Just an idle musing, prompted by the upcoming closure of Glitch. My wife is a big fan of this game and intends to be online at the stated shut-down time in order to participate in whatever kind of farewell they provide. The whole thing is really rather melancholy.
Has anyone else ever been online at the time of a game server shutdown? What happens? Does it just fade to black, or does it freeze up and never move again?
I played APB right up until they shut it down, it has recently launched as a free to play game. In the final hours players were engaged in all kinds of behavior that would get you banned like admitting to using hacks, spamming chat with racist messages and just general mayhem. It was like a big virtual riot.
I remember when the Gaming Zone was closing down (I think because it had been bought by Microsoft and was turning into the Microsoft Gaming Zone) (and in fact I probably have its name wrong), and on the last day they were going to shut the games down one by one, in reverse order of their creation, until the last game going was Hearts, and then shut it down too.
But I don’t think I actually watched it happen.
My only MMO is City of Heroes, and I haven’t played it since NCSoft suddenly announced they were killing it. So no.
I just found Glitch last month, and will pay until Dec 9th when they pull the plug. Damn it all - I am stuck in bed wit a freaking EEE PC netbook because my laptop finally died and this has not been a good fall and winter so far pain-wise. This really sucks because I actually was having fun, and since it is flash it plays just fine on a gimpy little netbook.
Anybody ave any suggestions for another game?
I’d assume you just get some “Lost connection to server” error just like if you’re on when they take the servers down for maintenance.
Sorry to revive this thread after so long, but I did in fact play Glitch right up to the server shutdown. As Jophiel said, the very last thing that happened was a grayed-out screen and a “server restarting” message. For about the last half hour, the server lag was pretty prohibitive, and my Glitch ended up stuck in transit trying to get home. 
I thought they handled the shutdown very well overall. There was lots of new content released over the last month and everyone got a bunch of free in-game credits to spend.
My wife’s article on the Glitch shutdown just went live at PCWorld. She played the game far longer than I did.
I logged on to CoH about 15 minutes before the end, basically to see the game off. There wasn’t anything special going on gamewise; lots of protesting and angry people & people wishing each other well though.
Yup, played until they pulled the plug. The grief in game was amazing.
It really was amazing. I have to say, I did not expect to be this affected by the closure of an MMO I played for maybe a month total.
It was truly a preposterous game. And yet, we kind of liked it.
That’s all that happened for the recent City of Heroes shutdown. It happened early for one of the busy servers, too, ruining many a forlorn plan to leave avatars in specific places, in the middle of a task force, etc.
Me, I just parked all my avatars one more time and signed off early.
I think that if a company is going to shut down a game server and thus take away the world/platform forever, they don’t have a lot of investment in a grand finale.
I agree wholeheartedly.
And yet I will really miss it.
<grin>
I am grumpy because the in game community were fantastic, and I was just getting my tower set the way I liked it. I finished adding 2 storeys to myhouse [a bedroom, and a workspace for Mr Cranky my craftbot] and a full tower. I had all 4 machines in the workshop with around 30 storage boxes holding finished product to make towers and the assorted materials for making all of them [and a box for the building permit], the lobby was a cubimal race track, I had a gardening floor with all the herbs and their seeds, and a music room with a comfy chair and all the music boxes, and a chow hall with enough storage boxes to hold all the cooking ingredients, shelves for the tools and a nice worktable … I would have loved to have had another month because I could have actually filled each of the storage boxes with a maximum of contents. The right side of my street made a fuel cell but I hadn’t really decided what to do about the left side.sigh
I agree, which makes what Tiny Speck did for Glitch all the more remarkable.
<high five from the Emo Bear> 
Sounds like you had a really awesome place! I never got that far, mainly because I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to nest or just explore. I eventually ended up trying to build up my house because I was accumulating so much stuff, but I couldn’t get very far before the game ended.
The fun in a game for me now is in the exploring and crafting - after being hard core raid in Everquest, and World of Warcraft, and living in null in EVE Online, a nonviolent explore and tradeskill sandbox was absolutely perfect. I am in wicked pain this fall and winter, my damned laptop died so I needed something I could play on my gimpy little EEE PC …
Honestly, if I turned around and won a sizable lottery, I would negotiate with Stoot to buy Glitch, contact Kukubee and the gent who did the music, and a buddy of mine who is a major computer geek with contacts and see what I could do about porting it from flash to something else and globally emailing all the accounts about it starting up again.
I swear, with proper advertising, and a few tweaks to things and in probably 2 years I bet we could have it running in the black. The book project financed in something like 2 days, and the music project financed in about that time as well.
Yup, I played my own MUD up until the time the server application ran for the final time.
It was a school project, me, my group, and the graders were the only ones who ever played it to begin with. 
