90 Day Until the Apocalypse -- Day 0

On the day before the announcement of the apocalypse I felt very tired and I went to bed very early.  I therefore woke up very early.  With time on my hands I logged into City of Heroes and proceeded to run five hero tip missions, with the idea of running another five on Saturday and confirming hero status on my character Princess Ozma, which would allow me to start running the Signature Story Arc missions.

Later at lunch I logged into the City of Heroes web site and saw that they'd released a bunch of costume codes (which allow you to look like different NPCs).  I applied one of the Talon Mistress codes to one of my CoH accounts and I was happy.  I usually miss such giveaways, I'm not very interested in clawing my way past other players to try to be first in a free-for-all, so I don't watch Twitter or Facebook religiously or wait in Pocket D for hours when they're doing giveaways.  I have a few of these NPC codes, and that's generally been enough to keep me satisfied, I never felt like I had to get them all.

Anyway, I was in a good mood.  It was the Friday before a 3 day weekend, and I'd recently updated my list of CoH goals so that I knew which characters I wanted to work on and who needed what task force to earn the Task Force Commander badge, and so on.  I was ready to have a good weekend.

And then, I logged on later in the day during my break and saw that the game was being closed.

I have friends who played Earth & Beyond, so I know a bit of what this is like.  Obviously I knew that City of Heroes was an old game and wouldn't go on forever.  But in the last year they've added so much stuff, the game has felt revitalized and active.  There were a lot of cool things coming down the pipes in the next few months -- several new costume sets, at least four awesome ones that I very much wanted to get my hands on, and new AT powers, new pool power customization and cool new pool powers, a whole slew of changes to the game that was going to make things even better.

So it was a bit of a shock -- enough that people instantly began spinning conspiracy theories, and repeating them over and over.  You repeat idle speculation enough times and it becomes hard fact.  But all you really need to know is that NCSoft is a big company that makes most of its money from other games -- Lineage, Guild Wars, Aion -- and it has lost a lot of money recently.  Like, six million in one quarter.  City of Heroes didn't lose that money for them, but it was the smallest game in their stable, one of the oldest with the least prospect of making big money.  And, apparently, although it's done really well in the last year, it wasn't doing so well very recently, with people trying out other games like Star Wars:  The Old Republic and The Secret World.  Also, Funcom had been very disappointed with sales of The Secret World and has decided to back off from the MMO market, and even World of Warcraft has lost a million players in the last year, so there's an idea out there that MMOs are a thing of the past, not a thing of the future.  They're a dying breed, or so it seems.

And Paragon Studios was developing a new one, which I'm sure would have required more investment from NCSoft.  So, basically, they cut Paragon Studios free.  You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain why

Anyway, I was very depressed the rest of the evening.  I spent a lot of time reading sad and frantic posts on the message boards.  I logged into the game and talked to friends, but I didn't play much.  Really, I expect that this will be a good thing for me in the long run, I'm too addicted to the game and play far too much.  But it's a sad thing to realize that you won't be able to log in and say hi to old friends and run an Imperius Task Force, and that all of that cool stuff that was coming will never arrive, and that all of your plans for the game and the characters you wanted to work on will be impossible to fulfill.

Anyway I do plan to stick with the game until it closes on Nov 30th, and thus I thought I'd try and document the journey, because I like to do that sort of thing.  I have this blog here on Google's Blogger that I've never used, so this is what I intend to use it for.