A huge chunk of me died inside when the world of halo 2 stopped. But, i will always have those memories until the day i die/stop gaming.
Rumours said it was to allow for a bigger friends list. I disagree with this and im pretty sure this was disproven. If anything from a business and economic perspective, it was costing them money to keep the original XBL servers up, when only a couple of hundered (thousands when the shutoff was announced) were using it.
I like to think that everything happens for a reason and always try to look for the reason as to why this happened. I wish that there was an offical reason released as to why this happened. But if you are right wilis_kid, which I think you might be, then an annoucement of that calibre might cause a huge outburst of anger towards microsoft. I just hope that the sacrifice of halo 2 online was not in vain!
[Edited on 08.17.2011 5:51 PM PDT]