My letter - drafted, but not yet penned as I need to find some decent paper:
Dear Mr. Kim,
Reading that City of Heroes was being shut down was a shock to me on par with losing a family member. City of Heroes is the reason I can have friends, with my life constantly moving me around by hundreds and even thousands of miles cross-country because of school and my fiance's job. He is also a devoted City of Heroes player and it is through this game that we are able to connect with each other and have something to do together when he is in Austin, Texas and I am 1,900 miles away in Providence, Rhode Island. The shutdown date of November 30th is right when I need to leave him again and return to school, and without City of Heroes, we will be two very sad and lonely people. This is not just a game to me. It is a part of my life - not my whole life, but a part as dearly loved as a real city or town that I could call home, and the only online game I have ever loved enough to pay a monthly subscription.
However, City of Heroes goes beyond individual players who will mourn its passing. This game, like any work of fiction, is an entire world of stories and characters created by both the players and developers. The same could be said for other intellectual properties - Star Wars, Pokemon, and the Marvel Universe spring to mind immediately - but all of those properties exist in the form of movies, comic books, tabletop games, and single-player, replayable video games in addition to any multiplayer online video games. If the game servers for, as an example, Star Wars: The Old Republic are shut off, then the entire universe of Star Wars will still exist in the form of the many books, movies, and offline games based in it, that we would still be able to read, watch, and play. City of Heroes, on the other hand, is only an online game - when its servers shut down, its whole world disappears, and the loss of that world and its stories is a tragedy.
I implore you, if NCSoft truly cannot sustain even one City of Heroes server, then please sell the intellectual property to someone who would be able to keep the world alive - even to someone who would only keep it alive in a form other than an online game. I understand if it can never be an online game, developed by Paragon Studios, again: that would be the most wonderful thing for the people who still love it, but I acknowledge it might not be possible. But if City of Heroes lives on as a series of comic books, or as a tabletop game played with dice similar to Dungeons&Dragons, even that would save the world and the stories it contains from oblivion.
Sincerely,
Hilary Lockhart
@FlashToo - Virtue server