City of Heroes’ rogue servers probably will shut down character restoration as 8000 gamers signed up for game

The City of Heroes rogue server drama was still on the air past weekend as community work pushed forward behind the scenes to return the game to us, with a reported 8000 accounts to put on a test server that expanded to hold more than a thousand of them over the night, and for Sunday afternoon, it’s expanded to 2700 plus.

All the changes happened without NCsoft’s, the owner company, participation. But that’ll may change, since Saturday rumors about any possible debates between NCsoft and the other companies involved in the City of Heroes development might depend on the character database, not the code and assets.

We all fell in love with MMORPGs like ESO at certain point of our gaming life. Players probably remember that one of the most painful discovers from the leak of the secret private server past week was the statement that the server let players log into replicated characters from the live version of the game. A lot of potential players apparently want that developers make that character database available to possible future servers too now that the server codebase has been disseminated. However, it seems like if that may be beyond the well-known table, for good reason actually. The official statement was made on Discord:

Some notable sources past weekend gave us particular cause to believe that the hypothetical sacrifice would be more than worth it that means NCsoft could be on a fast-track to studio of the year right now, so keep yourself updated. But until we can speak on public, we keep to advise players not getting involved in illegal activity and you better don’t give your money to anyone related to these servers.

If you’re looking for something to read while you’re in your waits, check out this note below from Graham West, an ex-Paragon Studios developer who worked on City of Heroes for several years. There’s a bunch of tech info, explaining the game infrastructure work process for those who’s not aware of how things operate, and he uses that to talk about the private server, admitting he’s probably breaking his NDA but he does this so to assure everyone: it’s hardly possible that anyone from Paragon would’ve revealed truly sensitive personal data. Private servers were also around for some MMOS like Black Desert for a while. It’s hard to justfiy why people play there when you can play on official server.

“It’s easy to see a game team member could straightforwardly gather all the live game DBs, plus all the source code and assets, but not the account credentials. It would be easy to add a very basic password check to the DbServer code, and give everyone invited to the private shard a unique, unchangeable password for their account name. With no control or routine access to the AuthServer DB, no need to run an AuthServer to operate a shard, the simplicity of adding an alternative method of access control (I could’ve done something bare bones in literally a day and if an engineer supplied Leandro, they could’ve done that too) and the regard we all held for our player community, I am highly confident he would not have been given any credentials or anything else from the AuthServer’s DB.”

It’s worth to read some other developers’ comments, including Shannon Posniewski and Jesse Caceres.

“I’m actually happy to learn that this shard exists,” Posniewski, now at Cold Iron Studios, says. “It’s nice to know that some people can still get some joy from the game.”

“I had heard rumors and seen a couple posts on other Facebook groups that made me believe this existed,” adds Joe Morrissey. “I think it’s great. I don’t know how many times people have fanboyed out on me when they learned I worked on the game. It seems to get me more cred than anything else I’ve done.”

Hard to say if nostalgia is good or bad, but if you want to get into new game like Destiny2, in our store you can order any D2 Boosting to get a head start on the game. If you’re not sure you want to stay for this testing period and prefer to return once something official is announced, you also may still be missing a character builder. Probably you should dig into your old MIDs builds. It seems like there’s an updated version titled PINE, including some Issue 25 content most folks had never even seen until this week.