One year later, City of Heroes’ officially recognized fan server has me praying it’s the future of dead MMOs

A little over a year ago, City of Heroes got the sort of second chance most defunct MMOs never do: a fan-made private server with written permission from the publisher to continue operating.

While NCSoft hasn’t guaranteed that the fan server can last forever, it’s a mite more generous than the cease and desist letters typically handed out to these sorts of things. World of Warcraft’s Classic version only came to be after a notoriously huge private server with the same idea got the boot, and Disney has been playing whack-a-mole with Club Penguin clones ever since the real thing shut down.