Dismantling a Naysayer

This is the Naysayer.

Certain of my Twitter friends advise taking the high road, ignoring the troll, believing that commenting on stupidity dignifies and elevates it.

Those of you familiar with my forum career will realize the futility of appealing to my better nature with such rarefied philosophizing- I've always found open contempt and mockery to be vastly more effective at stopping the spread of epidemic ignorance than silence, however high minded and well intentioned.

And so, on to the Naysayer:

 I consider myself to be a moderate and realist.

Well, sure, doesn't everyone?
Nobody sees themselves as anything other than the reasonable, rational center of the universe.

And yet, how often reality differs from that rose-colored viewpoint.

It is also interesting to me how this echoes the self image of the forum posse that was super invested in dictating how other players ought to react to the shutdown announcement- they also were "realists", "adults" who understood the situation better than those silly people who had allowed themselves to become emotionally attached to a video game and who insisted on carrying on in such an unseemly fashion.

I have the same opinion of this fellow as I had of them- there is a word for the sort of person who hangs around funerals inflating their self-worth by denigrating the mourners.....but "realist" ain't it.

But by being that, if one is faced with a huge load of unjustified optimism, idealism, and illusions of grandeur, one always ends up looking like a terrible cynic.

Terrible certainly applies, but nope, "cynic" isn't the right word either.

Also, point of order: one cannot engage in "unjustified" optimism or idealism.
I understand some folks like to sprinkle 'big words' more or less randomly into their writing in an effort to sound more erudite and intelligent, sort of like witnesses on those judge shows who try and bolster their credibility by using fifteen words when three would do.

Alas, such efforts inevitably generate the opposite of the intended effect.

I don't dislike City of Heroes.

No?

So you go out of your way to slag off the efforts of people fighting for something they love out of habit?

Huh.
Y'know, you'd look like much less of that thing you don't want to call yourself if you did dislike CoH.

But if I read that the huge "Save City of Heroes" campaign managed to get a whopping 19,000 online signature on their petition, I can't help but snortle. 

Well of course you can't, because you're such a giant a.......oh wait, we're not supposed to notice that because you think you're such a moderate realist, right?
Okay, okay, I'll keep playing along.

In a market where a game with 200,000 actual *subscribers* is regarded as a failure, how is any company going to be impressed by 20,000 non-committal online signatures?

Well, putting aside the truly gargantuan straw man you've erected, a company that casually axes a profitable game the way NCsoft has obviously doesn't give two squirts what its players think.  I'll grant that being deaf to the dulcet clarion call of sweet, sweet greenbacks they're unlikely to take notice of a petition.

But that petition is just one aspect of, for want of a better term, The Resistance.

And if we are engaging in the digital equivalent of facing an advancing armored column with little more than swords, spears & ritual facepaint....

What of it?

Following your sterling example and collapsing on our butts the better to mock the un-serious dummies who care enough to keep fighting would guarantee failure.

If each of these 20,000 people would have sent $100 to NCSoft, that wouldn't have been enough to save City of Heroes.

As noted this was not an economic decision- the game remains profitable.  The Free to Play model was successful enough to finance an avalanche of content unlike any previously seen.
You managed another factually accurate statement, if not the one you thought you were making- congratulations!

So...why keep fighting, in the face of an indifferent corporate bureaucracy with a history of MMO genocide?

I'm glad you asked!

And what, precisely, does that make you, fella?

Yeah....that's what I thought.