We are in a time right now where we are watching people's lives be ruined by copyright claims. This is a major topic right now, these past few months, not just in the world of game emulators, but all over the internet. The recent major abuse of the copyright claim system on YouTube, especially by gaming companies, has brought this issue into the light. Talking about this is NOT fear mongering. This is pointing out to the people demanding emulators what the people capable of even beginning such a project already know, and explaining some of the problems with the "Just rebuild it" attitude.
Here's the deal. Ever since the announcement of the shut down there have been threads here, on the CoH boards before they were closed, Reddit, and probably plenty of other places where every few months (or days in the beginning) someone has the brilliant idea of "just make an emulator", just like this thread. People inevitably chime in that "yeah, just do it, it should be easy", and others try to explain the many reasons why it is not that simple. Mostly because no one has the game code besides NCSoft, and it would be designing a full game from scratch (which IS happening, go check out the Atlas Revival Project).
No one who has ever suggested that someone should just "do it" has any of the necessary skills to do it themselves. The people who DID have that kind of skill either did not have the time/interest to do it (or you would probably be hearing something by now) or joined one of the successor projects. I'm sure individuals or small teams tried back when the shutdown was announced, only to realize the obvious, that a game that was in development for 3 years before launch by a large team of skilled developers, and then received regular updates the entire time it was running, cannot be duplicated by one or two people. The amount of work in just rebuilding the various zones would take one or two people months/years of full time, unpaid work. Then there's powers. Then there's animations. Player models, enemy models, player stats, enemy stats, AI behavior, costumes, server hosting, file distribution, and a million and a half backend things that we who don't program video games would probably never know about.
The "fear mongering" is not what is preventing anything, it is just a new and currently very relevant problem, so that is why people decided to bring it up rather than spelling out the same old things for the millionth time. The fact is that we KNOW NCSoft would do everything they could to shut the servers down, to sue anyone who even tried to break even on the cost of development into bankruptcy, and from a player perspective the best we could hope for is the code is given to someone else to host for a while before they are shut down and sued, and so on, so we can start from scratch every few months.
But since historical reference to similar cases means nothing and the rest of us are clearly worried about nothing, why dont some of you who think it's so easy just go ahead and do it? I'll play healer when you get the game back online
