Chad Gulzow-Man

Nemesis makes much more sense. Since we kept beating him at chess, he decided to just burn the board to ash.

Same play controls, same chat and team features, etc.

Basically, CoH in a different setting with completely different NPCs and storyline.

You might as well say, "The only way to stop bullying is by just making sure no one ever comes in contact with anyone else."

The term is "sociopath." A psychopath will actively seek to cause pain to others and enjoy doing it.

Some people just feel things more extremely than others.

At the age she was when all of this started, it's really hard to not give in to peer pressure, especially when said pressure is baited with compliments. She made a mistake when she was 14 and it ruined her life. Eventually, she saw no other way out, and took her life.

I don't doubt things would have gotten remarkably better if she managed to finish high school and moved on to (a nice out-of-state) college. But high school--the mid to late teen years--is absolutely the worst time to be a social pariah. Not only was she the victim of bullying, but don't forget, that came as the result of her being the victim of a sexual predator.

So, it is sad. Extremely so. But her reactions were... understandable, if misguided and unfortunate.

I don't believe in an afterlife personally, but I do hope that she's found peace.

Totally this.

Like I said, I'm perfectly willing to pay money to whomever wants to legally run a server. But I consider donating to a fan-run emulator server a far more fair solution than the fact that the person/people/corporation that technically owns it are refusing my money and not letting me play at all.

The point isn't to make a profit on others' work, it's to maintain its availability to a public that also wishes to see that picture. An emulated server makes no claims on ownership, just like the fact that I can buy a copy of Van Gogh's Starry Night or Da Vinci's Mona Lisa doesn't mean I have any right of ownership to the original. Likewise, prints of a painting don't do anything to devalue the original work of art.

IF an emulated CoH server comes to be, nobody will claim that it was their inspiration that brought it into being. Nobody will say, "Yes, I invented Statesman." Nor should they require substantial fees for access to that content--any money earned for the effort of creating an emulator needs to go to maintaining the servers and the effort of improving the emulator (i.e., a small stipend to pay the people who maintain the game).

Anything else would, in fact, be immoral, and I would no longer support the project, but in fact oppose it.

Well, if another company legitimately purchases the CoH IP and restarts lawful servers, they'll be the ones who get my patronage. I'm not about to support illegal activity if a legal option exists simultaneously.

For the rest of your post... there's no reason to shut off the existing CoH game now if the plan is to make a sequel in a few years. And since Paragon won't be having anything to do with a sequel, should it ever come to pass, it's doubtful that it would really carry on the same spirit as the original. It would likely end up being a superhero-shelled version of a generic Korean grindfest with a heavy loot and PVP focus, and therefore be something I have no interest in playing at all.

Hey, we told them we'd be willing to continue paying for it. Since they told us they no longer want our money and put the thing we want in the trash anyway, there's no real victim in our just taking it.

Legally, we may be wrong; I'll admit that. But morally, it's not like they're going to miss it.

Legality and morality are not always one in the same.

The MMOs that make it to consoles are still server-based. Like on a PC client, the console client really only has to worry about handling what the player sees and hears, and gets messages from a server that tells it when and where to display them.

Likewise, the bulk of a player's client installation is graphic and audio files. The server program is going to have little if any of that, so it'll appear to be much smaller... but will in fact contain a lot more (in both number and complication) code.

What Bill said.

My tummy informs me that "it's still probably delicious."

Damn, now I want cake...

Actually, they gave us the okay to talk about other games shortly after they announced CoH was closing.

Politics is still a no-no.

This is the only thing that I can think of that may have pointed to the game being shut down, but it at least made SOME sense--the amount of people playing the game who spoke only German or French were minuscule.

Like you, OP, I also felt bad for them losing their native language, but I thought it was going to lead to more focused and faster releases in general.

Echoing this. Silver age campy ≠ bad.

Is it bad that I JUST got that reference...?

Granted, I only learned the name Sonny Crocket about 2 months ago as the result of playing the Back to the Future point-and-click adventure game by Telltale Games... I wasn't allowed to watch anything with guns in it in the 80s.

Good to know that my individual opinion is somehow incorrect. I'll get right on fixing that.