Have you guys noticed that the shutdown of CoX is unexpected enough to count as actual news for the gaming community? As in, I was away for a few months on a break, but then I saw an actual news article on Escapist Magazine informing me. Don't just spread word to CoX communities (although, for obvious reasons, we will get the most traction there), go for any large, general gaming community you're already a member of.
Emphasis on "already a member of," though, do not sign up for a community and make your first post shilling for your cause. If anyone here has an account on the Penny Arcade forums, that'd be helpful, I already threw up a post on Escapist. Unfortunately, though I've been around years, I mostly lurk, so I'm certainly not getting any traction as an entrenched member of the community.
EDIT: Oh, hey, on the subject of effective action, we've only got three months to make this work so let's try to skip the "blind flailing in the direction of everyone who seems like they might have any sort of culpability at all" stage. We need to figure out exactly who has the power to make CoX's ongoing existence an actual thing that happens. There's a rumor circulating that NCSoft has been asked a prohibitively large amount of money to renew the license to the CoX engine in order to cull the competition for a game being pushed out by the current owners of the engine. Unfortunately, even who those current owners are seems to change from one iteration of the story to the next. If this is true, it presents a significant problem for our plan. While NCSoft can potentially be convinced to relinquish the IP for CoX to fans if we could raise enough money for it, getting the Mystery Corporation to give up the engine to CoX, the most popular game ever made in this little niche, is going to require more money than could ever be conceivably raised by anyone, including, apparently, NCSoft themselves.
Know thy enemy and know thyself, find victory in a hundred battles. The very first thing we need to do is find out who is actually responsible for shutting CoX down. NCSoft might not actually be in a position to start it back up, and in fact it's likely they're not, since the move makes no sense from a business perspective and clearly came as a surprise to the development team. I have no idea how we're going to solve the problem of the engine license being withheld if that's the case, but at least we'll know what problem we're trying to solve, and hopefully with enough time left to do something about it. So we need to know who would know and how we can get them to divulge the information. Can anyone get the dev team to open up with anything approaching reliability? It's unlikely they know what's going on, but they're far more likely to tell us than suits in Seattle or the distant Korean overlords.