*peers through the dust and embers*

Originally Posted by Iron_Emerald

I don't think it's at all mysterious that people have a different reaction to something they have first hand knowledge of versus something they don't. Of course I'm going to complain more about City of Heroes shutting down than I am about those other games. For myself the only one of the other games I'd even heard of before was Tabula Rasa, and I'd never heard anything about it shutting down. City of Heroes on the other hand has been my favourite game since I started playing it a couple of years ago.

If I had heard of the games shutting down at the time then I'd have felt sorry for the players and maybe even signed a petition if somebody asked. But I really wouldn't have much knowledge of which side was in the right. Here though I know enough about people like Arcanaville and the devs that I choose to believe them when they say the game was doing well. I also know that I object to the timing of it coming so close to Issue 24 coming out. Whether you agree with those reasons or not, it's information I just wouldn't have on games I haven't played and occasionally read the forums of.

And as for the "why is 4 games in 4 years closing acceptable, but 5 games in 5 years isn't?" line. Everybody will have a different kind of threshold for when this kind of thing would start to count as a red flag. For some people they won't deal with a company after they've shut a single game the 'wrong way' others are going to be just fine with 5 games in 5 years. But I'll bet they wouldn't be happy to keep giving money to an MMO company that made traditional MMOs and shut them all down after a month. The last example is silly extreme, but the point is that everybody has a level where they decide there's too much of a pattern to keep doing business with a company. Some people feel they've reached that level with NCSoft, both due to their personal feelings over City of Heroes and the number of other games they've closed.