Selling the Server Software?

Now that we know NCSoft has no intention to try to save CoH or let another company buy the IP and run it themselves, why not this:

Sell us the server software. Make one last cash-grab, NCSoft, and sell us the stuff to run our own private servers.

I know many of us enjoy playing the game solo, or in small groups, and small private servers would be perfect for that.

Don't let CoH die. If you don't want to keep it alive, NCSoft, then at least give the keys to the kingdom to those who are willing.

They won't do that. They didn't with Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault or Dungeon Runners. When NC closes a game, it's gone.

Unless of course you have a bunch of coders in the playerbase to make a server emulator.

There IS such a project already in progress, which I've quietly followed for several years: Super Entity Game Server. They are using an old client to try to reverse engineer the COH protocol, and currently it boots into character creator; mapserver loads, but you can't move in the map or anything. If you know any able coders who want to help on such a project, funnel them to SEGS. It's better than starting from scratch, and it prevents fragmentation.

When the live servers close, projects like SEGS will no longer be able to capture traffic data in order to reverse engineer the protocol, so the time from now to server closure is critical. Spread the world. SEGS has only one coder who's been slowly putting out about one alpha per year. Throwing some resources that way (where resources = coders, mainly) it's the best chance of keeping COH running.

I support your project and if there's any way I can help, I will.

I'd love to see a red-name, especially Zwill, weigh in on this issue.