The discovery of a secret server City of Heroes managed by the fans causes a merger of the community

It turns out that when MMO superheroes City of Heroes was stopped at the end of 2012, it was only most dead. For six years, he was kept alive by fans on a secret private server. Following the discovery of this server last week, the City of Heroes the community has been thrown into chaos.

City of Heroes was an MMO in which everyone was playing his own superhero or bespoke villain, after the City of Villains expansion. When it came out in 2002, there was nothing like it. Surrounded by an elven forest of spooky and serious MMOs, he brought to the scene the indispensable colors with an explosion of high-flying comics. Although his popularity has diminished over time, his ferocious fans have survived countless ups and downs. In 2012, the NCSoft publisher closed City of Heroes developer Paragon Studios as part of a "realignment of the company's direction". Paragon fought to keep the game alive until the end, but to no avail. In this era of "Avengers, ""Endgames"And" Robert Downey Jrs ", fans are all the more saddened that their favorite game has not survived and that superheroes have turned pop culture into a personal playground.

Secret word City of Heroes server – managed by a group calling itself the Secret Cabal of Reverse Engineers, or SCORE – was released for the first time last week thanks to a video removed by a player named Destroyer Stroyer. For six years, according to the video, a few thousand people have a hard time City of Heroes the fanatics were able to continue to play the game well-liked despite its official stop, thanks to the server. The retreat was immediate and fierce. the City of Heroes subreddit exploded with sons of gamers who felt like they were being "deceived", who felt they should have been informed to be able to play again, while their alter ego of superheroes in bitter mourning returned to the The SCORE programmer, Leandro Pardini, told a website dedicated to MMOs MassivementOP that he and others had been so silent about the server because they had seen NCSoft issue orders to stop and abstain from similar projects for games like Tabula Rasaand they did not want to take the risk.

Following the video, however, the City of Heroes The team of private servers has decided to disclose its server code to the public so that other people can also debone their own servers. However, the code is not quite simple and community programmers always strive to turn it into something that everyone can execute. To bridge the gap, Pardini collaborated with community members on a public server, which went live late last week.

It would have been a neat end in a messy situation, but it was not the case: Yesterday, moderators of the public server closed the server for legal reasons. Using a server involves unauthorized reproduction of NCSoft's copyrighted game code, which flew on the screen when the server was secret and private, but would have attracted the attention of lawyers if it was open to the public. (NCSoft did not respond to KotakuRequest for comments.)

"We are on the road to legal action," said a moderator, Voodoo Girl, in the newspaper City of Heroes Discord. "As such, steps must be taken to protect the people involved in this project, their families and their future. As for all of you, we are heartbroken. We wanted to see our city come back, but doing it to the destruction of the lives of those involved is too much risk to take. "

The public server project manager, named "Innocuous", said in a Discord announcement that, despite the apparent apparent need for the server shutdown, they were prepared to defend themselves against the impending "hogwash" even though it was causing them a "major legal unrest".

Leandro Pardini, SCORE's programmer, was caught off guard. "I just came home and I'm not fully aware of everything that's going on," he said. says on Twitter at the time. "While it is true that there has been some sort of contact with NCSoft, I am not prepared to leave the community without a public server as long as the time required to resolve this problem will be long. "

A few hours later, however, the team completed a 180 and concluded that no imminent lawsuit was going to take place. Innocuous attributed this to "some crap that resulted in a massive server panic", partly because of their "inexperience". The team then claimed to work on setting up another public server. 24 hours later, they have not made an announcement yet.

But the repercussions of the revelation of the private server continued. Monday afternoon, there was a mass exodus from City of Heroes Discord. Hundreds of former members joined a new "/ r / CityofHeroes Official Server", saying they were leaving first, because Innocuous and his company had not been transparent during the first hours of the shutdown. public server. They also expressed concerns about moderating the Discord channel, claiming that Innococuous had already refused a person to a position in Discord on the grounds that they were openly trans. As part of their announcement Discord, the moderators of the official server of / r / CityofHeroes provided screenshots that seemed to back up both of these claims. Innocuous did not respond to KotakuWe asked questions about this topic or other topics, but answered in a DM of Discord: "we have a very good announcement coming soon".

This dissident group Discord is also working on his side City of Heroes public server, but said that they "had problems getting something compiled that would work in the current code base" and that they did not currently have a timeframe for provisioning their server.

All this precariousness has been an additional motivation for the people who work City of Heroes server code into something more accessible and easier to distribute. It is quite possible that NCSoft is trying to take legal action against these fan-run servers, but if anyone can create a server, the game will never really die. It will be preserved in some form, which is unfortunately better than most missing MMOs have today. (NCSoft has not responded to a request for comment.)

Update – 21:15, 23/04/19: The Titan Network, a long-standing group of City of Heroes Fan sites now claim to be "in discussion" with NCSoft about a community-managed server. "Things look good, so stay strong," said Tony V, director of ParagonWiki on Twitter. "We do not have a schedule for the moment, but we will provide more updates as soon as we can."

At this point, no one is really sure what will happen, but many fans hope the drama will pass so they can just play. Others are grateful to have been able to revisit their former virtual home even though it was only for a weekend.

"I want to thank all the people who took the risks to make this weekend possible, and hope we can work in the future to be able to play on private servers in peace," said a player named GnawerOfTheMoon on Reddit. "For a little while, at least, I was able to play my old Storm Defender again and steal zapping the bad guys, and it was excellent. See you in another park in the Atlas, I hope. "