So apparently there’s been a secret City of Heroes/Villians pserver operating for the past 6 years. Nothing Spivey in that regard except that since pretty much everything was server side with CoX it’s been almost technically impossible to make a pserver for it without rebuilding the game from scratch more or less. This means that the pserver owner got his hands on the compete backend code for it. The story goes that a dev for CoX stole a copy of the final backup of the game before it was shut down and handed it over to this guy which was the head mod for the CoX subreddit. Instead of releasing the code allowing anyone to make a pserver he made a secret one that only his clique could play and then even spicier he set up donations and Patreons to fund various CoX pserver attempts while pocketing all the money.
As mad as this story makes me, I’m more mad that NCSoft shutdown the game. I’ll never forgive them for that, nor will I ever play/purchase an NCSoft product…
I mean, it was a solid business decision, shut down a dwindling game to divert limited resources to 2 projects that were looking to make a lot more money.
At the time they shut down CoH it was boasting less players then GW1 and that game was OLD.
I suppose that’s a fair assessment, though they made it basically impossible for anyone to create a private server without the actual code. And now this story comes out, which means I still can’t play CoH…
It was actually doing well enough to pay for the devs to continue to make new content releases for it. It just never did well in NCsoft’s main market of Korea.
“Resources” are not always “money”, ncsoft was not a large company, the servers and devs that a game with so few players was eating up wasn’t worth it when they had two much bigger games in the pipeline.
FYI if they cared so much about the Korean player population GW2 would have actual Korean servers, it doesn’t.