City of Heroes had the rug yanked out today by it's parent corp NC Soft. Severs go dark November 30. All other support has been suspended and the staff was let got with no prior warning.

Guild Wars 2 just launched.  Probably had something to do with it.

An old gamer buddy texted me and said, "I don't know why this bothers me so much, but it does."
I said, "I know what you mean."

JG

It seemed to be ticking along quite nicely - all the development costs were long-since paid off when Cryptic were still running it, and it had a small but devoted subs base, who would be quite cheap to support. It should have been profitable.

Nice game. Shame to see it close; there was nothing else quite like it. DCUO is something else, and Champions Online... is just a bit rubbish.

Just looked at the CoH forums, 8000 people currently live on the forums.

Sooner or later, the "Game Over" page comes up for every online game.

That's sad.

I only ever played the trial account, back in 2007, but (1) I was amazed by how well they took the supers concept and squeezed an awesome MMO out of it; (2) I loved the City of Villains jailbreak starting area; and (3) I spent a good amount of my free trial hours playing with the character creator. (If there was justice in this world we'd get the character creator as a freebie to play with. Fuck Hero Machine and Fábrica de Heróis, this is the real deal)

I didn't stick around to see City of Rogues, but the Mission Architect expansion sounded amazing. Pity I didn't get to try it.

Oh well. Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess.

NcSoft are sorta in trouble outside Korea atm as other than Aion and the recently launched Guild Wars 2 they dont make much profit on mmo's these days(i believe they still rule the korean scene with lineage and Aion amongst others), City of Heroes is an old mmo that has a small dedicated fanbase but not enough that risking money on  building a sequal game would be worthwhile so unfortunatly it's being put out to pasture alongside other older but still classic mmorpg's that just dont have the fanbase to survive this increasingly shinking market where in order to survive you either have to be a fantasy game or offer something another mmo doesnt offer better(which unfortunatly Champions Online and to a lesser extent Dc Universe do).

What makes matters worse is the fact rumours say Arenanet(creators of Guild Wars2) may be going it alone early next year which would mean even less profits for NcSoft.

As a long time player, it seems their are a lot of reasons why this has happened. NCSoft has lost a lot of money on AION, the licensing from Cryptic (now owned by a competing Korean corporation) looks like it is expiring, and the whole free to play thing produced good money, but takes continued support to keep making that money. Especially since the engine was never meant to allow many of the additions players wanted.


Now, I'm sad to see it go. I wish they'd have treated Paragon Studios (the people who did the local work) better, so even if they announced the reason they're shutting down COH1, to build COH2, they will lose customers. (Plus the likelihood of them creating a 2 is very small.)
 
The thing that kills me the most is all the time I spent and money on a digital game that doesn't even leave me a souvenir, only friends I made, and memories. (Unlike tabletop RPG's, where I have the book, and I have the character even if they "died.")


So I'm bummed, but I was expecting it, sadly.

Dedicating so much time to anything can be disappointing, but in this case more so since in the end we've no control over what happens to the game in the long run.

Though the game had it's flaws and ultimately the gameplay needed a bit more, it was done well. And it was a game i could run!

I'm surprised DCUO hasn't been cancelled yet.

Quote from: Silverlion;578968The thing that kills me the most is all the time I spent and money on a digital game that doesn't even leave me a souvenir, only friends I made, and memories. (Unlike tabletop RPG's, where I have the book, and I have the character even if they "died.")

The basic hazard of digital subscription media.

With the right setup you can capture video of a 3D game, but since so much of it is just tedious !@#$ing around, that's not all that satisfying.

The loss of the community is what's gutting me. Yes, you had trolls. Yes, you had idiots. Every community has these. But by and large, the community on the Virtue server was welcoming and fun. I made a lot of friends -- and yes, I consider them real friends; there are people on the other side of those words -- and, in particular, I was welcomed with warm and open arms by the community surrounding The Cape, a player-run radio station for Virtue.

I don't intend to lose these people. I've already gone into the Acceptance phase. No petition is going to stop this. No deal is going to save the game. It's going away. But I'm not going to let the community be ripped away from me by simple business decisions coming out of Korea.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;578972Though the game had it's flaws and ultimately the gameplay needed a bit more, it was done well. And it was a game i could run!

I'm surprised DCUO hasn't been cancelled yet.

Sony online tends to keep games around way past the sell by date(everquest 1 is still active) so unless dc pulls the licence themselves i wouldnt expect them to shut it down for a fair while yet, also it actualyl isnt that bad of a game despite the fact its a sony mmo(and thus predisposed to being abit shitty).

Quote from: Corvus;579018No petition is going to stop this. No deal is going to save the game. It's going away.

Given the game's age and lack of any sequel plans, either buying the IP or convincing them to release the source is at least in the realm of possibility.  Wouldn't do jack for the community, but the community could then potentially run their own servers.

Quote from: CRKrueger;578933Just looked at the CoH forums, 8000 people currently live on the forums.

I don't know what 8k, live, on the forum at that moment means for total population, but I assume its at least 10 to one.

I figure most people never go to the forum.



So sad; I played COH ever since it released, right before WOW.

Just last week I was planning out a new character based on a new powerset scheduled for release in the next expansion.

Then.."Wham"   ganked by NC soft!



Guildwars2 may get me on the rebound though.