To all of you...

We'll miss you guys, too, Z.

Good luck, dude. ^_^

Based on this announcement, we as players, fans and consumers should make a responsible attempt to convince NCsoft to reverse its decision in this matter.

Therefore, we are mounting a campaign of letter-writing to make a personal appeal to Mr. Taek Jin Kim, CEO of NCsoft, to reconsider the decision to shut down Paragon Studioes, and instead keep this excellent Management and Development Team intact and keep City of Heroes alive.

We invite all players who have enjoyed this game to join us in this effort. Many players have already drafted petitions, and we urge all players to support these efforts and sign them, and encourage anyone who has ever played the game to do so as well.

Most important, we want to get physical letters onto Mr. Kim's desk. E-mails make a forceful statement, but the impact of receiving 2,000 e-mails is not nearly as great as the impact of having 2,000 physical letters sitting on one's desk. Nothing impresses a CEO like a piece of paper with a name on it, because it is a tangible reminder that there is an actual paying customer behind it.

When you write to Mr. Kim, it is important to follow some simple but crucial guidelines:

1. Be polite. I cannot stress this enough. A letter which begins with criticism and outrage ends in the wastebasket. Hostility toward a shutdown only validates the decision to be rid of such customers. BE POLITE.

2. Being polite does NOT mean being deferential. As a customer, you are entitled to certain considerations, and it is not at all improper to request that your expectation of those considerations be met. Write as an equal, as one gamer to another, and make it clear that your devotion to the game represents your devotion to the NCsoft as a continuing customer. Threatening never to buy another NCsoft game is counter-productive, but asserting your continued commitment to subscribing to or purchasing items in-game from "City of Heroes" cannot hurt our case.

3. Be brief. One paragraph is all you will need. "One page: read, two pages: dead." Remember that you are writing to the CEO of a major corporation. It is not reasonable to assume he will have the time to read every letter through and through, but knowing that the first ten letters say the same thing as the next 990 will make an impact.

4. Put a Subject line before the text of your appeal. A single line that says something like "Please do not end my subscription to City of Heroes!" gets your point across and reminds him that you and the thousands of other letter writers are part of his profits.

5. Send letters to both the US and Korean offices of NCsoft. We can't know for sure where Mr. Kim will be at any given time, but knowing that he has stacks of mail waiting for him at either office is part of the message we want to send.

6. Send all letters via "Certified Mail/Addressee’s Signature Required/Return Receipt Requested". This takes a little more effort and costs a little more, but it is well worth it. According to US Federal postal laws, a letter so marked must be signed for by the address or their legal representative, which in the case of CEOs is usually their personal administrative assistants; usually it's not the receptionist or security guards. This is your best shot at getting your letters directly to where they will do the most good.

7.Don't stop at one letter! If you can mail a letter every day, that would be great! But try to send at least one every week. Keep the flood of letters going. They are expecting an initial surge of appeals. What we want to show them is an ongoing commitment to saving the game.

All letters should be addressed to Mr., Taek Jin Kim, CEO, at the two main offices of NCsoft:

In the United States:

Mr. Taek Jin Kim, Chief Executive Officer
NCsoft Corporation
1501 4th Avenue, Suite 2050
Seattle, WA 98101
UNITED STATES

In Korea:

Mr. Taek Jin Kim, Chief Executive Officer
NCsoft Corporation
157-37 Samsung-dong
Kangnamu-gu, Seoul 135-090
KOREA

These are the corporate offices. Writing to any other addresses will reach NCsoft facilities, but may not reach Mr. Kim in time, or at all.

Please get involved!

We already KNOW that the game will be GONE if we do NOTHING.

If we do SOMETHING, we may have a chance to save it!

Good luck to all of us, and start getting those letters out!

Sincerely,

DASHER

P.S. If we save this game, I swear you will never hear me complain about "Travel Power Suppression" ever again. You have my word on it!

Thank you Zwilly and all at Paragon Studios for giving me a home away from home, for giving me an extended family who I've grown to cherish for the last 5 years, for giving me a place to go when real life needed to go away for a time. To some it may seem silly to grieve for the loss of a game, but for us players it was more than that. I never thought I would be so emotional about a game being discontinued.

Thank you Zwilly for being a part of the Moonfire TF (Virtue server) I was forming and showing me the old "Pocket D" afterwards. Not the best Moonfire I'd ever done, but fun nonetheless.

This feels like knowing the world is going to end and trying to figure out what I want to accomplish before it does. So I will be there until the "fat lady sings" and darkness falls upon Paragon City, the Rogue Isles and Praetoria.

Best wishes to the dedicated employees of Paragon Studios.

Thank you. The community of this game has always been head and shoulders above the community of any other online game I have played. Thank you for helping to make it so.

<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison

This family of 5, me my wife and 3 sons, would like to thank everyone for the last 6 1/2 yrs.

We have over 15.000 hrs in this awesome game, and quite frankly we dont know what our Saturday afternoon game will be after the game is all.

Together we have over 120 lvl 50´s on all servers and a total of 324 chars in the game.

This game has brought us more joy than anything else.

I thank you all, the Devs, the players and our 40+ VG mates.

Thanks !

Andy,

I tweeted this to you yesterday, but in case you missed it:

I've been through a lot of community managers over the years, across many MMOs. I don't hesitate to say that you're the best I've ever seen. The next community to have you at the helm should consider themselves blessed.

Thanks a lot to all you Zwill and all the Paragon Studios people. City of Heroes has always been a great game, and it's better than ever now. You've all done such wonderful work, and it's so sad to see it go away.

We may never know what the Omega incarnate slot would look like... except Zwillinger already got his own from the Lovecraft branch.
Of course you need a few [R'lyeh's rain] to craft it

Remember on Virtue, many were violently scratching their heads repeatedly when they heared this:

Quote:

[Admin] NCsoft_Zwillinger: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!! [Admin] NCsoft_Zwillinger: It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!

Huh ? God ? Hand ? Window ?
Ooh, i know where i've already seen this...



(couldn't find a higher res pic, sorry ^^)

(I know i know i'm evil sometimes... but i've got some kind of [Tyranny] inherent hehe)

Nope, aliens won't find you. Not even the riktis, i'll still count their corpses to sleep as one could count sheeps, bwhahaha ^^

Best wishes for the future and many thanks to you and all the team, past or present for your work =)

Thanks for all your hard work.

It´s been a real pleasure. I´m really going to miss COH

I am so glad I kept my subscription up since the game was released, so I think I did everything I can, but regardeless of that, it did not work out. I will miss this game and all of you so much *cries*

I'm late to the party, somehow I missed all these parting dev posts in this section.

Zwillinger, I have never had the opportunity to meet you or any other Paragon Studio folks. But I have been here, in this game, since the very day it went live, and I was present on the forums not long after.

There have been many talented and fun people working on and facilitating CoH since those days, and I am grateful to all of them. But well before this sad news hit us, I had been thinking you were our best Community Manager yet.

I liked our past community folks. I really did, and I think all of them did good things for us. But you've just gone further than they did. You've really managed to straddle a line between being our buddy and being a sensible employee of a game company. You've explained things to us just a bit more often, in just a bit more down to earth way. You've engaged with us in more ways, what with the video streams and the coffee talks and so on. I don't know if your example helped lead Paragon Studios into greater openness overall, or if you were just one of many new faces who collectively were more communicative and interactive with our players. In the end, you were all awesome.

I thought some of the past community folks left some big shoes to fill, at least in some ways. None of those shoes are big enough for you. Not one.

If you go on to community management elsewhere, I have no doubt you will help bring fantastic energy to the community. They would be lucky to have you.

Thank you, and godspeed.

Zwill is a beast.

The amount of abuse he took on PVPEC Vent, Victory PvP Vent and just ingame...wow. An angrier man would have spawned giant robot form and nuked us all.

A hearty thanks to you, Zwill. I won't actually come out and say you were my fave redname.... How 'bout I say you were the redname I actually saw ingame the most. I still remember the first admin message I saw in game. You taunted us to chase you down in PvP. I was not leveled high enough, but I tried to scramble to find the entrance...never got there...LOLZ!
Thanks for all you've done for us. Best of luck in the future.

Hugs to you and my prayers go out to you on your next endeavor. May you make that place as special as you did here!!

I think this sums up my experience with City of Heroes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMoMBFhMdDw

Thank you for all the work you've done managing this community and for the weekly dev chats, Zwillinger.

And sorry if I didn't say 'Hi!' that time you suddenly appeared out of nowhere on the Defiant server and surprised a team of fearless heroes on a Positron Task Force. It sort of caused me to crash out.

Thanks for the hard work Z, and your down to earth friendliness. It was well noted you did your best to address different players personally, and it is beyond commendable. You rocked my friend, and brought a big smile to my face when I would see your name in red.

Take care, keep the city safe, and maybe we will meet in the sky some day!

Paragon Vanguard
Luke Minhere
Ammo Dump

Thank you, Zwill. I am sad to see you go but, fates willing, we will all meet again someday. Go, spend some time with the family, they'll appreciate it very much.

Like so many moments in life, a song comes to mind.

"I'm leaving here
And you'll know why when I'm gone
I'm leaving here
Translate your knowledge to this song
I won't forget
Why our words were meant to mesh
Why I'm glad we shared a glass
I gave something to your soul
And you gave me more than you will ever know!"

--Armored Saint, "Upon My Departure"

Andy,

From amongst those that shone brilliantly, you radiated like the sun.

You were the best of them, Andy. Your mark has been left, and it is eternal.

May you and your family achieve even greater achievements and prosperity.

I don't have the words. Only tears.

Fair winds and following seas, Z.