I started the process as soon as I knew the game was going to end.
My SG helped, I suppose. Starkweather and the VoPC cut all ties to the game within days. They left to go to TSW together. Myself, well, as much as I loved them, I loved CoH more. And I knew it wouldn't be the same anywhere else. So I bid them farewell and continued on here.
A few of the friends I made over the years formed a new SG, the Storm Riders, to have someplace for people to go. I remember the recruitment spam, "We're the Stormriders, a brand new SG created today for those who want to ride out the storm with us. Wish us luck!"
The way I saw it, everybody had a right to their happy ending. I had three months to make it happen for myself and everyone else. In the meantime, I started getting out more, diving into my research, and taking some time away to go to the gym. I knew that if the end was coming, it would be a whole lot easier if I had rebuilt a life outside of Coh before it ended. And, believe me, it helped...a lot.
A lot of my time in game was helping others adjust to life outside of CoH. And while I won't get into the details, most of the advice I gave amounted to the same thing: start reconnecting with the world out there, because that's the world that'll hold you together when the world in here is taken from us.
A lot of people--myself included--came to the game because of something that happened out there that drove us to CoH. Perhaps it was a stint of unemployment. Perhaps it was a tragedy. Perhaps it was simply a time of supreme stress and overwork. Perhaps it was an injury or medical condition. When things out there get so bleak, we tend to escape it by finding something like CoH, something that makes us feel important to others. Something that makes us feel like we are doing important things.
Is it wrong to escape in that way? I think it's the most natural thing a person can do. And what is so tragic about the closure isn't so much that it kicked us back out there. I mean, after all, we really ought to be living life out there more often. The tragic thing was that the closure forced people to be thrown back out there before they were ready, and that is just too cruel for words.
I didn't like losing CoH, but I slept well on December 1. I might not have done everything, but I did enough to where I could say, "I played the heck out of it," and move on to the other things I've been doing. But I consider myself one of the lucky ones. It was through luck, not character or strength, that made my transition easy. A lot of people I know aren't able to move on, because their situations were so dire, unrewarding or bleak that they simply had no desire to move on at all. We owe those people some sense of purpose and hope. If NCSoft won't give that to us anymore, who will?