As formulated by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross relating to how people react to terminal illness or to any other personally catastrophic news. I saw all of these in the CoH community since the word came down yesterday that the game was being shuttered — including all of these comments or variants thereof (well, not much of #5 yet).
- Denial — “NOOOOOOO!” “I don’t believe it!” “I feel numb.” “This makes no sense.” “It’s a fake to increase interest in the game.” “Someone else will buy the game and keep it running.”
- Anger — “It’s not fair!” “NCSoft is screwing us!” “I’ve put all this time and effort in and now they just take it away? Unacceptable!” “Why are they doing this? I demand an explanation!”
- Bargaining — “Isn’t there anything we can do?” “Petition NCSoft to keep the game running!” “Petition NCSoft to make the game open source so someone else can keep it running!” “Petition Sony to buy the game!” “Can’t they just let the servers run without any extra change or growth in the game?”
- Depression — “I’m never going to play a game again.” “”Nothing will ever be as good as CoH was.” The game will be over soon, so what’s the point of playing it with any of my characters?” “I’ll never be able to think of how I met my spouse in the game without being sad now.”
- Acceptance — “It’s going to be okay.” “There are other games out there — what is everyone else moving to?” “It’s had a good run and I’ve enjoyed it. Time to move on.”
I have been through some of those stages. I don’t know that i can move on to another game though. I will never love another game like I love City of Heroes. I do not want to poor my money into another game that they can just take away. I bought a Harley recently. I will just poor my money into that and other real world stuff instead so no one can take my efforts away from me again.
Hehe. This is spot-on. I’m now hovering around the depression stage. I have no desire to play, or to find a replacement (with little faith that there’s anything else out there that would tick all the boxes that CoH did anyway), and feel really sad when I think back to all the time I spent with various characters and people in the game. I also have an almost desperate urge to screen shot or video everything in order to save my characters some how. I’m just not sure how best to do it. Maybe if we all take enough screen shots we could create Google Paragon Street View! 🙂 Ah well, it’s all very silly, but I’m definitely not over it yet. 🙁
Something to be said for that, Elfin, certainly. Of course, any pastime is transitory sooner or later.
I plan on doing some scrapbooks myself, Stuart …