Personal Concerns over Direction

[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