How am I handling it? Now well at all. When the game was shut down, I wasn't even able to be there, because my computer had crashed and would not reinstall the client properly. (I have 256k DSL, so while I could log in and play the game, having to redownload it was night impossible at times) So I missed out on the final Halloween festivities, the final runs, the raising of the torches.
I deleted all my screenshots a month later. too depressed to look at them and remember all the fun I'd had. for the next few months, I sputtered on, basically ignoring all the talk of the game except for occasionally checking the news in hopes that NCSoft had rescinded its edict or at least explained once and for all why they killed my home. they never did, which just left me to fester over the scum of the earth that are business people who will look at a thing that is thriving and say "nope, it's not making ME enough money, kill it and pay me the difference."
The last few months have been pretty rough IRL for me, and more than once, I've thought, "you know what would feel better, "Let's go save the city!" only to remember a moment later on looking for the Launcher icon... oh, that's right, some greedy asshole firebombed The City and then pissed in the ashes and salted the earth behind them. like a kindergarten bully who doesn't want anyone else playing with his toys.
So I started actively looking for more news. Like so many others, I found all the old, dead links, the ones from 2008 that pointed to long dead private racks. the fanciful lies of people claiming to be playing on private servers only made me angrier still. I knew of Phoenix Project. I had actually joined their message board way back in February, but there was little I could contribute to it. I chattered a bit in one or two threads but that fell off as well.
These past few weeks have only grown worse. I've tried the other Hero RPGs out there since I don't do swords and sorcery, after hours of downloading each through borrowed connections, none of them trip my trigger remotely. In fact, I'd say after 3 weeks of playing Champions Online, it makes me all the angrier for that game coming from the same team that originally created our game, but that it falls flat in the areas I enjoy like the stories told and the encompassing world-building or the free form play.
but worse, are the states of the revival projects. SEGS is a badly broken bizzaro world that barely functions in one guy's garage server rack. Icon is a morose ghost town utterly devoid of other people having fun and of much of anything to do which just reminds me of what's been lost. And Phoenix is schismed into two projects now, neither one of which seems to be moving along much beyond concepts, and even if they are, I am not a coder and I have no money to donate, and both already have writers out the ying yang and so no ways for me to be involved.
all my opinion, but that's what counts when i'm the one living inside my head
So no, I'm not handling it well. not well at all. especially not coming up on the one year anniversary of the death warrant being signed.