
'Secret' City of Heroes Emulator - fzeroracer
https://massivelyop.com/2019/04/15/score-city-of-heroes-emulator-leak/
======
darawk
Oh man, city of heroes. I spent a long time reverse engineering this game when
it originally came out. It had some unusually complicated networking code,
IIRC. I was able to write a (the first?) client that was able to emulate some
of the protocol, but eventually I sort of lost interest. It was fun to work on
for a while.

I remember there was an incident once where an online acquaintance of mine got
hold of the admin tool for the game. I believe he found it by tracking down
one of the engineer's personal websites, which for some reason had a copy of
this tool accessible on it. The tool gave you administrative access to the
servers (not ssh, administrative within the game), with no other form of
authentication. We had fun with it for a little while, and then eventually the
engineer who's site we had taken it from joined our little IRC channel to ask
us to stop using it, and we did. Fun times.

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fzeroracer
To say this has been a bit of a storm would be an understatement. People are
understandably pissed off, because there's been a lot of smoke and mirrors.

Paragon Chat is led by a lot of the same people behind the private server
where they admitted that they used it as cover for their fully fledged server.
Additionally they've been behaving in generally scummy ways, deleting posts,
taking down any references to the private server and more. On many of the City
of Heroes communities they had members of the mod team seek out and delete any
comments that might've even slightly hinted at the server's existence.

It's like the strangest conspiracy theory but it's over a dead MMO.

~~~
ergothus
I dont understand why people are so pissed. I loved coh/cov and have been
waiting for a successor for many years.

NowI find out that some people have had a successor in secret, and have been
acting to keep that secret because of the near certainty that it would get
legally stomped. Hard.

Why should this piss me off? Because some people are luckier than I? Because
they've lied to protect this secret the way I'd wang them to if I had been in
on it?

Everyone talking about this says how obvious it is that people should be angry
and I just feel like I'm missing something. NCsoft is the one responsible for
denying the game to everyone, and if some few have been able to get around
that with some effort, that doesn't make my situation worse.

~~~
AgentME
I find the article unclear: do they actually have the original server
software, or have they just made their own server (with tips and data from ex-
employees)?

~~~
ergothus
The various sources I've seen say it's the original, albeit tweaked and
modified over time.

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fouc
Honestly I feel like there should be more consumer protection - particularly
extending to the server side of things. It doesn't seem particularly ethical
to be able to kill off entire products just by unplugging the server.

I'm not asking company to maintain the server though, that would be unfair
also.

~~~
lvturner
Having been part of a relatively popular game shut down, we agonised over
this.

There were several reasons given, from “we might use it again in the future”
and “we’ll need to be really careful about the database” I suspect there was
also a case of some embarrassment, as some of the code was far worse than an
outsider might imagine :-)

Ultimately we just deemed it too much effort to release it as even if you
explicitly state it’s totally unsupported, people will go to really strange
stalker-esque lengths to try and contact the original devs for any level of
support, and we just didn’t want, nor have time to deal with that burden.

Note, my memory is a little hazy around all of the details, so I can’t quite
remember all of the finer points.

I do remember that the topic would repeat in passing as an “ah, I wish we
could...” for a very long time after the call was made.

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apk-d
I don't understand why this kind of support of long-obsolete (and officially
unavailable) multiplayer games is met with negative reaction by the copyright
holders. These might be some of the most loyal fans of your game that you've
ever had. How is this a danger and not an opportunity?

~~~
teddyh
Because the copyright holders have new games that they would rather you gave
them money for, instead of you playing old games without paying them.

~~~
holtalanm
well that's where things get a little wonky though, right? CoH was a
subscription-based game, so technically these extremely loyal fans would,
theoretically, still be paying the company.

The fact that companies shut down popular games due to their profit simply not
being as high as projected is just stupid. (note I said profit, not income. In
the case of CoH, the game was 100% making profit still when it was shut down).

~~~
analognoise
It's about the time value of money.

If you give me 100, and I make a profit for you of $0.50 a year on it, it's
profit right? But this other investment, investment B, makes $5/year. Which
one are you going to put your money in?

Investment B every time.

The companies don't want profit, they want the MOST profit - especially
because if they don't choose wisely, they'll find it difficult or impossible
to seek extra financing.

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filthius
It sounds like this isn't an emulator but rather the actual retail server
software. This group has been sitting on it for 6-7 years while dishonestly
encouraging emulator development publicly.

This whole thing reads like a crazy conspiracy theory that actually turned out
to be true. The insidious part is that is has apparently been kept under wraps
by banning leakers (and everyone associated with them) followed by gas
lighting them since a lot of the top people in the community were in on it.
Totally nuts.

~~~
nullsmack
On one hand, I can totally understand bad feelings about this. Especially with
how people have been treated and the fact that people want to play the game as
it was and not in a shallow imitation of itself. On the other hand, I can
understand why it was kept secret. If they are not served with a C&D that
means they can keep reverse engineering the code behind it, and figuring out
how to pull out the resources or make their own. I hope that's what they were
doing anyways, rather than just sitting on it. What an amazing opportunity to
pick at a game via a private server! One would hope it would be tons easier to
build an open source private server while having a working copy rather than
just guessing at what kind of responses the server should send.

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parliament32
>Then it was hit by a Cease and Desist order by NCsoft in November 2011. The
website was seized, the forums went dark, and progress completely stopped. One
thing was made abundantly clear to everybody: NCsoft was not going to tolerate
the development of servers for their games, even four years after they were
shut down.

Why do companies do this? If they're clearly not making any more money off of
it... I understand not wanting to release source (the IP could technically
still be worth something), but why go after fan efforts to resurrect a service
they're making $0 on? What's the business reasoning to spend lawyer money on
stomping out unofficial servers?

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Riverheart
I was never big into the traditional superheroes of Marvel and DC but I had a
real soft spot for this game. They got into animation as they matured but the
original walls of text from missions were pretty good reads. Heroes and
villains had a lot of polish. I had to stop for a while and by the time I was
ready to get back in they were shutting down. Champions Online came afterwards
but the IP it was based on seemed stereotypically awful. Dr. Destroyer as the
main villain? Come on. There's a project called Ship of Heroes that might be a
good substitute if they make it to release.

[https://www.shipofheroes.com](https://www.shipofheroes.com)

~~~
WorldMaker
Dr. Destroyer isn't the main villain of Champions or of Champions Online. He
does have a somewhat strong arc in the central hub city of the game, that was
briefly played up in one of the versions of the tutorial.

Part of the problem with the IP is more that it doesn't have a main villain or
follow a central storyline. It's decades of tabletop adventures that go in all
sorts of directions (some light almost parody, some power fantasies, some
mixtures in between).

Paragon City of CoH/CoV had the opportunity of being designed as a singular
place with a natural story flow built to roughly coincide with player level
flow. Champions Online is much more a loose association of vignettes and
interesting settings with less of an over-arcing story. As a player you could
see some of that problem directly too in the way Cryptic kept rebalancing the
levels of zones to try to offer more variety to early players, more
introduction to other plot lines in the game in the idea that maybe you'd fine
the one that most interested you/your player faster.

One interesting thing Champions Online attempted (and didn't quite succeed at)
was letting players build their own main villain. It's a shame that the
Nemesis system still takes far too many levels to unlock, because had they
found ways to wrap that into even low level storytelling, that would have been
a big deal. That should have been something more of the game was built around.
Most people don't even realize it exists because it comes around at a very
high level and is basically optional at that point.

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Halluxfboy009
I will be shocked if NCSOFT doesn't pursue immediate legal action. It's one
thing to infringe on the copyright but the bigger story is that someone,
presumably a current or previous employee, stole the entire CoH database AND
made money off of it for years? They're gonna try to make an example out of
this guy.

~~~
crooked-v
"Made money off it"? How?

~~~
freeflight
Not sure if this applies in this specific case, but many private MMO servers
finance their operation (and probably generate a bit of money) through selling
"premium slots" and other special powers.

~~~
gambiting
Well, private servers will usually do lots of stuff that an official server
wouldn't. I used to play on a private Lineage 2 server where you would get
things like 100x XP and gold gain for instance.

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unstatusthequo
Everything is available for a price. Has anyone actually contacted NCsoft
about a price? My sense is there are enough people who would contribute to a
purchase, given enough organization.

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Causality1
Lawyers are first and foremost bureaucrats, and the primary duty of any
bureaucrat is to justify their own pay. Six years or twenty, it doesn't
matter. If NCsoft has a legal claim to the ip their lawyers will send a c&d.
We need a digital consumer rights bill that includes the right to operate
private servers for defunct games.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
I think you're angry at the wrong people here. NCSoft wants to keep the IP
dead - their lawyers are just there to serve that function.

But I agree, we need some way to keep these dead game alive. I can understand
if there is a franchise there'd need to be considerations, but CoH is totally
gone from this earth, and that's not right.

~~~
analognoise
Why is it not right? They built it, financed it, drew it, programmed it,
marketed it. They own it.

If they want to smother it with a pillow, they should be able to. It is
theirs; the players and fans certainly don't own it.

~~~
Causality1
Except they sold a piece of it to every person who bought the game. What right
do they have to revoke the functionality of software on other people's
computers when it isn't them maintaining that functionality?

They didnt put an expiration date on the box, and therefore every single City
of Heroes box is currently a false advertisement and they owe everyone a full
refund.

~~~
analognoise
I'm sure the agreement people made to play had language about changes to the
service, 100%. Lawyers dont miss this kind of stuff.

"I don't understand how online games work or terms and condition" is not the
same as false advertising.

~~~
Causality1
Oh I don't argue they have good legal standing. I'm arguing they're morally
bankrupt scumbags.

