Score:4, Funny)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday April 21, 2019 @11:51AM (#58467372)

      You don't understand. They have literally broken the internet right now. Again. The internet breaks like every week now. I don't even know how I'm typing this to you because of how much we broke it.

      • How do we even know you typed it, and that it isn't a deepfake of what you didn't type?

      • I don't even know how I'm typing this to you because of how much we broke it.

        My Secret Slashdot Server is keeping the broken internet running. And thanks for making me tell everybody about it, jerk.

    • But they were angry on the internet! Doesn't that mean their words mattered as much as all the other words?!?!

      Are you trying to take away their Freeze Peach ?!!?!?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Welcome to the Meta Outrage economy. Find one person mildly annoyed about something on Twitter or Reddit, and make out it's an angry mob rioting over it, smashing up their bedrooms and headbutting the keyboard in a fit of rage.

      It's big business now. There are already a couple of dozen YouTube videos up about it, all monetized of course.

  • Angry people on the internet (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Shocking! Don't worry though, they will forget it in a week after their next tirade.

  • Outrage (Score:5, Funny)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Sunday April 21, 2019 @10:05AM (#58467040) Homepage Journal

    Of all the things to be outraged about, this is definitely the one item to choose.

    • You're right about that!!

      I've been out there jogging'n stuff.. talking to people, making lasting friendships.. while I could have been doing that in a game instead?

      I'll never get those years back.

      • I know, right?

        Here I was meeting and marrying a lovely lady, building a good life together and having fun when I could have been logged into a City of Heroes server every night for hours on end, eating Cheetos and sniveling about some minor in-game drama.

        I feel so cheated! (I mean, I never payed the game or even heard of it until now, but still...)

    • If you can't get worked up over a morally pure issue like this, your outrage would simply be a slave to context.

      Do you just want to be a sheep that hates, or do you want to develop a true skill?

      • Do you just want to be a sheep that hates, or do you want to develop a true skill?

        "Sheep That Hates" - I think I just found my new band's name.

  • The first rule about secret servers for dead MMO's, is that you don't talk about secret servers for dead MMO's!

  • Get ANGRY? No, get a LIFE! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Those who can, do.
    Those who can't, play.
    Those who can't play, watch letsplays / sports / read star/royalty gossip.

    How pathetic does one's life have to be, to be angry that they could not waste their lives in some game that isn't even useful for learning anything, but basically just triggering the achievement trigger without achieving anything *real*, like a drug.

    People like this should be looked after, so they can get back to having a real life, instead of, for all practical purposes, commiting suicide, and

    • He should have set up his own server. Then he could have been happy.

  • and not the horrific "shuttering". Let's hope the trend of using that word is over.

  • Thank Blizzard and the bnetd fiasco (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jody Bruchon ( 3404363 ) on Sunday April 21, 2019 @10:45AM (#58467162)
    Blizzard aggressively pursued the creators of an alternative Battle.Net daemon in court [eff.org] and forced them to stop distributing their work. Blizzard's legal pursuit of bnetd permanently cemented all dead MMOs in the grave for the masses because writing any replacement server is now considered piracy.

    • Not only that... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      But they went after the originators of bnetd who had tried very hard to make it compatible with the battle.net servers while respecting the cdkey verification and ensuring it didn't help propagate piracy.

      The german development group responsible for the Warcraft 3 Beta modifications and cdkey verification bypasses are who they should have gone after, and they continued developing bnetd with impunity, including the diablo 2 realm server support which eventually became feature complete. In the meanwhile Blizza

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Star Trek Online had massively exploitable experience gain back two years ago.

        Spreadsheet is accurate tho, one of the devs has a habit of implementing things based on what makes values in a spreadsheet look pretty rather than evaluating their actual ingame impact

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by spain ( 612172 )

        Emulating modern MMOs is next to impossible without machine learning based reverse engineering.

        Good news - the person in question was handed:

        • The server source code
        • The game's database, containing all game data, including player characters and likely account info.
        • The client source code

        Makes creating a private server much easier.

    • And yet, I have a WOTLK server running on one of my wife's old laptos sitting right next to me by my desktop PC.... Mangos lives on [getmangos.eu], ya know.

  • A person suffering from "withdrawal symptom" shouldn't be playing the game in the first place. A member of my family was addicted to an MMO, and it held him back terribly. After he quit, he got a Ph.D and married. For those not addicted, they've no doubt moved on to other games or life interests.

  • If a company wishes to discontinue a multiplayer product dependent upon unreleased server software, they should be required to release that server software to the community or refund the cost paid for the software client. This of course should fall under a broader consumer protection act, perhaps under right to repair or anti-planned obsolescence.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • No. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Sunday April 21, 2019 @11:51AM (#58467374) Journal

    No, if you pay attention to the cries it's not the SERVER that really has people in an uproar, it's the hurt feelings of people being excluded from what they THOUGHT they were a part of.

    The CoH 'community' has always perceived itself as some sort of pack of refugees done ill by Cryptic. Turns out that they aren't quite as close as they thought they were, and the waterfall of tears is the hurt feelz over that.

    • Just because refugees have common cause doesn't imply they all want to end up in the same neighborhood, living side by side.

      Maybe they're just a random collection of shrill neckbeards, and not actually some sort of independent community?

    • No, if you pay attention to the cries it's not the SERVER that really has people in an uproar, it's the hurt feelings of people being excluded from what they THOUGHT they were a part of.

      The CoH 'community' has always perceived itself as some sort of pack of refugees done ill by Cryptic. Turns out that they aren't quite as close as they thought they were, and the waterfall of tears is the hurt feelz over that.

      Obviously you are not part of the COH community. The ones crying are a tiny minority. The vast majority are overjoyed that the game is not dead.

      They had to keep it secret due to NCSoft having a history of firing the lawyerpult at private servers. I'll be shocked if they aren't already loading it up now.

      And I don't know of anyone who is angry with Cryptic. It is NCSoft that pissed off the players by shutting down the game in the first place.

      • 1) the OP story was about players in an uproar. If you have a bitch that's not representative of the bulk of the community a) I'd agree, and b) take it up with the OP. My comment was about the people who are indeed, in an uproar (whatever fraction of the community that is)

        2) If people aren't angry at Cryptic, then they're not paying attention. Jack Emmert was the key person behind CoH, heart and soul. He *was* Cryptic. Then he abandoned CoX to pursue another superhero IP (iirc Marvel Universe) and NC S

        • 1. Who's bitching? My point is that the COH community is still quite close (I consider myself a part of it), regardless of a tiny minority of butthurt players.

          2. Cryptic created COH, and then sold it to NCSoft. Yes, they went after a Marvel MMO, but when that fell through they took the work already done and it became Champions Online. They were not at all involved with COH when it was shut down.

          NCSoft DID NOT have another 'awesome supers game' and had nothing to do with Cryptic and Champions. I'm not

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Megane ( 129182 )

        They had to keep it secret due to NCSoft having a history of firing the lawyerpult at private servers. I'll be shocked if they aren't already loading it up now.

        "They" is the one guy who received the leaked original source code, and literally told nobody except the users of his private server of its existence. And there are no indications he planned to ever tell anyone else, since it was running well enough that he had been adding mods, like entire new classes. And he was a reddit mod who had even added references to it to the automatic shadow ban list. He could instead have secretly re-leaked the code any time during those six years, such that he could have had pl

  • "I like the rest of you have been lied to," Reddit user avoca wrote in a thread titled "BE ANGRY" on the City of Heroes subreddit.

    So you are upset that a select group of mysterious individuals comes together in their secret lair (aka server) to fight criminals and they have to hide their identity to avoid repercussions spilling into their normal life. I believe that describes every player's fantasy of City of Heroes. BE ANGRY...more like BE JEALOUS!

  • Examples like this where dedicated fans can create their own emulated version of the game and maintain the server to play it on, demonstrate that there is a market for the online games that are no longer leading products. Your MMO is no longer a money maker? Downsize it to a single server, eliminate all the staff, and automate the maintenance. Charge a subscription fee to cover server & royalty costs, bundled with other legacy games for administrative cost savings.

    • eliminate all the staff, and automate the maintenance.

      This is not something that can be done, your server will be hacked.

  • I wish publishers of non-licensed IP MMO games would open source their games when they shut down their official servers. The community can support and develop the code if they want, or maybe inspire new generations of MMO developers from the code base. I never played CoH, but if the publisher has no plans of relaunching 'classic' servers, or a CoH 2, why not open source it? It isn't like the code is bleeding edge to give competing publishers a leg up, and it would take a lot of work from the community to

  • Back in college my roommate played City of Heroes. Several of us played on his computer. Most of us just loved the character creator. (Which also reminds me of Marvel or DC wanting to sue them at some point because very creative players could create copies of their heroes???).

    Later on this guy got City of Villains. I remember all the material for the game talked about PVP.... building bases and invading hero/villain bases and all this stuff. Then I remember 4-5 years later reading none of this stuff wa

    • The PVP stuff *was* actually in the game.

      They did a lot of QoL to the game over the years, and Issue 24 was going to add a lot more when it was unceremoniously put down. I won't claim it was perfect, but the game was FUN to play. YMMV of course...

  • Disclaimer: I played COH for a bit when it was first out and it didn't grab me outside of its character creator, which overall I still don't think has been matched.

    The thing with COH is that it wasn't Cryptic that killed it, it was NCSoft. COH was profitable its entire run, but NCSoft at the time was pretty notorious for basically killing anything that wasn't doing crazy numbers- and there were some rumors that the Korean office was a bit embarrassed that the American office was outperforming them at the time. Dunno if I believe the latter.

    So you had an MMO that a lot of people liked and had a pretty large/diverse playerbase (I knew a LOT of families that played it together) and an emphasis on getting attached to your characters. It was profitable to the point that even if it was a red-headed stepchild NCSoft could've let Cryptic run it in maintenance mode forever and people would've been happy. Then they unceremoniously kill it and the devs basically have to tell the community "Well due to IP law/etc/etc we can't just give the code out".

    A rogue dev leaks the server code (and according to some also the character data for live) to someone well-known in the community.

    This dude's response?

    1. Make a private server and tell no one about it.
    2. Make "Paragon Chat" which is just the character creator and a chat lobby with a shrug and say "Aw gee-whiz guys, I dunno if we can actually re-create the game. This is basically the best we can do. :("
    3. Solicit for thousands of dollars in donations to make a server emulator...which they already had.
    4. Purportedly attempt to sabotage the other attempts at creating server emulators.

    A C&D is a joke. The server was super-private. If the powers that be found out and C&D' them they can be like "okay we turned it off, sorry", then spin it right back up somewhere else and go dark.

    If the former dev can get away with leaking the server code, these idiots can sure as fuck release it through some anonymous channel.

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