Golden Girl

That's the idea - the more people who register and recommend this story as something CNN should take futher, the better the chance we'll have of getting more attention for it.

And we've just hit CNN:

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-8373...feeds%2Flatest

We suggest people register and recommend the report as something CNN should take further.

Also, just to et you know, as part of the player rescue effort, and building on the spread of our story on gaming and mainstream news sites, we're planning to issue a press release tomorrow that outlines the situation and our goals, which should help to continue coverage of the story.

Meanwhile, we're continuing the letter writing campaign to the head of NCSoft, as well as the online petition - and any Twitter users are encouraged to use the hashtag #SaveCoH in an attempt to get it trending.

I'll repost this here, because Protean told me that he liked it the first time I posted it a couple of years ago:

I was wondering when you were going to show up - and you can be rightly proud of Praetoria - it's the single biggest and most complex storyline in the whole game.

The bit that sounds really good is "Paragon management" - not "some of the developers" - it makes it sound like they are still holding the studio together in at least some way.

The major problem with removing war walls would be the edge of the city - there'd have to be something that would eventually stop the player from going past the limit of the playable zone space.

Here's an example of a signature CoH feature that could quite easily be changed in any spiritual successor, even though it'd be a major change - war walls.
Removing them is a frequently made request, and the devs did the best they could in Praetoria within the current engine limits to give us the invisible walls between zones - but any spiritual successor to CoH would be using a much newer engine, giving the possibility of one single city zone - but would that remove too much of the CoH feeling for some players? What if we took a poll on it, and found a 60-40 split in favor of removing them? It's a clear majority, but what about the 40% who'd obviously regard war walls as an important part of the CoH experience?

This is just an example of the kind of stuff we'd be faced with in any attempt to make a spiritual successor to CoH - it wouldn't just be a group of player-developers deciding amongst themselves what, in their opinion, was and wasn't part of the CoH experience - it'd be a constant dialog between as many CoH fans as possible to try and create the best possible follow up to CoH - every single planned change would need to be polled and talked about to try and come up with a solution that pleased as many people as possible.

Any spiritual successor that we tried to set up would have to follow the design goal of "CoH, but better" - it would need to offer all the things that players like about CoH, but with a more modern engine, and even small changes from the CoH template would need to be handled very carefully.
The reason that people are so passionate about CoH is because it's CoH - if we were going to try and start up a spiritualk successor, then it'd have to offer them the same experience.

I would - but I get the feeling that NCSoft simply doesn't want the game anymore - they could have scrapped the secret project, reduced the dev team, merged the servers, even gone into maintenance mode of they wanted to.

Another key part of the whoel structure of CoH was the way anything beyond the basic game was always optional - IOs, Incanrate system, PvP, bases, AE, SGs, aution house and so on - even the entire misison system could be ignored if the player chose to street sweep.

Any spiritual successor to CoH would need to have nothing that players had to do if they didn't want to.