I don't have money to spend monthly fees. Although if it was yearly then maybe.

This is why when I get my new PC the the MMO I will be playing will be guild wars (the second one looks so good, better than WoW IMO)

I don't mind, because if you think about it...... one brand new game is 50-60 bucks, and most gamers buy a new game once a month, so there spending more on buying a new game other then just paying 15 monthly.

Have you ever thought that some of them may well be advlts who don't have enough money to go around? Not everyone wants to spend $15 bucks a month to play a game you know.

If a developer wants to charge, keep it low or do this: Make some of the game free to play and charge for the rest. Global Agenda did it well.

But again, the problem isn't that they charge. It's how much they are charging.

Let's look at it this way: If blizzard charged $5 USDs a month to play WoW, they would make $7,500,000 a month. After 12 months, they would have made $90,000,000. This is assuming that they have 1.5 million active players.

And you tell me that they couldn't afford it? Because at $15 USDs right now they make $270 million.

They could definitely afford to charge less.

Or, they should do something like LOTRO did and allow you to get a lifetime subscription for around $180 USDs.

I wouldn't want to pay a monthly fee.

For instance:
What if I have a really busy month and I can't play for more than a few hours? I'd have wasted $xx.xx money.
Why should I have to pay to play something when other games have persistent worlds set up for free, or other no-fee forms of multiplayer?
What am I really buying with that money? The ability to play the game? Then why are there some games that offer hundreds of hours of entertainment without the hefty cumulative price tag? For the price of the MMO game + the monthly fees, I could by at least half a dozen games a year that would entertain me.

My biggest, game-breaking, reason-I-quit-every-time gripe with Blizzard was that even though they made boatloads of money to run their servers...every single Tuesday was blackout day. Like 15 guaranteed hours of primetime daylight that every single server is down, every week, without fail.

If people pay so much money you'd expect them to be able to handle maintenance a little more...timely.

So just get them for the PC or PS3 :hehe: .

I don't mind it. If I feel like playing WoW I pay 15 bucks for a month, and just cancel when I don't feel like playing anymore. $15 is not that much for a potential 1 month of game time, since it is not like a single player campaign which you can actually beat. If I had to call up the company or do some tedious thing just to cancel my recurring subscription, then I would not play that game.

The free MMOs are worse anyways... like that crap Maplestory game where people spend hundreds of dollars a month on in-game clothes that freakin' expire. Monthly fee=good, microtransactions=bad.

I would argue that a monthly fee is a form of microtransaction. :shrug: Besides, what about the highly successful no-monthly-fee Guild Wars?

I have not played Guild Wars, but a single payment for the game and no fees after sounds good. It all depends on how the company makes money, and how much their server costs are.

Guild Wars is mainly an instanced game right? They probably save on server load by not having a large, seamless worlds like WoW, so they are able to make it free.

I don't mind paying monthly fees as long as the company adds new content and protection against cheaters. WoW does that in spades. What I hate is online games with monthly fees that charge to 'unlock' what is on the disc already or sit on their hands while hackers destroy the game. A good example of this is Phantasy Star Online. Sega had a license that could print money but through laziness and inepitude ****ed it away. Maybe they would be in better shape today if they took better care of their possible cash cow.

This is true. But Guild Wars is also praised a lot because it hasn't fallen into the online-store model that lots of these "free" MMOs have to compensate no monthly fees. Infact the only way they make any extra money off of current players is selling all of these standalone expansions. So in effect it IS like paying for content updates, but not any more than paying for Burning Crusade.

Then you see pitiful husks like Anarchy Online have all of their expansions, and they keep having to make them free because nobody plays anymore.

Totally against it. I once considered to play EVE online, but that was only because there is a time in that game where the in-game money can pay your monthly subs (official method of doing it too, supported by the company).


The amount you have to pay for the quality of game you get is ridiculous. Personally, I have tried most of the MMOs out there (WoW, EQII, EVE etc.) and none have them (other than EVE) has managed to keep my attention longer than the trial period. I quit WoW after about 4 hours it was that dull.


If you want to waste your money spending ?15 a month to play the same game, fine, but I'd rather put that ?15 a month to better use and buy a CD that I can listen to for the rest of my life, or a game (from a few years back) for more than a month.


Also: the xbox live thing, ?40 for a year to play any game online in said year, is not the same as ?15 a month to play one game online for said month.

Personally, I think Xbox live is expensive, I have, but it is expensive for what you get. And don't give me all that nonsense about it being better to the PSN, because, personally - I get far more connection issues with XBL than I do on PSN. And PSN is free.


[rantyrantrantrantRANT]

Monthly fees don't bother me one bit. When I subscribe to an MMO I know that I will be getting my money's worth for the subscription. The cost averages out quite nicely (at least in my case). When I subbed on LOTRO, I was averaging about 3 days played in game per month (~2 hours per day). Fifteen dollars meant that, per hour, I was paying ~20 cents. That's a pretty good deal. By comparison, I've only played 2 days of MW2 so far and the cost per hour is $1.25. Gradually, that will come down as I play more, but I wonder if it'll ever hit 20 cents an hour.

It's like my gym's monthly fees. Sure, $50 a month sounds like a lot, but when you spend 2 days at the gym each month, the hourly costs aren't all that great (especially compared to the cost of gym equipment).

I understand that some people play significantly less, so the cost effectiveness may not work for them. In which case, I wouldn't recommend playing an MMO at all, because they are quite a time investment. Finding a group for an instance can take 30 minutes by itself, not including the instance itself and any potential wipes.

I cannot stand the monthly charges. That is why I will never play them.

This. I barely buy any games anyway, I'm certainly not going to keep getting charged monthly.

What I would like to see is a company that takes the MMO to the next level by hiring Dungeon Masters to DM each and every server, plus all the servers do not really have to have the exact same storyline going on as long as the stories fit into the story of the MMO. In Ultima Online in its hay day they had such a program in effect. The Dungeon Masters were called Seer's and any player could apply for and take an online interview and become a Seer. There were also other jobs in this program, some people were actors that the Seer's could use in their plots and stories and they were known as Troubadors. The Seer's came up with the stories and submitted them to the developer for approval. Once approved the Seer's story was then implemented on that Seer's server. No Seer could be a Seer on a server that they had regular characters on. All Seer, Troubador, or any other volunteer were provided a free account from the developer. Some of the Seer storylines took the server population a year of real time to complete, these were EPIC storylines and the beautiful part was that the plot would change according to what the players did. Many times my own character changed the plot of the story by things he did, and many other players were able to accomplish the same thing. This was just like playing a game that has Dungeon Masters and quite frankly todays MMO is really really boring compared to what UO had way back when....

Also the Seer had special abilities like being able to teleport his characters anywhere in the game world, they could also set up permanent or semi permanent gates to allow the players to travel with them or send them to a location. Also many times the gate would just appear because of what happened in the story and the Seer was there doing it all but invisible to the players. the Seer could also make items and give them special names to support their storylines. These items became the most rare of rares in the game and to own one was a real status symbol, most of them were owned by who ever was the last to use the item in the storyline. All of these items were just normal game items that had been given a special name, like "the sword of dawn" or "the lute of spirit silence", and yes some of them did end up on Ebay but usually someone who knew what that item meant to the server would purchase it and display it on their server with a book telling all about what it represented in the history of that server.

Why can't they spend the monthly fees and hire writers and Dungeon Masters that play the game in shifts and deliver dynamic storylines for the players to take part in? At least that way the population of the server actually makes the history instead of the developer ramming it down our throats with yet another raid dungeon in an update or expansion....

This. I'd rather spend my money on getting more games as opposed to just one.

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.wow.com/media/2009/02/wolfstatueoutsidehq.jpg

Ahh, the good old days... Even better were the player-built towns that sprang up, players scrimping and saving and slowly building them up bit by bit. UO did things that modern MMOs can't even contemplate. We held boxing tournaments, role-playing "raids" by neighboring orc players, abduction storylines, all-out war... The greatest moment was perhaps when Lord British came to visit our fair town of Deepwater (on the Europa shard) and we entertained him for an evening with songs and tales from some of our best bards at a banquet in his honor. Good times, good times...

I don't like paying them, which is why I play games like Guild Wars (no monthly fee) or Lord of the Rings Online, where you can pay a relatively small amount of money and get a lifetime subscription. Companies like Turbine definitely know how to provide value for their customers, even the ones that do pay monthly.

I don't really like the core game of most MMO's, I hate the fact that it isn't how good you are at the game, just how much time you can sink into it. That's one of the reasons why I liked Guild Wars better than any other MMO I have tried. Another thing is, especially with Steam deals, I would rather get $15 a month worth of new games than just keep spending it on the same one.

This , I was going to get into Wow , but I don't have the funds to pay it off monthly.

I don't understand the problem. I'll be using WoW as an example as it's the only consistently good MMO I've tried and still play.

-WoW has content patches on a regular basis, adding new dungeons, items and events.
-In game support from Game Masters, while the wait time is long that is to be expected with so many players on each server.
-Maintenance once a week and small bug fixing patches very often.
-Excellent security offers to keep your account safe.

In short, why would all that be free? The monthly fee isn't even that high, so I don't see the problem.


And what if that game turns out to be terrible (AoC comes to mind), you've just blown 300$ on a game you won't play, instead of paying 10$ for a month and then realizing it's not for you.

I agree. Besides if you buy a new game for $60 you are getting less gameplay than one month of WoW anyways, unless it is a really long RPG or a multiplayer game.

For the people saying "oh I can't afford to pay it every month", you can cancel on the website at any time, and you get to keep whatever days you have left in the month. If you pay $300 and get bored of the game in 2 months, then you have just wasted $270.

I've been playing MMOs since the AOL days when you paid by the hour. I seem to get a lot less these days for my money. When I was playing Gemstone, there were GM always in game, there were special events, like merchants, GM run monster raids on the towns, and even GM run quests now and again. Character names were policed and the chat channels were monitored for OOC comments.

These days, you pay and don't really get much. Any added content is likely to be packaged into an expansion, and nothing is policed. You have elves named things like "IpownUnoob" and "Dr111111zt" dancing on mailboxes and every other tell is from someone trying to sell you in game cash.

I play MMO mostly for the social interaction and group roleplay. It has become increasingly more difficult to find one that isn't overrun by Bnet kiddies.