Perfidus, there's a reason he doesn't get it. He still thinks City was "just a game."
City was never a game.
City was a town built around a theme park. People were drawn to that town for a lot of reasons, and they stayed because of the other people in that town. We went out, went to work, came home, and then we all went to the theme park. Some of us were there every night, some just a couple nights a week, but it was always there. The devs kept listening and making more rides that we liked, and the old rides were enough fun that it didn't matter if we'd ridden them 3 times or 33 times, we were always good for one more trip. But we wouldn't have stayed if it hadn't been for the people.
Some wise religious man--and I completely forget who it was--once said "put yourself in the attitude of prayer, and prayer will come." We put ourselves in "the attitude of heroes"--and we all became a little more heroic. Maybe it was in raising money for charity. Maybe it was in offering a stranger some inf or showing a newbie the ropes. Maybe it was just taking the time to be kind to the kid at the drive-through window. Maybe it was really going out of your way and outside your comfortzone in the real world to do something for someone else, like staying up all night to talk an SG-mate through some bad times. Maybe it was chipping in to help someone with his bills. Little things, not so little things...somehow, being heroes part time made us more heroic full-time. And as we became more heroic, we liked each other more.
Our characters, our toons...even if you scoffed at RP, still, you put something of yourself into every toon you made, and you reacted to the missions and the content inside the skin of that toon. For me, at least, being a writer, every one of the 60-odd characters I created was as, if not more, alive to me than the characters I create for books. Some of them I spent more time with than any book character--even in a series, I normally don't spend more than a year inside the head of any one character. I had characters whose skin I had shared for more than seven years. I knew them better than most living humans in my life, and I bet some of you have the same experience. Of course we knew them better than living people around us--that doesn't trivialize the people around us or make us crazy. We created these characters, we know their thoughts, and short of developing telepathy, you can never know another live human as well as we can know our characters. They're part of us; we're part of them.
So in one blow, we have lost our home--NCSoft just ran a bulldozer through it. Friends are gone, scattered--we never thought for a moment that we wouldn't have the City to connect with them. We've lost our social support net.
And we have lost "children" we know as well as we know ourselves, who are part of us--NCSoft has buried them in an unmarked grave. We have no place to mourn but here, and no place to go but here. There's no urn on the mantlepiece, no marker we can visit, and the murderers sit on the other side of the ocean and smirk and dismiss us as inconsequential children, easily distracted.
Cry. Rage. Cry some more. I'm going to.
I'm also going to work. I am not going to give up until the last possible way to bring back the City has been tried and has failed. You have my word, for what it's worth.