Well, just crashed emotionally, picked myself up again and put together the following email to Gabe and Tycho over at Penny Arcade.
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"Hey guys. Please forgive the rambling flaws of this message, it is difficult beyond words for me to write. For a long time I have read Penny Arcade, and I have always known you both to be willing to go to bat for a worthy gamers cause, and I find that I am now part of one that could use any attention you can give it.
I've never been what you would call strong socially. For a long time I felt certain I would never fit in or be able to cope with the world at large, and there were times when things got very dark indeed. However as fate would have it about 7 and a half years ago now I was introduced to something that profoundly altered my life. One of the few true friends I had convinced me to try City of Heroes.
At first I did not want to like it. It was a subscription game, and a thing that would need me to be online all the time. But as I started to play it, I found that it was unlike anything else I had ever played. It was not so much a game, but a world. In this world I found characters and stories. And behind these characters and stories I found people. People I could relate to. People I could talk to. People I could be friends with.I learned to create my own charaters, my own stories. I joined with my friends and their characters and their stories, and together we forged ourselves our own world, a shared narrative... a shared universe that was all our own. For seven and a half years, we poured our hearts and souls into this game, and experienced the best times of our lives.
And somewhere along the line I learned to take strength from that somehow, to be able to do things in the real world that I never thought would be possible for me. I made it through a few jobs, survived college, and even managed to do a face to face meeting outside the game. I know these must sound like very simple things, but these were things that were previously impossible for me. And I looked forward and thought perhaps there was more still that I could do, still more of my difficulties I could learn to overcome with the help of the game and my friends within it.
When I went to log in to the game last friday night, when I went to go spend time with my friends in our shared world we had spent the last seven and a half years creating, I was filled with optimism over everything coming. The advancements that were to be released soon, the new stories we were going to be a part of were already dancing in my imagination. It was a tremendous shock to discover that quite suddenly and without any warning or justification that NCSoft had suddenly decided to "re-align it's focus" and bury City of Heroes. Thank you for your seven and a half years patronage and all your love and support of the game, but you and your friends and your world are no longer required. Don't let the door hit you on the way out, and do remember to try Guild Wars 2. It is, after all, our newest and shiniest.
I logged on to find my friends and the rest of the game in stunned disbelief. We knew the game to be magnificent, fun, and innovtive. We knew the dev team to be dedicated and brilliant. We knew the game itself to be profitable, and it's outlook to be the brightest it had ever been. And we knew ourselves to be passionate and devoted fans. To suddenly have this thing that we loved struck with what amounted to summary execution without even the decency to tell us why or give us a chance to save it was beyond injustice. A lot of people despaired at the news. But others... others resolved to fight.
A petition went up to stop the shut down of the game, and already has over 13,000 signatures. Meanwhile a lot of us are gathering in a place called the Titan network, which has long been dedicated to City of Heroes, and are planning to do everything we can to save the game we love.
I know it seems like a long shot. Some corporate suit in Korea has decided to crush the world we love, and what can we possibly do about it? But I know the power of gamers... of we who are united by our love of the worlds and the stories we have experienced together. You two showed me that. Through Childs Play. And through Pax. And through every site that has nearly buckled under the flood of interest generated by a single link on your news posts.
Gabe... I remember you posting once that you'd burn down everything you had if it would catch people like this in the flames... people who think they can just stomp on others dreams... on the things they love.. that they can just throw them to the curb when they have no more use for them because they can't fight back.. Right now, NCSoft is those people. Tycho, I know you understand the injustices of the world too, and fight for those brave enough to be innovators, to make something unique and wonderful all their own. City of Heroes and all the fans within it is that ideal, and Paragon Studios the people behind it are the ones keeping it going.
Please... please help me. Please help us. Don't let the game and the world we have loved for so long die without a fight. If there is anything you can do to help, the command center for saving City of Heroes can be found here:
http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/board,134.0.html and if you wanted to sign the petition or direct others to it and show that people that love games aren't just expendable throwaways that can be thrown under the bus when they're no longer useful you can find that here:
http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/board,134.0.htmlAnything you can do to help I would be eternally grateful for.
Joe Dumais
@Vhailor2003
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Writing that... pretty much drained all my emotional energy again. But I bore my soul and didn't leave anything on the table with explaining the heart of it. They're both good guys. I don't know if they can help, but if they can... well. They've helped with a lot of amazing impossible things over the years.
