laserwulf said:
The problem with the arguement about "why not just buy $15.00 worth of credits each month" is quite simple, someone else might choose to put more money into the game. With a subscription fee it establishes a base line from which all players work, it comes down to you and the amount of time your willing to invest, as opposed to someone simply being able to buy their way through things. What's more with a "cash shop" based game, the general tendency (going by asian MMOs and things like Farmville) is that the further you go the more it's going to cost to keep playing in a practical sense. A flat subscription fee keeps things from getting out of hand with the developers getting greedy once the cash shop is in place.
I will also point out that the $25 Celestrial Steed for World Of Warcraft is purely a cosmetic item, it is no more functional than any other mount in the game, and you still need to obtain the nessicary skills and pay for the training to use it at each level of abillity.
In comparison Star Trek Online's "Galaxy X Dreadnaught" is the only ship of it's class in the game, and provides a massive advantage to the players who have it because your ship is basically a part of your character, and this ship is pretty much a super-heavy cruiser that can mount cannons (which normally isn't allowed for a cruiser), packs a spinal mount, and is so far the only Federation ship equipped with a cloaking device. The Celestrial Steed doesn't really do anything for you in WoW except look cool, in Star Trek Online there are massive game play benefits attached to the item in question. What's more the issue with being the only ship of it's class is that as your character advances to each rank catagory you get a new tier of ships Lt., Lt. Commander, Captain, etc... that ship represents a tier higher than what can be obtained in the game without paying so basically it's a way of getting people to pay to access to endgame. Sort of like telling people in WoW that in addition to what they paid for the game and expansion packs, they have to pay a $25 fee to advance the last level so they can access the dungeons.
Now, the one bit you are correct on is that not everyone can invest the time in an MMORPG. However that is the way it is with any game or hobby, and that's perfectly fair. It's no worse than sitting down with any other game and being unable to beat it due to the fact that you don't put in the time. A better analogy though would probably be more akin to sports since the end game where most of the really dramatic action takes place requires a lot of work to get there and be able to keep performing. You not only need to raid, but you need to be able to farm for materials and such to keep supporting yourself, if you don't do that it's not going to work, that's part of the game. It's sort of like how some people that play baseball very casually aren't going to be able to make an established team, it doesn't matter if you don't have time to put into it because your doing other things, the coach still isn't going to let you onto the team without you investing the time and effort. Not every game is for everyone, and MMORPGs take a massive time committment to do well, that is part of the genere, if you can't put in the time that doesn't mean you should cheat or be able to buy your way in.
While I, and other players, might have invested hundreds of dollars in World Of Warcraft, all the people that have been around the same amount of time have invested the same thing, assuming they did not engage in illegal activitiy. Where we are respectively comes down to the time we put into it, and our respective levels of abillity (and what we decided we wanted out of the game of course). To put things into perspective "Farmville" has been around less time than World Of Warcraft, and people have spend far, far more money in that game to keep up with it. Heck, there was an incident covered her on The Escapist about some kid who stole his parents credit cards to buy thousands of dollars worth of virtual materials for Farmville.
I put very limited time into Guild Wars, so I can't claim any expertise, but I don't even consider that in the same league as World Of Warcraft, or other MMORPGs. It's defining factor is pretty much that it's free, but along with that you don't really have much in the way of a persistant world, there are very limited numbers of items, and most of it comes down to PVP which is pretty much why they call it "Guild Wars". I can see how some people love it, but it's in a differant league entirely.
