I have no idea how 'unicorn' came to be the replacement word for 'troll'.
Things that need to happen on November 30:
1. We must not give up hope of still convincing NCSoft to sell the CoH IP. Like every other company, they will have executive turnover, and the people who made the decision to kill CoH may be replaced in favor of those who would permit it to come back from the dead. Especially if our campaign gives NCS such bad PR that their sales on other games drop and the responsible parties get blamed and sacked because of it. I'm calling this Plan B for the sake of convenience.
2. We need to play close attention to whatever the remains of Paragon Studios are doing. If they have the leadership and the funding, they may reform as their own company. If they do this, they will probably try to make an MMO. If they do make an MMO, the chances of it being a superhero MMO are pretty good. And they already know what we like, so it's probably going to be pretty similar to City of Heroes. We may lose the setting that we love so much, but I'm sure they could make a new one that would be just as appealing. I'll call this Plan C.
3. We need to look at what we can do to reverse-engineer parts of CoH, especially the servers. Even if we can't put server content out there, we might be able to get as far as the loading screen, and maybe even a simple room could be crafted on the server that would give us access to Mission Architect. It's not CoH, but it's better than nothing. That would be Plan D, I think.
4. Lastly, Plan Z needs to swing into high gear. Taek Jin Kim may be determined to take the IP with him to his grave, Paragon may not be able to put itself back together again, and who knows what we can really do (and get away with) for reverse engineering the game and putting up private servers no matter how incomplete. Plan Z will allow us to recreate the CoH experience. Whether Plan Z succeeds or fails will be up to us.
We are Heroes. This is what we do.
