City of Heroes to end.

[Pob255]

The news came out yesterday

Farewell, from all of us at Paragon Studios

This morning we announced that Paragon Studios will be taking to the skies of City of Heroes for the last time.

In a realignment of company focus and publishing support, NCsoft has made the decision to close Paragon Studios. Effective immediately, all development on City of Heroes will cease and we will begin preparations to sunset the world's first, and best, Super Hero MMORPG before the end of the year. As part of this, all recurring subscription billing and Paragon Market purchasing will be discontinued effective immediately. We will have more information regarding a detailed timeline for the cessation of services and what you can expect in game in the coming weeks.

The team here at Paragon deserves special praise for all that we have accomplished over the last 5+ years. These developers are some of the most creative and talented people in the gaming industry. By now, we've all been given this news internally, but to anyone who may be reading this message after the fact; know that your hard work and dedication has not gone unappreciated or unnoticed. To any potential studios looking to grow your team; hire these people. You won't regret it.

To our Community,

Thank you. Thank you for your years of support. You've been with us every step of the way, sharing in our challenges, encouraging us to make City of Heroes better, more than everyone else thought it could be. We couldn't have come this far without you. I implore you all, focus on the good things of CoH and Paragon Studios. Don't dwell on the "how" or the "why", but rather join us in celebrating the legacy of an amazing partnership between the players and the development team.

Thank you, and I'll see you in the skies, one last time.

Andy Belford

Community Manager

Paragon Studios.

http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/n.../thank_you.php

The news has come as a bit of a shock as it's been out of the blue, only this week was new stuff released on the marketplace and back in april NCsoft said they where going to continue the game for a few more years to come.

A lot of bad feelings toward NCsoft from CoH players now.

[Pob255]

I'm still waiting to see if there's going to be more detail as to why?
NCsoft made a big loss in Q2 but CoH wasn't one of them, CoH user base and profits where down from a few of years ago, however it was still showing a profit and they've been fairly level over the past two years.
It was still the largest player base of the 3 super hero MMO's and with some great active development going on.
While it never did that well in Korea in the US it was NC soft's most popular game (before the release of GW2)

Granted this isn't the first MMO they've pulled the plug on, Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa where both pulled early in their life because of failing to make profits.
However CoH was still making a profit and the very sudden ending has come as a major shock to the players, with the whole dev team basically kicked out it's very unlikely that there'd be any sort of closing event (special events is something the dev's and community rep's have been great at doing)

As you can probably tell I was a CoH player, still the only MMO I've stuck with for more than a month, so I too am a bit shell shocked.
The play style is still a pretty much unique in MMO's having little in the way way of a loot system (it was added in but only around a crafting system, so still never a major part) the game play and combat was built around teaming, so while you could solo teaming was important and pug's where easy to form and generally fun (one of the reasons I think I've not got into many other MMO's), the vast majority of content being instanced rather than open world meant few players vs lots of mobs, so combat could easily get really chaotic which made it a lot of fun.
The very social aspect to it made it far more easy to meet people and build friendships within the game and promoted a more friendly community.

Heck Project spork came about because of CoH (the bloke I did it for is a friend I made through CoH, Spork was his one of his toons) heck I first came to Hexus becuase my GPU died and I wanted some advice about a replacement and a new psu.