Multiple Parties Talking To NCSoft About Legally Bringing Back City Of Heroes

The City of Heroes drama rolls on -- now with extra (potential) legality!

MassivelyOP is reporting that the Titan Network, makers of Paragon Chat, are in direct negotiations with NCSoft to host a fully legal server using the source code distributed last week. Titan's head honcho, Tony Vasquez, has been keeping people up-to-date on the situation via Twitter, while another group, labeled as the "leaders of Reddit-backed Discord," are also pushing for a legal solution.

Both parties are having to take their time with the matter and will provide more details when they become available. As the Discord people put it, they are working at "legal/corporate speeds and it is not the speediest process."

As has been pointed out, though, the Titan Network -- which has been taking donations for Paragon Chat for years now -- uses the same launcher that the original CoH rogue server, run by Leandro Pardini, uses. Also, Pardini was one of the original devs of Paragon Chat, as noted on its wiki page, though Pardini said he left the project some time ago. This has led some to believe that Titan Network has been fronting for Pardini's private server for some time, using donations from the Paragon Chat community to keep it running, while also keeping the community at large locked out.

UPDATE: Paragon Chat co-creator Codewalker has chimed in with a forum post, stating that "Paragon Chat has never asked for donations, and never accepted any." (Donations can be made, however, to the Paragon Chat wiki.) He flatly denied the notion that Paragon Chat was a "smokescreen" for Leandro's SCORE server, which he knew about, and that "there hasn't been just a whole ton of coordination" between him and Leandro through the years.

The Titan Network has also apparently been "in negotiations" with NCSoft before (here's a forum post from 2014) and, well, you can see how well that apparently went. All this means two things: 1) the drama train has only just left the station and will likely see several more stops; and 2) don't get your hopes up too high just yet.