City of Heroes private server drama - reddit mods get a hold of the game's code and proceed to hog it to themselves

[Desire Lines]

Okay, so there is something really interesting happening with an MMO called "City of Heroes". I'll let the /v/ anons sum it up for me:

The game's subreddit is in an uproar right now:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Cityofheroes/
http://archive.fo/NaqXw

Here is an article about it:
https://massivelyop.com/2019/04/15/score-city-of-heroes-emulator-leak/
http://archive.fo/6Qwm4

‘Secret’ City of Heroes emulator operators address SCORE leak drama, rebut personal info database rumor
By
Bree Royce
-
April 15, 2019 8:10 PM
158

If you’ve been around the post-sunset City of Heroes community long enough, you’ve probably heard the rumors that there’s a secret City of Heroes emulator out there – not SEGS, and not Paragon Chat, and not any of the spiritual successors, but a full-fledged, live, and functioning emulator of the real game. Traditionally, anybody bringing that up has been ostracized as a liar. But it’s all come to a head this week as one YouTuber posted a video calling out the secret server and at least one of the people behind it, and now we’ve got a lengthy statement from the emulator team’s leader acknowledging some of the claims and resoundingly denying others.
Let’s start from the beginning. Destroyer Stroyer aka Doc Boy, who says his real name is Brian and who uses his own face in the video, says he was invited by an admin to the secret server after he made a huge screenshot-dump post on Reddit. In a nutshell, his accusation is that some members of the City of Heroes community acquired the game’s original code from a former Paragon Studios employee and have been running it in absolute secrecy, under threat of ban, for the last six years.


“At least for me, playing the game and not being able to share the game, was not fun,” Destroyer Stroyer says, explaining why he chose to break his NDA to expose the server. In both the now-deleted original video and the second upload (shown above), he accuses various members and groups across the internet, most specifically the City of Heroes subreddit, of working in tandem to keep a lid on news about the server, and he alleges that the secret server has a database backup of the live game, including what he implies is account and character information. A second leaker additionally accused Paragon Chat of being a “smokescreen” for the real emu.
In a statement prepared for Massively OP, a representative of the not-very-secret-anymore emulator, SCORE (it stands for Secret Cabal of Reverse Engineers), has addressed most of these rumors and accusations, absolutely confirming the existence of the server. SCORE’s lead dev, Leandro Pardini, denies the claim that he moderates the CoH subreddit; says that Paragon Studios, the Titan Network, and SEGS are entirely blameless; and vows that no personally identifying information was ever shared between former Paragon employees and the SCORE team. “This last NDA breach has had some malicious elements to it, probably to inflate the claims and make it feel more dramatic than it is,” Leandro maintains.

“There is one specific rumor that needs outright debunking, though: at no point did I, or anyone else I know, receive a database containing player names, emails, birth dates, payment information, or any other personally identifiable information. Not only would this have been a massive breach of privacy, but that is not information that a game server would ever need to operate, and so it would have been completely pointless to share.”

The CoH Survivors Facebook page has absolutely exploded in fury and hurt over the news. While some folks are feeling vindicated because their previous claims about the secret server have been proven true, others are concerned that the publicity will bring a(nother) NCsoft C&D down on the operators’ heads. (Frankly, we’re concerned about that too and considered that most carefully before publishing this piece.) And still others are crushed that they’ve never been invited and have instead been funneling money and time into other City of Heroesspinoffs, like Paragon Chat and the spiritual successors.
“A ton of players who loved this game, myself included, […] probably never were going to get an invite anyways, since we never used Reddit, nor did we have a ton of super strong connections to people who might already be on said Private Server, let alone active enough to recruit us to it,” wrote one Facebooker, alluding to the now-dawning realization that the City of Heroes community isn’t quite as tight as some folks like to believe. (It’s not all doom-and-gloom, for what it’s worth; the memes are pretty funny.) There are also some gamers still accusing Destroyer Stroyer of lying and photoshopping his character, a brand-new archetype that never existed in the original game, since he didn’t stream it live. (They are incorrect.)
It doesn’t appear that most of the groups directly or indirectly accused in the (now-replaced original) video have addressed the issue; the only entity (other than SCORE) to have made a statement thus far seems to be the SEGS (Super Entity Game Server) operator, which in the first video stood accused of collaboration with this secret emulator, but the emulator’s community manager makes it very clear that it has no relationship with the secret project and in fact is rebuilding its version of the game from scratch completely in the open. This testimony is backed up by the SCORE statement and the corrected second video from Destroyer.

What follows is the complete statement given to Massively OP by Leandro Pardini of the SCORE emulator team.
The Secret Cabal of Reverse Engineers
Before I talk about City of Heroes, I need to go back in time a little bit. It has been over six years since the shutdown, so a lot of people either forgot or never knew how the server project started. And for that, I need to talk about another game.
When NCsoft closed Tabula Rasa in 2007, a group of devoted players banded together to code a server for it. It was called Infinite Rasa and it developed things in the open, with a project website and forum. The overall architecture was being discussed publicly and there was a buggy server that allowed players to log in and run around the initial area.
Then it was hit by a Cease and Desist order by NCsoft in November 2011. The website was seized, the forums went dark, and progress completely stopped. One thing was made abundantly clear to everybody: NCsoft was not going to tolerate the development of servers for their games, even four years after they were shut down.
When City of Heroes closed in November 2012, this was very fresh in my mind. Instead of trying to develop a server out in the open to suffer the same fate as Infinite Rasa, the efforts to revive City of Heroes focused on trying to acquire the IP from NCsoft through various means, with any server development being held in secret.
And here is the irony of the entire situation: the fact that a City of Heroes server is being developed in secret is not a secret. If you search for the phrase “Secret Cabal of Reverse Engineers” in Google, the very first result is a post from 2013, in which a player is explicitly saying that the server development efforts “might want to stay as low as possible”.
So that is what SCORE did. It utilized closed forums with, closed access. Invite only; initially only for developers, though eventually expanded to friends and family of anyone who had access. Accepting an invitation to the project involved a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), and anyone who breached it had their access revoked. Over the years, multiple people who weren’t happy with how fast the project was moving or wanted it made public were removed. For the most part this was not an issue, because the community at large, at the time, understood that this was a secret project, a backup if everything else failed. That seems to no longer be the case.
There are currently calls to make SCORE public because of the extra exposure; the reason given is that, after six years, NCsoft surely wouldn’t care. But Infinite Rasa also thought they were safe after four years. This is not a mistake you make twice.
I believe that the reason this particular NDA breach gained so much traction when others didn’t has to do with the community evolving over time. Many people no longer remember that efforts to acquire the IP were ongoing at the time, and so server development was agreed to happen underground. It is possible that a lot of people that played City of Heroes while they were teenagers, and never engaged with the community at the time, are now adults who never knew about it in the first place.
Now, I need to address the connections, or lack thereof, between SCORE and other projects that have become entangled in this dramatic reveal.
Super Entity Game Server
The Super Entity Game Server project already existed back in 2012 when the City of Heroesservers were shut down, and their goal is to implement a fully playable server that connects to the original release client from 2004. At the time there was a lot of discussion about contributing to SEGS rather than starting a separate project, but the fact that SEGS uses the original release client, while SCORE targeted the latest beta client from 2012, makes both projects fundamentally incompatible. The projects are separate, and as far as I am aware, none of the lead developers or community managers ever accepted an invite to participate in SCORE.
SEGS has been given as a reason why the secrecy behind SCORE is unwarranted. After all, they have been operating for ten years now, and have not received any Cease and Desist orders by NCsoft. It should be noted that SEGS has not yet released anything to the level of what Infinite Rasa had: working weapons and enemies, though limited to just the starting area. It’s also possible that using the original release client makes them a less appealing target. In either case, they are certainly braver and more willing to take risks than I am, and I really hope that it works out for them. While my attempts to contribute to SEGS were extremely limited mainly due to my own lack of familiarity and patience with their programming framework, I still am cheering for their success and I hope that, if this whole situation attracts attention to them, it’s only in the form of new developers seeking to contribute their skills to the project.
The Titan Network
While the initial recruitment for SCORE happened on the Titan Network forums, the project was split off as soon as possible. Because of the then-ongoing efforts to acquire the City of Heroes IP from NCsoft, the owner for the site did not want a server development project to jeopardize the negotiations, and has on multiple occasions disavowed the server project completely, although discussion of SCORE are still allowed as far as I know. This might seem overzealous, but it is perfectly understandable; the Titan Network aims to be a hub for the City of Heroes community and their many projects, and being linked to a specific underground project introduces a liability that could cause them to be shut down as well.
Once it was clear that acquiring the IP was not going to happen, the Titan Network created a project where all the user data is held on the players’ own computers and the game processes are distributed among players. This is a brilliant idea, as it means that there’s no server to shut down; Paragon Chat operates on a standard, open source chat client. I collaborated on this project’s early days, but again, the goals are too different for the projects to be merged into a single thing. And because of the difficulty in properly implementing a distributed server, I recommend that anyone with the development skills to contribute to a City of Heroes server project joins SEGS instead.
Paragon Studios
This is where things get less pleasant. This last NDA breach has had some malicious elements to it, probably to inflate the claims and make it feel more dramatic than it is. While I won’t deny that some former Paragon Studios developers are aware of SCORE and have provided helpful tips in the past, this should not be shocking to anyone who has been around the community long enough; I have seen some former Paragon Studios developers in the Discord server for SEGS as well. Under no circumstances should there be fingers pointed at them; anything they shared was done so with the tacit understanding that it would not endanger their current or future employment. I am very happy to take the heat over this entire situation, even though I think it has been overblown. Leave them out of it.
There is one specific rumor that needs outright debunking, though: at no point did I, or anyone else I know, receive a database containing player names, emails, birth dates, payment information, or any other personally identifiable information. Not only would this have been a massive breach of privacy, but that is not information that a game server would ever need to operate, and so it would have been completely pointless to share.
Reddit
The person behind the current NDA breach cites Reddit moderators being too quick to remove all mentions of any private server, except for their two stickies for SEGS and Paragon Chat. While this again might seem overzealous, it really isn’t. Reddit as a whole does not tolerate when a forum triggers legal complaints; very recently, the subreddit where piracy is discussed had to delete 10 years of archived discussions to prevent being shut down. There are also the very valid concerns that malicious actors would post links to City of Heroes servers that turn out to be scams which infect the player’s computer with malware or stealing payment information. Reddit offers no accountability regarding who posts anything, and so it should be heavily policed to guarantee a safe environment. If this feels like censorship, you are always free to start your own subreddit. I do not moderate the City of Heroes subreddit, the Titan Network or any Facebook group.
Trust and Feelings
This is a difficult thing to address, because nobody likes feeling lied to, even by omission. At the same time, operating under an NDA comes with some rules that are well understood. The fact that we’re talking about a server project for a game while the company that owns the IP is still active and used aspects of the IP very recently for Master X Master makes things more complicated.
My approach to enforcing the NDA has always been to not reply to any public posts that revealed details about SCORE, and just contact the specific party to have the information taken down. Others have gone as far as to call them liars or crazy, which goes against my wishes. I do apologize for anyone who was on the receiving end of verbal abuse due to this situation.
Back in 2012, the City of Heroes community agreed that SCORE would operate in secret until we had something ready for release. The fact that nearly nothing has been released six years later is probably part of the reason why this attracted so much attention; the community has shifted and changed, and not many remember how the project began. I am sure a lot of people are curious to know how much progress has been done; however, with SEGS having regular and interesting releases, it feels quite unfair to come out of nowhere and steal their thunder with a progress report on something that is hidden by design.
Unless and until we are certain that a Cease and Desist order is no longer a threat, the NDA regarding SCORE development will remain in full effect. For most people this will seem like a moot point since most of the community are aware of it, but keep in mind, that is also how we started. Until then, support SEGS! They are very close to a new release and I will be very disappointed if the ghost of SCORE overshadows their accomplishments.
In parting, we specifically asked Leandro about the future of the server and how players can become involved – after all, public news that our original characters still exist somewhere in a playable format is tantalizing. It appears that work will continue and that the method for access remains unchanged, though plans for open events in the near future have been shelved indefinitely as a result of the unwanted attention brought about by the leak.

The video mentioned in the article:

Spoiler: The comment by one of the guys involved responding to the article

I'll finish this off with a particularly good post:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Cityofhero...etter_to_the_score_team_re_game_preservation/
http://archive.fo/S5Uue

Hey all. I'm going to keep this brief.

I'll skip over the sentimental stuff. There are people here who have stories about the personal value of CoX to them and their community far more meaningful and interesting than anything I could type. My story's the typical one - it was my first MMO, my first taste of an online community, my first online friendships and the first game that ever felt like it meant more to me than a gaming experience. But none of that's important, and none of that is why I'm writing this.

I'm currently attending school to be a librarian, and I work very closely with several video game archivists. The topic of how to preserve MMORPGs is complex, painful, and difficult, and it all boils down to the fact that an MMO exists in two parts, as the client and the server. Even if we can collect and maintain the client, the information held on the user's machine, it's next to impossible to preserve the server code after the fact. The fact that the community has collectively struggled to recreate even a fascimile of what the game once was is a testament to that. There are video game archives, real, actual academic institutions holding onto City of Heroes and Villains discs, collecting paraphanalia, and describing those, to the best of their knowledge, as the last remnants that exist of what once was the game City of Heroes. The game is a cultural touchstone, a significant step in the history of MMORPGs and PC games in general. CoX has immense historical importance to the world of video games, MMORPGs, online communities, and virtually anything else it touched. The lawsuit against City of Heroes through Marvel, wherein a court upheld that its developers were not responsible for the user generated content of the tools they were given in the costume editor, still holds legal significance.

In short, the game is important academically, culturally, even beyond the sentimentality of its community.

I understand and respect your motivation behind keeping the SCORE server hidden. I probably would have encouraged it, in fact, several years ago when negotiations with NCSoft were still ongoing. I have no sympathy for corporations who would try to artificially lock away a piece of history once it's no longer economically viable.

But at this point, in 2019, to keep the code hidden away is akin to hoarding the Rosetta Stone. It's finding an Egyptian mummy and storing him in your attic to bring out at parties. It's discovering an ancient Babylonian stone tablet and using it as a coaster.

I'm not asking you to make the server public - honestly, that wouldn't be good for anyone, I don't think. It would disrupt the community you've built, bring it undue exposure, put the entire project at risk. If the SCORE server goes down, at this point, then City of Heroes is genuinely, 100%, irrevocably lost to time, forever, without question.

That's why I am asking you, begging you, to release the code. Put up an anonymized torrent. Let people download it. At this point, there is one egg in one basket, and with word out to the public about the server's existence, the likelihood that it is discovered and C&D'd grows. If SCORE falls, City of Heroes falls. It no longer exists.

Right now, SCORE IS City of Heroes. That is an incredibly dangerous position to be in.

But with the code online, freely available - even if the anonymized torrent is taken down, others will have the code and can put it back up. The academically, culturally, historically significant game that is City of Heroes will still be preserved. Once it exists publically, it CANNOT die.

I am not asking this as a player. I am not asking this as someone who does admittedly feel a little betrayed, someone who loved the game and is desperate to play again. I understand your reasons. I don't blame you.

I am asking you, as an academic, as a librarian, as someone dedicated to the preservation of anything precious at risk of being lost - please release the game's code.

City of Heroes is in a miraculous position, one that virtually no game gets to have, let alone one with as many moving pieces as an MMORPG. We have the entire working game, ready and waiting, just as it was when it was taken offline. Just today, the cathedral of Notre Dame burned. We lost close to a millenium of cultural history, art, architecture. It's a tragedy that should never happen - a tragedy that wouldn't happen if we were able to freely copy and distribute Notre Dame cathedrals as easily as code.

Please do not let City of Heroes become another Notre Dame.

Keep the SCORE server private. Don't put your server at undue risk. I, in fact, encourage you to do so, to keep it and preserve it as a backup, just as you say.

But a backup is worthless if it's the only copy. As long as it exists in one place, it can always burn to the ground, and there is no recovering from that point forward.

Please consider the value of the game to the world at large, the value in making sure it's properly preserved. Beyond the community, please consider that you hold in your hands a very fragile, unimaginably valuable piece of history that we are at risk of losing forever.

Please, release the code and make sure it never dies.

@MrKrazy
Corrupted Youth on Infinity
Shoutouts to Bloodvine Academy and the CoX Forum RP community

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

As one who played City of Heroes until its shutdown, I find it aggravating that some dickhead would hog it all for themselves.

 

[Degenerated]

I gave up on a COH server a long time ago. I had no idea one was finally up and running. It's pretty enraging to see it happen but end up getting treated like this. So many good memories blapping criminals stealing purses from grannies on the streets or beating up clockworks with friends.

 

[It's HK-47]

City of Heroes is in a miraculous position, one that virtually no game gets to have, let alone one with as many moving pieces as an MMORPG. We have the entire working game, ready and waiting, just as it was when it was taken offline. Just today, the cathedral of Notre Dame burned. We lost close to a millenium of cultural history, art, architecture. It's a tragedy that should never happen - a tragedy that wouldn't happen if we were able to freely copy and distribute Notre Dame cathedrals as easily as code.

How in the world can anyone possibly be this upset about a video game that they thought had been dead for ages, anyways? The drama seems a little fascinating but I had no idea that the COH community was full of so many people willing to go bug-nuts over discovering that some fat guy still had a server somewhere.

 

[Francis York Morgan]

How in the world can anyone possibly be this upset about a video game that they thought had been dead for ages, anyways? The drama seems a little fascinating but I had no idea that the COH community was full of so many people willing to go bug-nuts over discovering that some fat guy still had a server somewhere.

I think it's partially due to lingering issues with NCsoft's handling of the shutdown.

 

[Polyboros2]

Man I wish someone did that with Marvel Heroes. The abrupt shoah of that game by the mouse was sad even if dumbing it down for console players had already kinda tarnished it.

 

[Aquinas]

I feel like this is a first

 

[Tanner Glass]

How in the world can anyone possibly be this upset about a video game that they thought had been dead for ages, anyways? The drama seems a little fascinating but I had no idea that the COH community was full of so many people willing to go bug-nuts over discovering that some fat guy still had a server somewhere.

Because typically when something like this happens (a dev leaking source code to a user), that user is able to basically move the emulation scene forward for that game by 5-10 years by simply sharing that information. It's literally an emulation "holy grail" and then on top of it, it even has unreleased game files, as in official shit no one has ever seen before? Amazing. Then on top of that it still has all character data preserved? It could have been the single most preserved MMO of all time.

People have put in a ton of work on WoW private servers, but also Star Wars : Galaxies, Maplestory, Rangarok Online, pretty much any game you can think of.

World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and there's still server side code that emulators are trying to re-create - and that game is 100 times more popular than CoH was and it's still running.

I'm sure there are people mad about it from a game perspective (City of X was pretty fun for a while), but I imagine more people are mad about it from a "shitting on the entire emulation community while making money off of a stolen product" angle.

 

[Done]

This may not blow up and go mainstream (though I really hope it does, it has all the makings of a great internet shitshow), but even if it doesn't, there's just something that's infinitely fascinating about a sperg blackmailing people into silence with EXP progression rates (which are essentially imaginary game points).

It's like we just gained a whole new window of insight into the human condition..

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

Because typically when something like this happens (a dev leaking source code to a user), that user is able to basically move the emulation scene forward for that game by 5-10 years by simply sharing that information. It's literally an emulation "holy grail" and then on top of it, it even has unreleased game files, as in official shit no one has ever seen before? Amazing. Then on top of that it still has all character data preserved? It could have been the single most preserved MMO of all time.

People have put in a ton of work on WoW private servers, but also Star Wars : Galaxies, Maplestory, Rangarok Online, pretty much any game you can think of.

World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and there's still server side code that emulators are trying to re-create - and that game is 100 times more popular than CoH was and it's still running.

I'm sure there are people mad about it from a game perspective (City of X was pretty fun for a while), but I imagine more people are mad about it from a "shitting on the entire emulation community while making money off of a stolen product" angle.

It doesn't help that, by and large, City of Heroes was a pretty friendly game.

You get the occasional exceptional idiot like you do in any group, but I honestly found the community pretty damn sedate and cheerful to play with. It helped that the game was coded in such a way that most of the content could be experienced by everyone, using things like sidekicking (which let a higher level player buff a lower one up to close to his level, so he wouldn't get smoked) or the level-less invasion events (where damage was scaled in such a way so that measly lower-level heroes could still pitch in and help).

It was a damned fun MMORPG, NCSoft basically killed it with no fanfare, and then this Leandro guy robbed the tomb. Sheesh.

 

[Slartibartfast]

I'll admit I'm a huge dork at the outset, and that I played City of Heroes from the launch of City of Villains (around the time I first had a computer capable of running it) until a few months before it shut down. I enjoyed the game, and the community, and I've not really found anything like it in either regard since.

My first reaction to this was kind of shocked anger but this quickly became simple acceptance as I realized that, given the popularity of the game with its players and the willingness of some in it to throw money at the hope of playing it again, this is the most likely scenario that could have happened. Guy got access to something a lot of people wanted, used it to surround himself with ass-kissers and paypigs, and punished anyone who broke the "NDA" by not only banning them, but also all of the people connected to them.

I'd say it was like he'd built a cult, but it doesn't seem to have gotten to that level of LARP yet.

 

[IceGray]

I guess if NCSoft hadn't been so persistent in refusing to release the rights, this wouldn't have blown up to such a scale.

Though I have no skin in the game as I never managed to play City of Heroes at all.

 

[Slap47]

Neat

 

[robobobo]

Well. Holy shit. It would be fairly grand if somebody uploaded those leaked server files somewhere public. Problem is, if dude wasn't releasing it before, he's certainly not releasing it now that he's been doxxed. NCSoft's lawyers know exactly which door to knock on now if it pops up on Pirate Bay tomorrow.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

Well. Holy shit. It would be fairly grand if somebody uploaded those leaked server files somewhere public. Problem is, if dude wasn't releasing it before, he's certainly not releasing it now that he's been doxxed. NCSoft's lawyers know exactly which door to knock on now if it pops up on Pirate Bay tomorrow.

Yup. Idiot. If he'd quietly dropped them on an anon torrent via VPN a few years after he'd gotten them (scrubbed of character files), nobody would've cared about his private server and NCSoft would've been left playing C&D whack-a-mole.

 

[Haramburger]

I still miss it bros....

Community was top-notch, it had some comic professionals mingling with the players, especially on the forums, and it had a pretty mature playerbase.

Had some good memes too:

This is how it start's jerk hacking (dupin)

this what happened in the last game i played hackers ruined it for everyone dupin rares and gold and just anything to cheat there no extened maintenance there trying to catch the hacker and we pay for it so unless people don't let GM'S know of wrong doing's in the game it we ruin it and there we not be a COH IT WELL BE GONE TO THE AMERICANS!!!!!!!

Go. Hunt. Kill skuls.

Never forget that the Villains side of the game was one of the last things Gary Gygax ever worked on, and we were gifted this amazing enemy design, Tarantula Queens:

It's strange to think that this game will live on mainly through the cardboard standees and t-shirts of Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory re-runs.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Yup. Idiot. If he'd quietly dropped them on an anon torrent via VPN a few years after he'd gotten them (scrubbed of character files), nobody would've cared about his private server and NCSoft would've been left playing C&D whack-a-mole.

That's exactly why he didn't release the files, though. He clearly wants people to care about his private server and be the only guy on the block who has one.

He also (allegedly) isn't the one who leaked the files initially, the person who has the files should just leak them at this point to someone else.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

I still miss it bros....

Community was top-notch, it had some comic professionals mingling with the players, especially on the forums, and it had a pretty mature playerbase.

Had some good memes too:



Never forget that the Villains side of the game was one of the last things Gary Gygax ever worked on, and we were gifted this amazing enemy design, Tarantula Queens:
View attachment 728763

It's strange to think that this game will live on mainly through the cardboard standees and t-shirts of Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory re-runs.

Oh jesus, I'd forgotten the jerk hackin and Kill Skuls memes. The dev team even added Kill Skuls as an exploration badge.

Didn't know Gygax was involved in CoV, but yeah, the Tarantula Queens were fucking creepy.

Ironically, the screencap also shows how dated the game was. It debuted in 2004, and by 2012 it had started to show its age. If NCSoft (via Paragon Studios) had announced they were discontinuing further development to focus on City of Heroes 2 (or some other successor title), it probably wouldn't have gone down so badly with the playerbase.

 

[The best and greatest]

Okay, so there is something really interesting happening with an MMO called "City of Heroes". I'll let the /v/ anons sum it up for me:
View attachment 727898View attachment 727899View attachment 727900

"After all of this there are new people surfacing and admitting that they were part of it, one stating that funds from the creation of City of Titans, one of three or four super-hero MMOs being created has apparantly been a front for this server and all their funds from the Kickstarter, Paetron, Donations from PayPal have all been siphoning to this man."

First screen in and I literally WOOOOOOOOOOOOW!'d

What a fucking story!

 

[💗Bitchstopher Columbitch💗]

Any idea if this it true?

Edit: it seems to be. A bunch of posts are getting deleted in this thread:
https://8ch.net/v/res/16365546.html
http://archive.md/G7r67

Here's some fishy shit that has been archived or hasn't been deleted:

It's most likely fat nerds fantasizing about revenge, but still. Just fantasizing about it is a whole new level of autism.