Personal Concerns over Direction

[Tubbius]

We all want to see the game revived to varying degrees and through varying methods.

However, there's a lot of discussion going around this particular forum regarding potential reverse engineering efforts and the so-called SCoRE (Secret Cabal of Reverse Engineers), something expressly forbidden by most games, and, if I recall rightly, the EULA to City of Heroes.  Regardless of whether people wish to argue whether the EULA still applies or not, the fact is that working to reverse engineer a game can easily bring down a shotgun effect blast of wrath from the owners of the IP/game in question.

I enjoy this community, and I find its efforts to continue on amazing, in terms of bringing back the game and of beginning new successors.  I find the fellowship here top notch, with people willing to look out for each other financially and emotionally.

However, much discussion lately is getting too cloak and dagger for my tastes, at least personally.  I want to stay in the know about efforts to bring the game back through legal means and negotiations, but it seems that many threads I even casually click through make the discussion sound like a "behind closed doors" setup.

I know I'm only one person, and I'm not looking to divide people, but I do have this concern over the direction of continued discussions and open talks about reverse engineering the game.

To the community at large, please don't make me feel like I have to leave this community to avoid possible long-term legal backlash.  That's not what I'm here for, and I'd wager that's not what any of us are here for, either.

Thank you for your time and understanding.

[JanessaVR]

Sorry you feel that way, but you're chasing a pipe dream if you believe we will ever get City back "through legal means and negotiations" - it's just not going to happen.  Disney wasn't interested, Google wasn't interested, and I don't think VV is coming back.  We're on our own, and no one cares about us except us.

And so we pursue other methods.  Methods where NCLimp is not in the loop.

We're not asking - we're doing.  They had their chance - screw them.

[eabrace]

I'm content with letting whatever's going on behind the curtain continue to progress.  I'm sure when we need to hear something, we'll hear about it.

Until then, I'm looking forward to seeing MWM start their Kickstarter campaign (any time now, right guys?) and trying out the successors when they have something playable out there.

[JaguarX]

yeah, and I think until it's cleared up, that SCORE, (that's what they calling it now? Geesh, what will they call it two months from now? GOAL?" Ahem anyways...) might want to stay as low as possible because definitely don't want collateral damage or EVEN risk it if it don't have to be whether 0.000001% or not.  We had maybe a 0.000001% chance of getting big corporations interested and that didn't stop the effort.


 And if it succeed, make it stay succeeded. I rather not read a massively article about "new COX private server up." then a few months later "COX private server owner sued." because they simply got relaxed and got caught. If they are going to catch ya, make them work for it. Don't be waving a red flag at the bull (although bulls are red-green colorblind It's the movement (taunting) of the cape that pisses them off and the situation). 


And when did those two TFHM end? A couple of days ago it was stated it was still going and waiting for reply and it may take time to hear a reply if any reply at all? What happened?

[JanessaVR]

And when did those two TFHM end? A couple of days ago it was stated it was still going and waiting for reply and it may take time to hear a reply if any reply at all? What happened?

I stopped expecting to hear anything from either of those some time ago.  They're not going anywhere.  We just aren't big enough or important enough for either of them to care.  Doubtless they took our letters and just threw them in the shredder without a second thought.  We're on our own.  There's SCoRE and the successor efforts, and that's it.

[Nightwatch]

Hadn't heard the acronym SCORE before!  I'm just happy that people who loved the game are trying to resurrect the experience I loved and still long for - either through developing another legacy game or through reverse-engineering the old game.  I hope all these attempts work.  I don't have tech skills but I would happily financially support all of them that looked viable.  I would like to play all of them.  Hell - there is a chance that one of the legacies may even be better! 

But I do not want anyone working on it or playing it to get burnt.  So although I'm "out of the loop" on SCORE, I wish them well and simply say include me if you feel comfortable doing so.

HAIL PROMETHEUS - HE WHO STOLE FIRE FROM THE GODS FOR MORTAL MEN!

[JanessaVR]

HAIL HEPHAESTUS - HE WHO STOLE FIRE FROM THE GODS FOR MORTAL MEN!

Um, that's Prometheus.  He stole the fire from the forge of Hephaestus (and was punished rather severely for it).

[Nightwatch]

LOL.  Youre quite right!  Jetlag.  now modified.  thankyou

[TonyV]

[Nightwatch]

[Cinnder]

I think the two main topics in this thread are bound up in timing and need-to-know more than anything else.

From what I've seen, the Titan Team is a group of pretty savvy folks.  I don't think they are going to do anything rash, which is the very reason I think they are not giving us details.  Without any inside info and basing this just on a history of the type of forum posts they make, I think whatever they are up to will be perfectly legal when the time comes.  I think the reason they can't talk yet is not to be cloak & dagger, but because the time is not right yet.  Maybe there's some sort of time limit after which licenses don't quite apply in the same way, or something like that.  I'm basing this solely on what I believe shows of their character and intelligence from their forum posts, so it's certainly no more than my opinion.

Regarding Disney or Google, it may very well be they were not interested.  But remember, we have no official stake in such a deal if it were happening, so we wouldn't hear anything until a deal was made--or maybe very close to being made and one of the participants thought it beneficial to get some PR to sway the deal their way.  (A buyer might want to increase awareness to justify their purchase, or NCSoft might even want to whip up excitement to bump up their asking price.)  The point is that business deals can take a lonnnng time, and we here are not part of the negotiations.  If a deal were being made as we speak, it's extremely unlikely we would know.  And anyone who did know would be risking the deal's success to talk about it here. If I had to bet, I'd probably reluctantly go with their not being interested, but right now it's really too soon to tell.

EDIT: How was I to know Tony was typing at the same time? lol  Well, looks like I was not too far off the bat then!  Tony, I don't know what gives you the idea that people would be impatient if you have a tentative release date (*cough* TPP Kickstarter *cough*). 

[TonyV]

Regarding Disney or Google, it may very well be they were not interested.

First of all, I don't know of any companies currently pursuing the IP rights to the game, so I don't want to feed any rumors that there's some kind of deal in the works that you guys don't know about.  As far as I know, there's not.

However, this does touch on another reason we're kind of quiet about things.  As soon as there's a private server available, that makes City of Heroes a much less sweet deal for another company to acquire.  I mean, put yourself in the position of Company XYZ who might be interested in the game.  Would you want to shell out for it if people could play it (or some equivalent of it) on their own private servers, even an upgraded version of it?  We're also aware of this consideration, and we want to be careful that we don't undermine the game's value (or, for that matter, inflate it if we hit snags) during development.

I want to be clear about what I'm saying here:  It's possible that if some other company acquires the game and relaunches, our efforts may not see the light of day, other than a significant improvement of the Titan Network sites due to insight on how the game works internally.  Or they may, as a divergent branch of what City of Heroes was like as of Issue 24.  Or maybe the company that acquires the IP will want to work with us to relaunch the game with upgraded features.  Or maybe we will launch some kind of investor or community funding effort to acquire the IP and make our product literally City of Heroes, in name, lore, mechanics, and everything else.

At any rate, I don't want to commit us on a path that precludes options like this further down the road.

[Captain Electric]

With respect to the OP, Tubbius isn't the only one here who has expressed discomfort; and although those people will have to accept a certain amount of conversation around the topic, we should respect our friends.

I loved City of Heroes like a family member, but filling up every thread with our baited breath won't untangle the code any faster for those working on it. One day I personally believe we'll have Paragon City back, but in the interim we are going to witness a burgeoning time for the genre and for us. It doesn't have to be a boring wait. Over the following weeks, months and years, many exciting things are going to be happening for our community, which is filled with ongoing efforts, including three MMORPGs.

Those people deserve our excitement and our focus too, and by diverting a little focus from CONSTANT topics like this, you'll be keeping the reverse-engineering efforts safer.

[Illusionss]

Tubbius: To the community at large, please don't make me feel like I have to leave this community to avoid possible long-term legal backlash.  That's not what I'm here for, and I'd wager that's not what any of us are here for, either.

I'd seriously like to know what in the hell benefit NCSoft would derive from crossing the ocean and suing me personally for discussing a potential reverse engineering project. I really would. Or suing any of us. What would be the charge? "Suspicion of unknown hanky-panky"? "Thought crime, first degree"? What would they get out of that? I do not HAVE assets they would find worth seizing. They turned up their noses at literally millions of dollars re CoX subscriptions, but my rather modest house and modest paycheck will interest them somehow? That would be amusing....  not to mention that by US law, primary residences cannot be seized for such reasons AFAIK.

Do they seriously think such an action would not instantly hit every gaming site out there, causing a massive chill/yet more bad publicity for them? Is that a thing they want to do after having emerged somewhat bloodied from the shutdown debacle?

I think the thing to keep in mind here is, that the issue of private servers is of great interest to much of the playerbase - and it is a thing that will continue to be discussed. No one is trying to run anyone off, but the subject will be discussed.

[JaguarX]

With respect to the OP, Tubbius isn't the only one here who has expressed discomfort; and although those people will have to accept a certain amount of conversation around the topic, we should respect our friends.

I loved City of Heroes like a family member, but filling up every thread with our baited breath won't untangle the code any faster for those working on it. One day I personally believe we'll have Paragon City back, but in the interim we are going to witness a burgeoning time for the genre and for us. It doesn't have to be a boring wait. Over the following weeks, months and years, many exciting things are going to be happening for our community, which is filled with ongoing efforts, including three MMORPGs.

Those people deserve our excitement and our focus too, and by diverting a little focus from CONSTANT topics like this, you'll be keeping the reverse-engineering efforts safer.

Yeah. And while it's all but well known that each individual probably wont get sued or even have to fear it much, remember the oft forgotten  "contributory infringement" of DCMA and Copyright laws. The usualy defense is that the website didnt know it was leading to copyright infringing materials, it kind of get nullified when there is history of talks about it and stuff. Right now, we are just a bunch of random people talking about doing something. That is something materialize and some mess up and either put a post the link and or encourage people, especially key personnel of the site, to use the copyright infringement material. Not all lawsuits results in chunk of money nor sometimes it's not the sole intended goal. What they probably go for is the shutdown of the site and using the discussions about it as evidence that it was well known that it was going on.

This is of course it, the server and stuff that goes along with it, is indeed illegally done.  If it's legaly done, then not much to worry about besides a few prods here and there.

A lot of times though companies wait until the problem gets huge because they can claim even bigger damages and have more evidence to use. And of course NCSOFT themselves dont have to see it there are a few reporting websites that even a common citizen can report suspected and or actual DMCA copyright trademark infringements and they bring it to the attention of the rights holder and go from there. Some even do most of the invetigative work for the comany and it's matter of filling out paper work. And remember NCSOFT still do have at least one office here states side with a staffed legal department.

In short, keep it low and resist the urge to shove it in their face. What they dont know about or know little about, they cant go after. But it's like speeding. Some get caught some dont but doesnt mean it's legal to speed. It's risk. If one think or dont think there will be a cop on a section of street, many speed. But if they know it's a speed trap, they usually dont speed unless they become sloppy and not paying attention. But even with speeding tickets, rarely if ever do the defense of "oh well the guy next to me was speeding too." works. If anything that pisses the judge more as  it looks like the perosn wont even take responsilibity of for their own actions and probably throw the book at them for it. Although they may be telling the whole entire unadulterated truth.

[Ironwolf]

For anyone who is concerned over "reverse engineering" please understand the legalities of it:

http://lwn.net/Articles/134642/

In a word the illegality of an operation may yield a fully legal product. In the EU it is absolutely possible to reverse engineer as long as you don't publish the product - you can though CHANGE it so that it no longer is the same and publish that.

One of the other issues is it can be also a literary work as it tells stories and has artwork.

The issue could be quite simply a process may be in a grey area that will yield a perfectly fine outcome. Do you want our coders to have to ask NCSoft if what they are doing is fine every step of the way? NCSoft will instantly say no, stop what you are doing and then you will have to sue and prove you are not doing anything illegal. Costing time and money no one wants to spend.

Now here is the fun part - what are the laws it falls under if the coders are multi-national? Also some countries allow complete reverse engineering without a problem and other countries do not.

[JaguarX]

For anyone who is concerned over "reverse engineering" please understand the legalities of it:

http://lwn.net/Articles/134642/

In a word the illegality of an operation may yield a fully legal product. In the EU it is absolutely possible to reverse engineer as long as you don't publish the product - you can though CHANGE it so that it no longer is the same and publish that.

One of the other issues is it can be also a literary work as it tells stories and has artwork.

The issue could be quite simply a process may be in a grey area that will yield a perfectly fine outcome. Do you want our coders to have to ask NCSoft if what they are doing is fine every step of the way? NCSoft will instantly say no, stop what you are doing and then you will have to sue and prove you are not doing anything illegal. Costing time and money no one wants to spend.

Now here is the fun part - what are the laws it falls under if the coders are multi-national? Also some countries allow complete reverse engineering without a problem and other countries do not.

hmm, different coders under different country laws. I guess, keyword guess, as I havent actually looked it up yet and or asked an actual lawyer, that it would depend on which one they sue. Say you have one in Kazhakistan, one in the US, one in Wyluuni Island somewhere, and one in Canada. Now assuming thye are working on the same project and more than likely there will be a website and or a server that is registered. If registered in a anti-reverse engineer, then it probably would fall under that jurisdiction. Now, lets say it's registered in Wyluuni Island where anything goes. Then the website and server would be safe but if the company wanted to be d-wads about it, they probably could still go after the citizens taht are part of the country that honors the anti-reverse engineering law. The kicker I see with that is, that would mean more than likely even in worse case, the server will remain in Wyluuni Island and given that just about any country part of the world wide web is accessible, then it probably could still be played on. On the same token though it may not show up on US version Google and equivalent search either way.

Now, lets say it is an illegal act to reverse engineer ins two out of four countries and the server is safe in Wyluuni island. Now, unless the two that fall into the anti-reverse engineering countries are millionaires, more than likely the company wont bother suign for monetary damages. How ever, in copyright laws there are provisions that said a person can actually go to jail even under Contributary infringement More than likely they will be issues a C&D to cease, then get sued. They go to court and more than likely the judge will tell them to knock it off. Although even if they knock if off the server is still protected in Wyluuni Island and ran by the other two. Now if the two where the law is in effect decide "to hell with the judge, I'm doing this for the right reason" and continue, then there is provisions under the copyright infringement laws that allow up to five years in prison which is rare but does happen from time usually not for full 10 unless they go in there saying "hey judge, I screwed your mother last night and she liked it." But nonetheless that is still a criminal record, a white collar crime, but criminal record nonetheless that can affect them for a while. But over all, the private server will still run.

And that is assuming each person is actual citizen of their respective country as while enforcement of the US copyright laws apply to generally US citizens, the US do honor the copyright of other nations, a lot of other nations.
Nations that US is not in copyright relations with are Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Palaua, Nauru, San Marino, Turkmenistan, Somalia, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. Although setting up a server from many of those countries is no cake walk and probably copyright would be the least of the worries.

10 common myths (11 actually) about copyright. http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

I think 11 is important here for this case. Especially the commercial value of the IP and if there is nothing to be one, yeah only the most vindictive companies would bother and the courts dont look too kindly on that BUT they dont look too kindly on vindictive defendants either. Which honestly notot be mean, surrounding this secret project, it's very vindictive feeling. Yet, I think as time go on, the actual reason can be softened to be more reasonable later down the line just in case the fit hits the shan.

[Turjan]

I'd seriously like to know what in the hell benefit NCSoft would derive from crossing the ocean and suing me personally for discussing a potential reverse engineering project. I really would. Or suing any of us. What would be the charge? "Suspicion of unknown hanky-panky"? "Thought crime, first degree"? What would they get out of that? I do not HAVE assets they would find worth seizing. They turned up their noses at literally millions of dollars re CoX subscriptions, but my rather modest house and modest paycheck will interest them somehow? That would be amusing....  not to mention that by US law, primary residences cannot be seized for such reasons AFAIK.

Indeed - but I believe the sad part of it is that NCsoft don't need to get a benefit out of such an act to do it, they'd just do it anyway, regardless. Not to benefit themselves directly, but to show everyone watching them that they're prepared to get legal at the drop of a hat 

As you rightly pointed out, they've already rejected not only the money from our CoH subs, but also all offers for the CoH IP. It's not about the money for them, it's about defending what's 'theirs'. Thankfully, even they're not crazy enough to try suing people for merely discussing such things, but you can rest assured they're out there, sniffing the breeze, waiting for the slightest whiff of actual substance beyond simple discussions. And if they think they've got a scent, they WILL pounce - count on it.

The failure and demise of Tabula Rasa surely left a bitter taste in NCsoft's corporate mouth, and they were no doubt glad to wash their hands of the whole business. But that didn't stop them from flinging out C&D orders at Tabula Rasa emulator projects. There was no gain at all to be had in that, but they did it just the same.

As always, Tony V's words are wise and to the point - we all love CoH, and we all want it back, so we simply have to wait and be patient. The fate of our (gaming) world rests in good hands. Safe hands. Titanic hands in fact. We may not be able to see them, but we know they're there, and we know they're holding not just the best interests of our game, but of our hearts too.

Trust them. I do. 

[LadyVamp]

In reference to Ironwolf's post, this very thing was undertaken by US company against another US company.  It went to court, and the courts ruled that what was done was legal because of the way it was done.

The product in question was the 486DX processor.  Intel developed it.  AMD bought it, had a team tear it apart and write up complete specs, called a messenger who took an envelope containing the specs but no actual Intel code to another development team.  The 2nd team's orders were build a processor that does everything the spec sheets in the envelope.  Intel filed against AMD and lost to AMD.  The key point in court was the two teams had nothing to do with each other.  No interaction.

That's how the story was told to me.  That was in the 90s while I was in college.  The precedent exists.

I believe the best thing we can do is let those who are working on this thing keep on working on it and be patient.  As much as I want our city and my toons back right now, I understand those teams are working as diligently as they can.  It's hard work figuring out how something was done.  They don't need us bringing up the usual is it legal, when will it be done, etc questions.

Instead, they need our encouragement.  Our support.  And, our understanding.

[Floride]

To the community at large, please don't make me feel like I have to leave this community to avoid possible long-term legal backlash.  That's not what I'm here for, and I'd wager that's not what any of us are here for, either.
Thank you for your time and understanding.

Reading this thread's replies, it's obvious that reverse engineering is a hazey legal area.
Follow your gut and just avoid posting on threads that seem to go places you're uncomfortable with. I don't see a reason to leave the community as a whole though. There's alot more going on here than just the SCoRE team.
I think the anniversary of the closure has a lot of people anxious, and is reviving their frustrations and heartbreak of the loss. Keep the faith, soldier!

[Seethe]

Reading this thread's replies, it's obvious that reverse engineering is a hazey legal area.
Follow your gut and just avoid posting on threads that seem to go places you're uncomfortable with. I don't see a reason to leave the community as a whole though. There's alot more going on here than just the SCoRE team.
I think the anniversary of the closure has a lot of people anxious, and is reviving their frustrations and heartbreak of the loss. Keep the faith, soldier!

Nope, not hazy at all.  100% legal.  If you wanted to go home and reverse engineer your television, you can.  If you wanted to reverse engineer your phone, you can.  If you wanted to buy a 2014 Ford F-150 and reverse engineer it, you can.  All of it is 100% legal.

You can't, however, reverse engineer the Ford F-150's power train and sell it to a Toyota.  That's a no-no.  That's where it becomes illegal.

There's no crime about purchasing a product and figuring out what makes it work.  If there were a criminal offense for it, the R&D departments of most major companies would frequently have people arrested and convicted.

[saipaman]

I just want to lobby for the support of Sentinel Plus files in any project that may or may not be happening.

[Ohioknight]

I believe the best thing we can do is let those who are working on this thing keep on working on it and be patient.  As much as I want our city and my toons back right now, I understand those teams are working as diligently as they can.  It's hard work figuring out how something was done.  They don't need us bringing up the usual is it legal, when will it be done, etc questions.

Instead, they need our encouragement.  Our support.  And, our understanding.

Slightly off topic, but speaking of the challenge of reverse-engineering COH... I'd like to shout out the behavior of street victim NPCs.  They chased you down and "thanked" you -- all well and good -- fairly easy to figure the process, but then they actively tried to get away from you by either running to a convenient door or trying fairly hard to avoid you and get to a concealed location so they could fade out.  If you think about that, it's real damn impressive and one of the most interesting things to me about the game.  It really came home when I played CO and saw their simple fade-out implementation. 

BTW, I would think it would be awfully hard to argue illegality or IP violation if you were playing the free client resources and your server software played as close as CO is to COH in game function.  Might want to not use the original names of the map contacts.

[HEATSTROKE]

hmmm how much does it cost for one to run their own server

[Cinnder]

Slightly off topic, but speaking of the challenge of reverse-engineering COH... I'd like to shout out the behavior of street victim NPCs.  They chased you down and "thanked" you -- all well and good -- fairly easy to figure the process, but then they actively tried to get away from you by either running to a convenient door or trying fairly hard to avoid you and get to a concealed location so they could fade out.  If you think about that, it's real damn impressive and one of the most interesting things to me about the game.  It really came home when I played CO and saw their simple fade-out implementation.

Agreed -- it was one of those nice features that made the game feel less...well...gamey.  Similarly, the fact that regular street mobs didn't spawn right in front of you (aside from special events, where they were actually teleporting).  Some people have said they saw mobs respawning, but in 7 years of playing I never saw it once.  Until they put the respawning mobs in Atlas, of course.  I felt so "et tu Brute" when they did that.  Up till then, CoH had stood out from the crowd of MMOs on this.

[dwturducken]

hmmm how much does it cost for one to run their own server

It depends on how the final "infrastructure" is set up. If it uses a centralized bank of servers, like the way it was, that is out of reach of most of us here. Last weekend, though, I set up a "server" for Team Fortress 2, and it's just an extra computer that I hadn't yet decided how to utilize. In that case, though, it's really just an old Dell PC running Windows Vista and a program that downloads and updates from Steam.

Not really being someone who works with these things, I imagine the decentralized model as being something that would be more difficult to implement, in this case, as it's not how the original product was designed. That said, it is the model that early multiplayer games used.

[General Idiot]

It also depends on how many players you want that server to support. If you just want yourself and a few friends, you can probably get away with running it on a spare home machine. If on the other hand you want to be support hundreds of players you're going to need something significantly more powerful. And then there's the question of reliability, full on servers have crazy stuff like redundant power supplies just in case one fails, and multiple backups of all sorts of stuff.

[dwturducken]

Not to mention having multiple servers for redundancy/loadsharing. Not for the faint of heart.

That said, toward the end, my primary mode of play was solo, unless it was Friday, when it was, at most, about 8 of us. Having the community-hosted servers would also make things like the lowby, post-Freedom Atlas Park missions less annoying. On Friday nights, we would ignore the mission arc and just street sweep until we were high enough to run to Kings Row, because the competition for the open mission mobs was annoying.

[Ironwolf]

If I were to setup a local server it would cost  about $1000 to make a nice fast system. In reality you could get a game hosting location to likely do all that for you.

http://www.gameservers.com/

That is one source where they will host the game on a dedicated server and provide the bandwidth and even manage it for you. Starting at $169 a month. So 50 people at $5 a month could swing it easily.

[dwturducken]

There was a discussion along these lines in my Friday night group. A few companies offer hosting for Steam game servers at about $5 a month, so we were tossing out ideas like rotating paying the fee. I know we're talking about orders of magnitude difference in processing and resources...

[LadyVamp]

hmmm how much does it cost for one to run their own server

Believe it or not but the "server" itself is likely to be the cheapest part.  Figure about $20k for a single blade server with enough horses to run a single world.  You do what to have more than about 4 or 5 players at the same time, right?  We'll need a few of those.  Figure 8 to support 4 worlds with failover support.  Figure 5 times that for the chassis to hold the blade servers.  Storage for that race horse is another quarter of a mil.  Since blade servers generally don't have much storage on the blade, we'll 10Gig Ethernet between storage and the chassis.  Can't price that one but Cisco Nexus 5ks ain't cheap.  The technical support to take care of it and protect it from hackers is another $100k per year.  We'll need a minimum of 5 people for that.  If you went open source for the OS with something like OpenStack to carve up those blades into multiple servers with full isolation you'd save a a lot of money on virtualization.  We'll need database servers to store toons that aren't in the world, the various objects, rooms, maps, etc.  Commercial SQL servers hurt license wise.  Can't price those.  Haven't in a few years.  Likely a pair of Kerberos servers for login accounts too.  And that doesn't count the various business servers you'll need to support the business you'll have to have to get the kind of cash such a beast requires.

Then there's the data circuit.  Figure another $10k+ / month.  We gamers eat bandwidth.  Streaming video might beat us out, but I doubt it.

And I haven't even brought up the space to setup that beast or the HVAC to keep it comfortable.  Or their costs.

Before you guys and gals shoot me for the post, keep in mind I manage a team that takes care of a few VMware ESX vCenter/vCloud Director 5.1 clouds.   3 clouds actually with a total of 450 blade servers.

Why so expensive?  Consumer grade hardware lasts about a month under such heavy use.  It isn't designed to take on such a challenge.

But.  If we are serious about making our home live again, we'll find a way.  You know, forming our own little LLC that's player owned would give us the necessary clout to get such a beast up and running.

[Codewalker]

Storage for that race horse is another quarter of a mil.

You're paying too much for storage. You can get a midrange unit in the $50k range that would probably be sufficient (8Gb fibre channel with dual controllers). I could even get EMC gear for about $100k that would be more than good enough for what an MMO needs.

Since blade servers generally don't have much storage on the blade, we'll 10Gig Ethernet between storage and the chassis.

10Gig? Why on earth? Unless your storage is iSCSI or FCoE or something you don't need that -- cross server traffic wouldn't be that much and your bottleneck will be the internet pipe. Even vMotion networks can be fine with a couple of 1Gb NICs and etherchannel -- and if you're virtualizing game servers which are sensitive to latency, you probably would have automatic vMotion disabled on most of them anyway.

A Nexus would be way overkill.

[adarict]

You're paying too much for storage. You can get a midrange unit in the $50k range that would probably be sufficient (8Gb fibre channel with dual controllers). I could even get EMC gear for about $100k that would be more than good enough for what an MMO needs.

EMC gives me cold sweats.  I know they are a big name, and in most cases, it works pretty darn good.  Their support is absolutely terrible, and we had had a TON of problems switching between fiber and copper.  Not as much of a problem anymore, since pretty much everything is on fiber now in our datacenter.  I hold grudges with tech companies though when they cause me to have to work a bunch of overtime that I don't get paid for.

[Illusionss]

Turjan: As you rightly pointed out, they've already rejected not only the money from our CoH subs, but also all offers for the CoH IP. It's not about the money for them, it's about defending what's 'theirs'. Thankfully, even they're not crazy enough to try suing people for merely discussing such things, but you can rest assured they're out there, sniffing the breeze, waiting for the slightest whiff of actual substance beyond simple discussions. And if they think they've got a scent, they WILL pounce - count on it.

I think a bit part of the problem is, NCSoft thinks this game is "theirs" and that they own it. And they may indeed, legally own it.

But I view ME as owning the parts of the game that belonged to ME. The ones *I* created. The ones I leveled up, and spent real-world time and money to trick out. I thought them up. Their backstories are my history for them that I made, not NCSoft.

So, a big part of me views them as pirates who without so much as an "ARRRR, avast me bucko, I am takin' your l00T!" - up and STOLE my property.

I will snatch it back the instant I get the chance. Shut that down, up crops another opportunity to snatch my property back.... sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. This is one of those times.

[Codewalker]

EMC gives me cold sweats.  I know they are a big name, and in most cases, it works pretty darn good.

Their VNX line seems decent, and is at least on par if not slightly better than most of the other storage I've worked with from HP and IBM. A lot better than some of their earlier stuff.

The trick with EMC support is to buy through a good local reseller / partner, and then when you need support make sure that partner is involved rather than contacting EMC directly. That way when they don't respond in a timely fashion or make dumb suggestions, you have someone who is highly motivated to keep you happy acting on your behalf, and often has contacts higher up the support chain they can call in.

[JaguarX]

Indeed - but I believe the sad part of it is that NCsoft don't need to get a benefit out of such an act to do it, they'd just do it anyway, regardless. Not to benefit themselves directly, but to show everyone watching them that they're prepared to get legal at the drop of a hat 

As you rightly pointed out, they've already rejected not only the money from our CoH subs, but also all offers for the CoH IP. It's not about the money for them, it's about defending what's 'theirs'. Thankfully, even they're not crazy enough to try suing people for merely discussing such things, but you can rest assured they're out there, sniffing the breeze, waiting for the slightest whiff of actual substance beyond simple discussions. And if they think they've got a scent, they WILL pounce - count on it.

The failure and demise of Tabula Rasa surely left a bitter taste in NCsoft's corporate mouth, and they were no doubt glad to wash their hands of the whole business. But that didn't stop them from flinging out C&D orders at Tabula Rasa emulator projects. There was no gain at all to be had in that, but they did it just the same.

As always, Tony V's words are wise and to the point - we all love CoH, and we all want it back, so we simply have to wait and be patient. The fate of our (gaming) world rests in good hands. Safe hands. Titanic hands in fact. We may not be able to see them, but we know they're there, and we know they're holding not just the best interests of our game, but of our hearts too.

Trust them. I do. 

The good thing is that while they can take the game they cant own our creations. They can, I think assuming all that writing agreed to when playing the game is correct, use the characters, but they can take the media but not the art.

Smashbinger will live on, maybe not on the same cavas with the NCSOFt/Paragon logo, but will live on still in my head, maybe even a canvas with the CO/Cryptic logo, or some other media. I own the art, they owned the canvas. They are not the only canvas in the world.
And using "I own Smashbinger" in a sense that I created him. Not yet copyrighted nor trademarked.

[LadyVamp]

Our setup is somewhat unique.  We don't run production servers that stay up year after year.  They're mostly testing platforms for website development where the developing teams use a highly customized set of apps including running Oracle and DB2 on the VMs with full datasets.  They get nightly refreshing of datasets hence why we use 10GigE between chassis and storage.  4000 VMs is not uncommon for us to have running at any given moment.  Usually 2 of 5 are database servers or accelerators.  As for storage, we build them in the petabyte range.    3Par and 7420 storage arrays make up most of our storage.  Despite the fact we thinly provision, we burn through storage fast.

The point I was trying to make was building out the server part can get expensive quickly depending on needs and what is bought.  Yeah the quotes were probably over the top for what an mmo would need, but then again, I've never built the back end for an MMO.

[johnrobey]

Just checking in and saying hi!  I've been away most of the summer, so catching up on the forums.  /em holdtorch