Developed by Cryptic Studios and published by NCsoft, ‘City of Heroes’ was a massive multiplayer role-playing game (MMORPG) based on superhero comics, released on PC and Mac on February 4, 2005. The title proposed us to create our superhero through a complicated character editor, in which we could choose between different archetypes, sets of primary and secondary powers, and of course, what most defines the identity of a superhero: his costume. The last steps in creating our superhero were to write a background story or description, assign a war cry, and choose his name. After these steps, the player would enter a tutorial to learn the basic mechanics of the game, and then face villains and enemies of all kinds for their elaborate universe. Unfortunately, after numerous updates, the game ended up closing its servers on November 30, 2012, seven years after its release.
Overall, these years, there have been numerous MMOs that have passed on to better life or are still active. One of those who said goodbye to us in 2012 was City of Heroes, The NCSoft title in which players could create superheroes and which received some expansion.
Since its sudden closure, Thousands of people remained eager to continue playing, protesting the decision to close their access. They reached a point where not a few tried to acquire intellectual property without much success. However, during the last six years, the game has been kept active thanks to a secret server from which its existence has not been known until now.
Thanks to a process of investigation by MassivelyOP, it has come to light that a group of users has been using the data from the original servers so that some players could continue to live exclusive adventures in City of Heroes with the characters they already had at the time. Therefore, as much as we had to say goodbye to MMO so many years ago, it has moved on.
It was the YouTuber Destroyer Stroyer who leaked all this information after receiving an invitation to join this private server. Thanks to this, he discovered a project called SCORE (Secret Cabal of Reverse Engineers), which completely recreated City of Heroes as it was at the time and which currently has about 3,000 players, most of them friends, acquaintances or relatives or acquaintances of those responsible for this secret server.
To ensure that no one has access to this content, administrators thoroughly examine who can enter, forcing them to sign a contract in which they must swear they will never say anything about this project. However, that idea has not pleased him to Destroyer Stroyer, so he decided to share it openly and accused the entire community of City of Heroes being accomplices for not having mentioned anything about it.
Yes, the most significant accusation that has made the YouTuber is the one that states that the team SCORE has the database of the players of City of Heroes original, in which are included details of the payments made, the addresses, names and personal data of the users all over the world.
In the same statement, he also mentions that a member of Paragon Studios, the team that was in charge at the time of the development of City of Heroes, was the one who provided the source code and all these essential data to SCORE. All of these events can be seen more closely in the video that Destroyer Stroyer posted below.
As it could not be otherwise, to calm the uproar that has been formed in the face of this situation, Leandro Pardini, a member of SCORE, has stated that he was a member of another project that was tried to resuscitate in the same way, creating a private server of the video game Tabula Rasa, another MMO that NCSoft closed in 2007. Its managers kept it active until, in 2011, the company contacted them to request its closure.
Therefore, fearing that this situation could be repeated and NCSoft’s lawyers asked them to remove the server, it has been kept strictly secret for years. Destroyer Stroyer has also accused Leandro of being currently a moderator of the city of Heroes subreddit, something the latter has ultimately denied.
In an email that has received the PCGamer portal, Leandro has clarified that he was a moderator long ago and used several accounts to create automatic rules to review messages from forums that required approval for publication, but at no time was he in charge of everything because he did not have time for it.
In the same email, you have taken advantage of to completely deny that SCORE has had access to the personal data of users who have played City of Heroes. Basically, because that would have been a massive violation of these people’s privacy, and that information is not indispensable for the server to work. Therefore, it was not necessary for the team to have it, nor was it essential to share it with anyone.
For a little more detail, Leandro explained that at the time, before the City of Heroes closed, players used programs to store all of their characters ‘ data on their computers. During the time SCORE was being developed, an anonymous person contacted Leandro to provide him with the details of all the characters that existed, although after giving them to him, he disappeared without a trace. Still, Leandro has stated that none of these data has ever contained any personal information.