I have not read all the replies to this post so forgive me if someone else has suggested this. I have been playing COH for 6 years. Between I and my girl friend we have paid for 4 copies of the game that will no longer be useable. Two of my copies are DVD additions, plus I bought COV and going Rouge. I will be out well over $400 after you factor in booster packs. I am suggesting bringing a civil action against NC soft for damages and seek a complete refund of all moneys spent in the purchase of the game and its add-ons. If this is gone as a class action meaning we need more than 12 other people to do this as a group. We can make it so costly for them to not give up the server software that they will give it up just to make us go away.
I have a good understanding of the law and we do have legal standing to bring the action. They have sold over 300k copies (an educated guess) of the game, at this number and it might be much higher. It could cost them over 10.5 mil if they lost or had to settle the case.
I know someone is going to say. There is no guaranty that any game will stay open and I say under US commercial code you cannot sell a product and then render the product unusable without consequences. There was a general understanding that as long as you agreed to pay a fee monthly to NC Soft you would be able to keep playing the game, if they had wanted to be able to shut the game down when people no longer played in adequate number to turn a good profit. They should have gave the game away and made all their money on the monthly fee.
I do not know if this has been tried before but it is high time someone does, if I get enough people interested in doing this. I will find the lawyer who will take the case. If done right is should not cost us a dime.
On the other side of this thought I would be nice if we could get all members that still want to play the game interested in forming a corp. we could buy it up. I would be happy to form a non for profit corp to do just that. We could raise 15mil very quickly if we sold stock at say $50 per share to all the players in the game. We could share the work for doing the admin of the game and running of the game with fellow plays who show an interest. Yes I know this is a pipe dream but Damn it why not.
Last word.