You have all articulated this very well.
If I were to make a real world analogy here...
Imagine if you were to buy a condo in a little resort. It's a quirky place, and happens to, by and large, attract the same sort of people as you. First a few of you come together, then you all start to form community groups, and the next thing you know, you have a city that bumbles along with some clashes, but mostly getting along GREAT.
Then the resort comes to you and says "We're bulldozing. The Hyatt offered us ten times for the land."
You say--"WTF??? I BOUGHT this! I've been paying my condo fees all this time!"
The resort says "Read the fine print. You only bought the rights to live in the condo until we kicked you out. Too bad, so sad, buhbye."
It's not an exact analogy, but it's close. And I seriously think that for an MMORPG we should have the right to find someone with a spare server and run it until the last person leaves.
I hate to be "that guy," but I feel that I have to, here. The condo analogy is nearly perfectly apt, but not for the reasons VV mentions it. Condos are a weird legal entity that I don't understand well enough to comment on; but a more appropriate term would be "apartment complex."
Just as VV's example says, we bought an apartment. Its management ran it with a strong community emphasis, attracting a lot of the same kind of people and putting together tight-knit groups who were always eager to welcome others in. People move in and out, but there's just this
something that its long-term tenants can't find anywhere else. They gladly pay their monthly rent, and shop at the on-site gift-and-convenience store that carried complex-specific products, and put their lives into it.
But in the end, they don't own it. They own the furniture they bought, the own the products bought from the store that are only useful with some of the features that the apartment building provides, and they've invested tens of thousands of dollars in living here...but it's not
theirs. The building, the space, is owned by a distant corporation that has, for whatever reason, decided to close the complex down, fire its beloved superintendent and management, and evict everybody. They stay until the end of their current lease.
It's sad that all those people are losing their homes, and that they can't find another complex with the same community aspect, but it's the way it is. They can keep all their stuff, but a lot of it doesn't do them much good in other complexes.
(We're talking in big generalities, here. The way NCSoft handled it is the equivalent of kicking all those people out and leaving the building an empty, unused hulk when it had been turning a profit when it was running. This is just plain stupid business. In a more general sense, though, we can hope that most companies that own these metaphorical apartment complexes are in it to make money and are smart enough not to make inexplicable decisions on this scale.)
To force a company that determines running the apartment complex is no longer in their best interests to continue to maintain it is slavery. To force them to give it away against their will is theft. What if they determined that the apartment complex (i.e. the resources that they devote to the game) would serve better as an office building (i.e. are better spent devoted to other products)? If it really will make them more money, then that office building generates more good for more people than the apartment did...or there are perverse governmental incentives. But I edge dangerously close to politics, here.
The long and the short of it is, we knew we were paying rent on a virtual space.
This is not to say anything Save CoH did was wrong. Far from it! I would fully expect that community living in that beloved apartment complex to do all they could to persuade the owners to change their minds. To sell it, to keep running it,
anything but evicting them and shutting it down. And this is perfectly right and laudible, especially when they go about it by showing that they'll spend more if they have to to keep it, that their community is a cultural artifact worth preserving in and of itself, that they are going to do good for others to draw attention to their own plight.
But in the end, should those efforts fail, it is wrong to say, "okay, we're going to now accuse you of being immoral and unethical because you made a decision for your own life that negatively impacts ours." We knew it was their property. The correct response is to try to come up with a way to make preservation of the use of those things we DO own possible. We learned this is not happening here and now, and it hurts. But we've got the "Plan Z" ideas as a very valid (if ambitious) plan to build our own, newer apartment complex. And we can discuss ways we'd like to see other companies preserve what is preservable...but we cannot
demand that they do on moral/ethical grounds. We can on business grounds: "Find a way to guarantee us this, and we'll do business with you over others." But that's it. Anything else is attempting to claim that the Baker's Union was immoral for refusing to work for less than they wanted and putting Hostess out of business. (Personally, I think they were
foolish, but they weren't being unethical or immoral. Just foolish.) To demand they take whatever Hostess offered and continue to work for them would have been slavery.
