I dunno how many folks here play City of Heroes, but last week the game's publisher, NCSoft, closed down the developer and announced the game would be permanently shut down in November.

This was a bit surprising because as far as anyone could tell, the seven year old game, while never a major profitmaker, was doing pretty well and has a steady customer base.

Well, that customer base is pretty passionate about the game, and have begun efforts to try and save it in some way, whether that be convincing the publisher to change their mind, licensing the IP to a third party, or other option.

Petition to NCSoft (more than 20,000 signatures already)

Titan Network has donated forum space to help coordinate other efforts.

Protest rally being held at Atlas Park in-game at 5 pm EST.

People started showing up early for the rally, and so many instances have been spawned of the zone that the server briefly crashed about a half hour before the start time. It's back up, however.

If you love the game, take a look.




-k

I used to play very regularly - I wasn't hardcore about it, but I would usually log 10-15 hours per week duringmy "active" phases. Even counting for inactive stretches, I probably avereaged at least 4-6 hours/week. Really helped that I had a good, friendly group fo people to play with (with an array of "lite RP" SGs between them all).

However, I left over a significant dispute with some of their community reps. (One of whom apparently went ballistic on someone, then got himself fired, a month later - good riddance.)

So while I'm sad to hear the game's in trouble, on behalf of my friends who still play ... I cannot honestly say I'm sad that NCSoft stopped making enough money to keep up with the game.

I hope one of he player-driven efforts succeeds. However, the likelihood of that is just about nil; similar efforts have been made for other NCSoft titles - AutoAssault especially, there was a five-digit offer to buy the IP put on the table, backed by some players willing to take out second mortgages on their homes to keep the game alive. And NC's answer was "no, it's ours, GO AWAY!"

I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience. If it helps any, they did revamp the entire CS department, moderators included, a couple of years ago.

Updates to the situation:

- An impromptu in-game unity rally last Saturday ended up with more than 5000 people showing up, which is pretty decent for something that was organized in like 3 days. (They actually crashed the server briefly, I don't think the system was designed for that many folks in one place)

- Several celebrities in the Sci-Fi community have spoken out in support of saving CoH. Neal Gaiman, Jim Butcher, Laurel K. Hamilton have been pushing for NCSoft to rethink their decision, and Mercedes Lackey has offered to act as a promotional "face" for NCSoft for free if the shutdown is cancelled.

- The rescue effort is among the top trending subjects on Twitter, and was briefly the number one topic. In general, nearly every game-related media group is covering the events. CNN is even poking around asking questions.

- NCSoft corporate, somewhat taken aback by the public reaction, has opened talks with Paragon Studios former management regarding the game. No details have emerged, but at least they're talking.





-k

I used to play CoH/V religiously, but after the Community Authored missions came about, it seemed the only thing people wanted to do was farm those missions. I could rarely get a pick-up team going, and never get a task force that didn't fall apart halfway through. I tried going back a while back, after it went f2p, but it was still the same. Too bad, because I had really enjoyed the game, and it had great character customization.

Man, I still have my discs lying around. After my parents stopped funding my RPG habit when I was 14, I had to give it up. City of Villains... So much fun was had.