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City of Heroes: Difference between revisions
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''City of Heroes'' managed to stay alive for so long despite being only a few months older than the massive ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' juggernaut largely by occupying a niche market and having a die-hard, rabidly-devoted fanbase. However, this was not sufficient to keep owners [[wikipedia:NCSOFT|NCSoft]] from shutting down the game (albeit with several months' notice) in late 2012. The move came as a complete surprise to the staff of Paragon Studios, who were in the process of designing and implementing at least a year's worth of new content at the time, and who were unceremoniously canned simultaneously with the announcement of the game's impending demise. Exactly ''why'' NCSoft killed a popular, groundbreaking game that earned them in excess of US$2 million every month is unknown. The company's few "explanations" were vague and confusing; industry observers and pundits generally agreed that the move made little to no sense. Additionally, NCSoft rebuffed all efforts to buy or license the game from them, apparently preferring to lock it up and throw away the key rather than earn ''any'' kind of money on the property. One of the more interesting speculations about their motivation was that it was a combination of face-saving for the Korean company and a deliberate slap at former NCSoft executive Richard [[Ultima|"Lord British"]] Garriott, who had overseen ''COH'''s creation and had just won US$32 million in damages from NCSoft in a lawsuit over how they'd forced him out of the company. (Another, very detailed, analysis for the death of ''COH'' can be seen [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YahAati0d2c here].)
In April 2019, after many failed attempts to reverse-engineer the server code for the game, it was discovered that a private server (running on leaked binaries) had existed since about a year after the game had been shut down. This never leaked since the group running this server carefully vetted every member. After a couple days of rage the code for the server was released to the community; the rage was promptly forgotten (mostly) and many independent servers shot up overnight, despite a brief panic caused by a bogus "legal threat" apparently forged by a [[Troll]]. The first and most successful of these, [https://forums.homecomingservers.com/ Homecoming], boasted in excess of 100,000 users by the end of the year, and immediately entered into negotiations with NCSoft (apparently still in progress as of the end of 2020) to legitimize is presence on the Net.
Meanwhile, the established "clean-room" efforts to create or recreate ''City of Heroes'' servers continued, ignoring the existence of the original code. As of Fall 2020 a tentative beta release has been announced.
{{tropenamer}}
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