I Have Come to Watch the World End

[rowyn]

koogrr IM'd me earlier today and reminded me that City of Heroes was shutting down tonight. Koogrr planned to be there, to hold a torch for CoH one last time. "I'll be on Virtue, in Atlas Park 33. When NCSoft first announced they were shutting City of Heroes down, so many people logged into Virtue to protest that Atlas Park reached instance #33. They have kept that instance going ever since."

Even in City of Heroes' heyday, it was extremely rare to see more than two instances of a zone; normally, there was only one.

I canceled my account in January of this year, because the truth was that I had not played since October 2011. Even when the game went free-to-play, I didn't come back to look at it. Not even when they announced they were canceling it.

But at 10PM tonight, I decided to go in.

kagetsume was on too, so I chatted with him for a bit -- we haven't talked in ages. I couldn't get to Atlas Park 33 -- it was full -- so I went to Atlas Park 6. I didn't know where to go, so I flew up to the top of the globe that rests on the giant shoulders of Atlas's statue. There were three other people up there. One of them was DJing a tribute to CoH on Dimensional.Net, so I tuned in. His selection was broad, including instrumentals and a wide range of rock and eras. Almost all with a theme of heroes, rescuing, etc. Related to the theme.

Lut suggested I get some screenshots, so I brought in different characters, my favorites from across several servers. Virtue kicked me several times and crashed once. The queue to log in at one point was over a thousand.

I hadn't meant to stay to the end -- it's three hours past my usual bedtime -- but it's only 24 minutes away now, and oddly I am not sleepy. The music and taking screenshots, getting shots of Lut's characters, talking to people, has kept me up. I logged out Kasadya to bring on another character, Alice Bocor, to get screenshots of her. It's ten minutes to the end now, and I am in the queue to log Kasadya back in after getting kicked. I got back in, and got kicked again in less than a minute. Five minutes to go, and Virtue cannot bear up under the weight of its players' grief, the thousands who want to be there in the end. I am position 84 of 370 in the queue for Virtue, and it's 2AM CST, midnight Pacific: closing time.

At 2:03AM, three minutes after the servers were set to go down, I reconnected with Kasadya. She rose into the air and broadcasted a triumphant "I'm still alive!" An instant later, the server went down for the last time.

But you know, I cannot believe this is the end. Even if NCSoft never sells the game or resurrects it, when I think of all the bootleg WoW servers out there, I have to believe that somewhere, someone -- some hacker or dev who managed to sneak it out -- is running a CoH server. Paragon City is still out there, even if I can't visit it now.



Farewell, City of Heroes. You were the best of the MMOs; I fear we will not see your like again.

Comments

[kagetsume.livejournal.com]

It hit me a lot harder than I expected it to. I played it since issue 0 (So, over 8 years), and for the reasons you note. It made it /so/ easy to play with your friends. Any level, just about any group setup. The game adjusted, and made it fun. It was a game you could log into for just 15 minutes, and you do something fun. It was a game that inspired people to do good things, RL. It inspired a group donate more to charities, and encouraged others to do the same. It inspired people to actually try to be heroes, even in small ways.

I've never played another game quite like it, and that's saying something given I have played games since 1982 when I first got Zork 1 as a gift. I'm going to miss it. BoingDragon and I couldn't get back onto Virtue in time for the shutdown after it mapserved us with 5 minutes to go. So we logged into Exalted and took to the skies in Talos. There we shot off fireworks into the night sky until the server disconnect message came. We were the only two in that zone on that server. It really was like watching a world come to an end.

At this point I have quite a loathing for NCSoft. They handled the shutdown very poorly. The game was doing fine; it was a positive revenue generator for them. Not huge profit, but there was profit. The message came quick, and heartless. I honestly thought it was some sort of hoax the first time I read it. But no, it was all too real. I will never play another NCSoft game; I will not reward the behavior they have shown; a complete lack of concern for their own customer wants. Frankly, I hope they go out of business.

[whitefangedwolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I hope NCSoft goes out of business, too, if only for the hope that the CoH IP could then be acquired by someone who actually gives a damn about their customers and would bring the game back.

[rowyn]

I do hope someone is able to buy CoH off of them. Such a waste to have it just sitting on a shelf getting dusty. :(

[rowyn]

Yeah, it's depressing because some of the things CoH did best -- like the whole sidekicking/mentoring thing -- are things that no other game is even trying to do. It's like every other MMO designer thinks that stratifying the player base and making sure they can't play casually with their friends is AWESOME. :(

I don't really know much about the shutdown, but I have a hard time hating NCSoft over their treatment of the game because I remember how much good they did for it after they bought it from Cryptic. Sigh.