Oh yeah people was pissed over that royally. Almost as much anger show then about ED as now about closing the game. Yet, after it all died down and people seemed to got used to the change, it was nothing.
When COH was wholly sold to NCSoft it was different times but many were heated about Atuo Assault closing. yeah, there were players that didnt like NCSoft much even years ago at least since 2007 when they closed down Auto Assault and sold COH/COV to NCSoft, but those people that talked bad about NCSoft then usually was flamed and jumped all over and shouted down. Some by the very same people that are now wholly against NCSoft the same way and some saying the exact same thing as the person they flamed and jumped down their throats was saying back in the times between 2007 and 2009. Times has changed it seems.
An objective difference between the two situations was that City of Heroes was a successful game; it had more players than most MMOs that get shut down and it had sufficient revenues to be easily profitable, nit-picking about Paragon development costs aside. Auto Assault was, at least as I recall, not a profitable game at shut down. It had a loyal core of players, but that core was very small.
Something that wasn't really discussed when CoH was shutdown is that a publisher cannot simply give its IP away to its development team. There were posters analyzing that situation completely wrong. They assumed that if the property was losing money, then it wasn't worth anything by definition. But that's not true. If you set the precedent that a game that isn't making money is thus worth nothing, you create the opportunity for an unscrupulous development team to use a publisher to fund the majority of its development work, then take the property away when it "fails" and go off and make money on it owning it in full. That cannot be allowed to occur. I have no idea what sort of money the Auto Assault team put on the table to buy out the IP, but it had to be enough to compensate NCSoft for the full dev costs of the title and then some, or it would be dangerous to let the property go. I cannot speak intelligently to how that went down, because I have no inside knowledge on that situation, but the shutdown occurred so soon after launch that its not unreasonable to assume that NC hadn't even recouped its dev costs yet, and thus had to hold out for a substantial amount in any buyout.
That was not the case for CoH. NC had made its money on CoH several times over. The devs had no specific motive to tank the title just to acquire the property. Most importantly the title was still making money. In this situation, if NCSoft didn't want to maintain the title it could have chosen to sell the property using normal ROI calculations in situations like this. My best estimate is that NCSoft could have legitimately sold CoH for something between $6M and $15M while setting no dangerous precedent for future game development.
I believe that amount of money was on the table, but NCSoft balked, for reasons not directly related to a pure accounting calculation. And because I'm more familiar with the situation on top of the fact the situation is fundamentally different in terms of precedent, my feelings are thus different for objectively different reasons.
Although not too different: I believed then that Auto Assault, while *extremely* flawed as a game, was worth spinning off and letting the dev team see what they could make of it. I just wasn't sure if they could have pulled it off. All investors want is a reasonable risk-adjusted return on investment. The Paragon team had the numbers to demonstrate they could do that. The Auto Assault team did not: they were a much higher risk. So its unclear how much money they could have put together to attempt to buy the property.