I'm going to interpret that as Lackey admitting that her previous writings were not good. (I've tried numerous times to read her books but haven't been able to).
Mercedes Lackey posts as Victoria Victrix over at the Titan Forums. She's been very vocal in trying to save CoH/V, while Brian Clayton (Paragon Studio's head) has been leaking information through her. She was also involved in writing a pitch to Disney about why they should buy CoH/V from NCsoft. I'm providing that as perspective for interpretation of her comments on this matter. Also, the comments about "interested parties looking to buy" always omits who these potential investors are and how much they were willing to offer. A lot of people on the Titan Network think that NCsoft should sell CoH/V at any price (and - again through Lackey - believe that now that CoH/V is shut down NCsoft's legal department is happy for it to be sold because of some kind of contractual restrictions that existed previously while it was active etc etc) so NCsoft should be considering any offer. CoH/V has a hardcore fandom who tend to ignore the problem that CoH/V was shrinking in active player numbers for years, possibly because the developers were catering to this fandom.
I think this was more because it was old and a little grindy, with no real end game to speak of. It came out pre-Wow, and was definitely showing its age. I just don't think NCSoft put in much of an effort, (like with most of their properties, they stuck it in maintenance mode.)
CoH was in pretty much the opposite of maintenance mode when it got shut down, actually. The dev team that was in place over the last year put a lot of work into improving and adding to the game both in terms of systems and content (including a fully-fleshed out end game). For awhile one of my big complaints was how the game always got new systems but very little new content. The last year or so changed that fairly substantially. The game was old and the playerbase was shrinking, but it was eight years old and that 'hardcore fandom' was much more loyal than the players of many other MMOs. An old MMO is not going to attract a lot of new players so it makes sense to try to keep the ones you have. But almost all of the changes made would have been welcome by new players as well as vets in terms of the streamlining and improved storytelling. Basically I'm saying Unsub's assertion is weird and without foundation, while Athryn's assessment is testimony to the great job NCsoft did of getting word out on how the game was improving. :P
Not to mention gating much of that content behind additional purchases on top of the subscription fee. I never took to the "It's only cosmetic stuff, you don't really need it" when much of the content was not cosmetic (Ninja Run in particular) and when the costume builder was the only thing making COH not a dry, stale, grindy old MMO. That wasn't particular to the F2P release; it had been going on since before Going Rogue. F2P was more of the same, and selling powersets for extra money on top of the subscription was the last straw for me.
Since 2009-ish or so. At least the declining players bit; I was curious when Going Rogue was announced about what it would contain and wasn't very taken with the direction it went. I thought then that if GoRo didn't bring players back that CoH/V would have some harder choices ahead of it. But there was a vocal group on the forums who loved GoRo and would argue against complaints about it.But GoRo didn't really grab players and ended up a ghost town for a lot of reasons people predicted (i.e. only the first 20 levels, not a particularly engaging place). The problem with the amount of reinvestment made back into CoH/V would have been done on the grounds it would help grow the game's revenue, which it resolutely failed to do. I agree that they had a loud and loyal fanbase (and still do). But they were a shrinking pool.
