*nodnod*
I am going to hazard a complete guess here, and say that at some point people who were paid ahead on previous games and wanted a damn refund went after NCSoft via their credit card companies.
I don't know if you guys are aware of this, but if a credit card company gets too many of these disputes against a particular entity, they take away the privilege of charging their card from that entity. And IIRC, at one point some time around that period (Auto Assault/Tabula Rasa shutdowns) you could use only one of the two major credit cards (either MC and not Visa, or Visa and not MC) to charge your CoH renewal. Methinks they didn't want to risk another such debacle.