Didn't Chris Bruce (Back Alley Brawler) mention in a fairly recent AMA on Reddit that the reason the deal fell apart with Paragon Studios at the last minute was because NCSoft didn't want to include the transfer of player accounts with CoX?
This makes sense, even when looking at other multiplayer RPGs that have gone bust and then come back under a different dev/publisher (Hellgate: London and A.P.B. come immediately to mind here). In both those games (which I played when they launched and also when they were rezzed later), once they were rezzed, you had to make a new account and reroll your characters from scratch. Transferring personal info and bank card #s could become a real hot mess legally.
Now imagine it's the end of 2012, and we as the CoX player base have just been told we'd be losing all our hard-won level 50s, all of our characters really, plus all our vet rewards and cosmetic/cash shop purchases.... Yeah, probably 95% of the players would have freaked and walked out.
This problem is further compounded by the rumor that NCSoft's client login system was ported to many games, not just CoX. If that was true, they probably wouldn't have wanted to give any of that code away, either.
Believe me, I can't stand NCSoft as much as the next die hard CoX fan, but when you hear hooves, think of horses, not zebras. C. Bruce's version of events really does make the most sense, not to mention that he was an actual CoX dev, and knew the Paragon devs as the game was closing down. He was also working for Cryptic (and Jack Emmert) at that time.