Tuesday, September 18, 2012

NCSoft Announces City Of Heroes Refunds


"As the long history of City of Heroes draws to a close we understand you have questions regarding the cessation of customer services such as recurring billing and outstanding account balances. Today we have some details regarding compensation and the refund process."

Baron Hundekopf

Thus starts the latest news on closure of City of Heroes. The bottom line is that NCSoft is changing their tune in regards to a policy that when a game is shut down they offer the players who have paid for subscriptions beyond the closure date credit to subscribe to one of their other games. Guess our campaign as had at least a small effect.

An Inquiry
While the statement about does sound pretty final, we have to remember that has been the case with others before us. The original Star Trek TV show was cancelled after three seasons, but the fans would not let it die, and look what happened there. The original cast did several movies, granted not all of them gems by any means, but those were followed up by Star Trek: The Animated Series, ST: The Next Generation (with movies of it's own when the TV show was shelved), ST: Deep Space Nine, ST: Voyager, and ST: Capt Quantum... er, Enterprise. And then there was the Star Trek relaunch movie based on the original characters with a whole new cast (and a returning Leonard Nimoy as a very old Ambassador Spock.)

Lightning Gal
More recently, there was the case of Farscape, which was shorted on little notice from five seasons to four. Fans made demands, and a special four episode/movie was produced to try and give the story closure.

Another example is Firefly, a TV show I did not think much of when it was first on, but now I own both the entire series (only lasted a season) AND the movie, Serenity,  that was produced after the fans of that show made enough noise to give it enough backing to hit the theaters.

Xi Chin
Granted, these examples are all TV shows, some becoming movies... but they all had something that one thing in common with City of Heroes: a fan base that is like no other. We will NOT go quietly into the night and fade into memory. We will continue to make noise, and hopefully someone will take up our torch and be able to either City of Heroes will continue, or will be resurrected.

Granted, if and when that happens, odds are that the developers from Paragon Studios that have been working on the game since Cryptic let go of the reigns will not be able to continue their work. Someone else will have to take over. Will it be the same? Probably not. But the alternative is oblivion to all the characters we as a community have developed by playing over the years.

So let's keep up the fight, for we ARE heroes, and what we have done so far has changed the way MMOs will close their doors forever.

But there is still much work to be done.

Again, to my fellow Lepras, Dale Newell's... and long live City of Heroes!

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