This just in, City of Heroes' shut down was actually a complete and honest mistake says an insider from NCsoft. Apparently while going over their quarterly numbers, they discovered that the company, Paragon Studios, was making more money than other games like Lineage, Guild Wars, Aion, and Lineage II. The CEO called a meeting with their top financial advisers to discuss options on what to do about this. Misinterpreting the information they had collected from that meeting and believing Paragon Studios was quietly attempting to absorb their previous California branch, NCsoft NorCal, and had openly declared that they were "Going Rogue", the parent company terminated Paragon Studios to further prevent them from becoming a rival company.
Little did they realize that Paragon Studios had only just relabeled themselves after NCsoft's own game, City of Heroes was their property, and Going Rogue was just an expansion for the previous game. Without warning, they shut down the game and fired everyone before they realized their error. Still, they were much too proud to admit that mistakes were made and decided to take certain steps to mitigate this disaster. Namely by continuing with the shutdown and pretending this was all going according to plan.
Now it's just one little embarrassment that NCSoft prefers to not acknowledge and the company is now asking, not for forgiveness, but for everyone involved as both player and developer to stop pestering them about what they're going to do with the IP and if there will ever be a City of Heroes 2. Instead, they hope that you enjoy playing their newest games like Guild Wars 2 and WildStar before they shut them down as well.