As per a very good suggestion further down the thread:
Here are the sign-up documents!With at least one very famous superhero who maintains "reporter" as his day job, I think it might be useful to reach out to the media-at-large as a community. It is desirable that wider-read media should write about the game and its closure and the efforts to save it; the best way, I think, to get the story out there is to invite the news reporters to come play. Show them everything you love about this game, and why you want it saved. Show them what you find fun, introduce them to the community and what makes it great, and tell them your personal stories. Maybe even win a few over as gamers who now wish they could play longer.
To this end, I propose a "Media Day" event. One day wherein we schedule time for experienced players to walk members of the press (from bloggers to webtv to newspapers and magazines and even TV news programs) through the character-creation process, and then through the opening missions and the processes of forming teams and joining supergroups and the like. If SGs can still be made new, perhaps somebody should even make the Weekly Galaxy (since "Daily Planet" is taken) as such and specifically invite all participants in this event to join it.
Give tours of various HQs, show off the gameplay, and most importantly, tell them about all the efforts to save the game and why it's worth saving and how NCSoft can win by selling the IP to a new studio.
The biggest snag to this is the inability to make new accounts. We can't just invite a horde of new people to play.
The second biggest snag is getting the attention of the media people.
The third is that I am, myself, not a player, so I cannot tell you how best to do the navigation and on what missions to lead our guests. I used to play, but I imagine my 5-year-old account is quite defunct by now. Nor would I be good at mentoring, personally, since I am not experienced in the modern game and wildly out of practice from when I did play.
Fortunately, there are solutions to all three problems!
1) I need volunteers who have spare accounts! I am not going to ask for your account information, but will, instead, pair you up with guests from the media and let you arrange to share the information directly with them. This will help prevent any mix-ups and - I'll be honest - I want to avoid any appearance of phishing, here.
2) I need volunteers who would like to be mentors! These people should love the game and be experienced in the opening missions. They should be willing to help one or more newbies through the process of signing on to an account, creating a fun superhero (or villain), and leading them through missions. A key part of this will be ensuring that your proteges are able to fully appreciate the story, the ease and fun of the game, and most importantly the community. Expect to spend a lot of time on Media Day with this; you'll be answering questions, helping arrange interview times and "press conferences" so your media proteges can ask all the questions they need to to appreciate this game somewhere vaguely approaching the way you do.
3) I need volunteers who are masters of social media! Specifically, we need to get in touch with members of the press as stated above, and extend these invitations! So if you know anybody in the press, if you know ways of contacting press institutions, if you know social media where the press unicorn for news, put the word out. Gauge interest and hand out contact information so that we can get some measure of what sort of headcount to expect.
This project is in its earliest of organizational stages, and it is the first of its type I've attempted to spearhead, personally. We need to pick a date, and thing to consider for this date are timeliness compared to the news cycle and the sunsetting of the game as well as whether media people can be on on that day and whether our
mentor volunteers can be on. So weekdays vs. weekends are a major consideration.
I am thinking of aiming for somewhere between October 15th and 20th, giving us at least two weeks to get this set up and still aiming for long enough before the deadline that the articles and stories will be published in time to make a difference.
My plan is to schedule this as an all-day affair, probably 6-12 hours of gaming and interviews and press conferences. A fourth category of volunteer to be the guys questioned at this press conference (or these press conferences) would be welcome. People like TonyV or VV or major players in the game who know the game, the community, and the circumstances as-we-know-them of the transfer of the IP would be ideal. It would be advisable for these volunteers to do as much research as possible into the situation so they can give authoritative but as-true-as-we-know answers without spreading unsubstantiated rumors.
For the time being, this thread is open for suggestions to refine this, mentions of tentative volunteering for any of these roles, expressions of interest in helping organize this game-side, suggestions for dates, times, formal sub-events to orchestrate as part of this, and general discussion. I will, this evening, set up some google documents for listing your preferred online name and contact info if you're volunteering an account or to be a mentor, as well as for leaving suggested ways of spreading the word. Anybody who wants to spread the word, speak up in here but also feel free to get some preliminary ground laid on garnering media interest.
Let's see if we can't have some major blogs, tv news, or newspaper articles telling the world about the writers' experiences in CoH and the efforts of that game's players to save it!