Hellgate: London Servers Shut Down

[GameBanshee News]

In preparation of the new free-to-play format, Bandai-Namco has shut down the North American server and forum for Hellgate: London. You can view the final-minute reports from either HellForge or Pumping Irony.

Former Flagship Community Director Diane “Tiggs” Migliaccio — yes, the same Tiggs that SOE fired for allegedly taking the players’ side after the NGE was released (many opinions on that debacle, your mileage may vary) — was back yesterday and spent nearly the entire day chatting and saying goodbye to Hellgaters. She’s currently the Community Director for Fallen Earth but she was given her powers back for Hellgate’s final day and placed in charge of “flipping the switch” for the forums. Someone else was in charge of shutting off the servers; if she ever said who it was, I wasn’t online for it. During the final couple hours, Tiggs went from simply chatting with us to using the Announcement channel, which is how the aforementioned uninformed players discovered the game was shutting down.

Tiggs’ first announcement read “Reminder that the Hellgate London NA and EU servers as well as the forums will be shut down at midnight CST.” That’s when the uninformed started asking “Is this for maintenance? How long will the server be down?” and some of us began explaining what was happening.

At 11pm CST, Tiggs announced “Sadly the servers and forums will be shutting down in one hour.” Every so often she would update with a countdown of time remaining.
(...)
The last few lines of chat that came across my screen were:

Take care all, let’s kick ass wherever we go!

love u all

dang this really SUX

bye everyone!

Seconds after that final goodbye, there was a sudden jolt of lag as we were all sent back to the Hellgate title screen and greeted with the message of a virtual world that no longer exists:

[DesR85]

Not too sure if I understand this but they're going free-to-play and decided to shut down the servers?

Three words: What's the point?

[Brother None]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DesR85 Not too sure if I understand this but they're going free-to-play and decided to shut down the servers? Three words: What's the point?

The free-to-play reincarnation will be under another company, Hanbitsoft. Maybe they could've coordinated the transition to be more smoothly, but in any case there's bound to be a server break, and at least this way it's clean.

[Tricky]

And so lord Perth fell, and the earth did shake with his thunder.