Ok, I'm about to write a book here...
I was an original beta tester for City of Heroes, about the same time that I got married. My wife is a very sweet person that I'm very fond of. When I told her about the new game that I was beta testing, she would watch me play, and very quickly became a fan. The playstyle, the stories, the open world, the lack of requirements for constant missions, the community that was quickly forming, which was different from other games, intrigued her. When the game went live, she and I both signed up. We played together on teams, made friends that we would see and talk to daily, and had fun. She loved that she could play as little or as much as she wanted, without being penalized. She was never a big gamer, but City of Heroes was the game for her. We played all the way up to the end, hoping that there would be some sort of last minute plan or escape clause, but no such thing happened. When the 'Save CoH' movement started, she had hope, and kept hoping. After CoH shut down, we tried to play other games together, but there was always something that was 'off' for her. DC Online, World of Warcraft, all of the others, couldn't capture lightning in a bottle. I stopped playing MMORPG completely, and gained other hobbies. My wife asked me, weekly, 'Is there any progress on bringing it back, or a version 2, or anything?' for the first year after shutdown. I stayed in touch on the Titan Network, followed developments, watch the lack of progress on the replacement versions, and shared things I thought were hopeful. The second year after shutdown all the way up to earlier this year, she still asked me once a month or so. She missed her CoH characters, her friends, and the fun we had from gaming together. We still did other fun things, but there was a tiny CoH shaped thing missing for her. Once the news broke about the pirate version, she was overjoyed. We quickly made characters and told all our old CoH friends about it, and we've had 5 of them return to the game, and we have a supergroup together. This is the good part of the story.
Now for the rest of the story. I'm not going to let this happen again. In real life, I am a server hardware and virtualization engineer. The very first thing I did was download a copy of the CoH server, client, and launcher, and got on eBay to find server hardware that would run it, which cost about $150. NCSoft has very little motivation to allow this to continue, and has not been very clear about their motivations in any of their negotiations. I applaud your efforts, but have very little hope that this will result in anything but a shutdown, either now, or six months from now, or a year from now. Later today I'm going to be saving all of the costumes for the characters I and my wife have carefully recreated from our old Live days on Freedom, and brace for impact.
I would very much like for the Homecoming guys to allow us to export existing characters, just so I don't have to powerlevel on my own or someone else's server.