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Given that NCSoft already has a No-Monthly-Fee MMO, I'd bet this is a Pay Per Month.

Your website requires me to disable images or override your CSS to be remotely legible. Don't use dark backgrounds.

You mean like this? Really, the 'bright text on dark background' format is becoming nearly as common as the more traditional 'dark on bright'. Though I think this is mostly a matter of personal preference.

They probably mentioned CoH since NCSoft has published (or planned to publish) a fair amount of different MMOs in recent years, with CoH (arguably) being the most recognizable/successful.

I'm supposed to want to play this?

Well, it doesn't look like aimed for Guild Wars fans (game synopsis) for sure. ;-) Sounds like a sort of anti-GW.

It's not technically a MMO, but Guild Wars sounds like what you're looking for. There are a few missions which really require a reasonable team but mostly you can grab some AI henchmen and just go, or play random-team PvP arena (usually 5 min or less per round).

Guild Wars runs just fine windowed. You can even resize the window with your mouse to whatever resolution you desire. And it's a great game, to boot!

Guild Wars optionally distributes its client over the web and on BT. When you launch the client you can enter a prepackaged product key or click a button to purchase one in a web browser. This is a great solution for all parties! Players don't have to repurchase the game due to broken media, and Anet prevents abuse since "pirated" copies cannot be played without a purchased serial. It's still recommended, however, to download the client from a trusted source.

Well, allow me to recommend City of Heroes/City of Villains. This is a Superhero/Villain based game available in two flavors (although they can be installed Symbiotically so you can play both with just one subscription). You do have to pay $15/mo for it, but it meets all your other requirements I think. Its easy to solo, fun to play, can be quite challenging, and most importantly *almost* every type of character can solo more or less (some way better than others mind you), and you can easily jump on, do a mission for 20mins then quit, and feel like you accomplished something. As well, its very newbie friendly - particularly if you find a suitable guild to play with - as characters of every level can effectively play with characters at other levels via the Sidekick/Lackeying system that allows characters to temporarily assume a higher level when partnered with someone - if you did choose to group with people. The game is primarily focused on doing missions, and so combat oriented for much of its content, but it has some great storylines to follow, and the combat system is far superior to most other games IMHO. City of Villains is the newer of the two games, and thus the more evolved. City of Heroes will catch up with future expansions I expect.

For free games, you might be ok with GuildWars. Its a fantasy based combat game with some adventure/roleplaying elements. It is primarily PvP (player versus player oriented) and I personally didn't like it, but it doesn't have any monthly fees and you only need to buy the original boxed edition to play it. As the name suggests though, it may well be group PvP oriented and might not be as welcoming to a casual player. I tried it in beta and disliked it for various reasons, but your mileage may vary.

Links:
City of Heroes
City of Villains
Guild Wars
EVE Online

Hope that helps :)

There is also http://www.guildwars.com/ which has a client and looks really nice, its fairly primitive in gameplay, unless you thrive on PvP.

Check out Guild Wars. Buy the game once, then never pay ever again. Well, except for expansion packs, but that's normal :) Like the FAQ says (emphasis mine):

Several people in my family (or guild) intend to play Guild Wars. Do we each need to purchase a copy?

Like every other online game, anyone who wants to have a Guild Wars Game Account needs to have his/her own copy of the game. There is never a monthly fee to play Guild Wars, so you will have tremendous savings over most online games. Spawning multiple copies from a single purchase is disallowed and account sharing is a breach of the Rules of Conduct.

Check out Guild Wars. Buy the game once, then never pay ever again. Well, except for expansion packs, but that's normal :) Like the FAQ says (emphasis mine):

Several people in my family (or guild) intend to play Guild Wars. Do we each need to purchase a copy?

Like every other online game, anyone who wants to have a Guild Wars Game Account needs to have his/her own copy of the game. There is never a monthly fee to play Guild Wars, so you will have tremendous savings over most online games. Spawning multiple copies from a single purchase is disallowed and account sharing is a breach of the Rules of Conduct.

Sounds like marketing suicide......

those who prefer Playing Skills over Grind time play Guildwars
Level cap of 20, it only taks 20-30 hours to reach full level and have a bag full of "Phat Loot" , then its all about your playing skills.

Guildwars had a pvp sneak preview of the upcoming chapter (expansion doesnt cut it, its a full seperate game, that you can "plug in" to your old account) and a new end game dungeon we had to download 10-15 megs each, with most people logging in over the space of an hour, and the server was down for about 10 minutes. Guildwars might only have a fith/quater of WoW's population (5 Million VS 1Million a few months ago) , but it does also have nowhere near the funding (a year of WoW , 24 quid for the game, a tenner a month= well over 100 pounds (I belive this is correct) , guildwars= 24 pounds to buy and no fees)

If guildwars can get it right, i see no reason why WoW cant

Might I suggest Guild Wars?
There's even a free preview sort of thing for the next chapter that's going to happen January 20th-22nd, and I personally prefer GW over WoW most days of the week.

That makes it sound a lot like they're just trying milk people on money by making it a MMORPG, when heavily instanced games like GW and Diablo has clearly proven that even with regular updates, you can make them free to play and find alternative business models with e.g. expansions.

One of the reasons I always hesitate before purchasing a MMORPG is because I feel the developers may intentionally have slowed down the game and gone overboard in making repetitive actions so players will play the game for a longer time => more money for them. They can't think like that if they just base it on expansions, which e.g. GW has shown. At least with WoW, this seem to be the case. That game has ridiculous amounts of FedEx quests. Fetch me 10 purple flowers, fetch me 8 gargoyle hearts, fetch me 12 kitten paws, fetch me 9 sparkly rocks, kill a wizard and fetch me 1 tome, ... *sigh*

Many people have found Guild Wars to be the answer to your A ... As for B...Probably not likely (but a neat idea).

Actually, that sounds more like Guild Wars to me. You can join a party/get quests/buy things in a city, but you will never encounter another character who is not in your party outside of any city or town.

So far, the group of Blizzard vets that went off to form ArenaNet have done pretty damn well with their game GuildWars. We can hope that lightning will strike twi... er, thrice.

I am personally waiting for the game that takes into account the player's skill at the game itself instead of having XXX level will beat XXX-1 level, or YYY class will always defeat YZY class. It's idiotic and boring, and brings little to tactics in games of scale.

You should check out Guild Wars. It's made by NCSoft and the designers of the game designed it from day one specifically for that reason: balanced PVP. There are no uber-leet godly items that give players an unfair advantage. Anyone can create a PVP character that has the same items and stats as anybody else does at maximum level, giving you the opportunity to fight in a fantasy battleground where some kid that spent $100 on eBay isn't going to beat you just because he bought some godly sword of slaying that kills anyone in 1 hit.

PvE content is admittedly a little lacking compared to WoW, but it's a great game and has probably the best PvP experience I've seen yet.

Hello-

First off, in a static business such as id's, patches are very expensive to make. They are effectively lost revenue, as the time you spend on patches is time you cannot spend on new, money making endeavors. For a company that's making an MMO, a patch is supposed to help you keep your existing (paying) customers, and help you attract new customers. Also, realize that the game industry is small. There's only about 30,000 of us, and we all kinda know each other. And we know each other's business.

The rate at which Blizz burns through hardware is irrelevant--they don't own the hardware they're running on. World of Warcraft is hosted by AT&T's high availability clusters (at least in the US), as reported back in press release here, and mentioned quite a lot during the closed beta.

You must realize that if an area is not going to be a commercial win for Blizzard, they are not going to provide service there. It's one of the reasons they have not added servers in Australia. They mention this on their forums time and time again.

I think you misunderstood my chastising you for not spelling out the word 'fuck.' It was not to insinuate that you were young, but rather to insinuate that when you write something like '****ing', it just makes you look foolish. Cuss words only have negative meaning because we give them negative meaning. I'm certainly not going to take less offense because you chose to write it out or not. The thought was there either way, which is what is offensive (if anything). Just write it out, and be explicit. The only people who aren't going to take offense because you wrote 'sh*t' instead of 'shit' are most likely dimwits who are too wrapped up in appearances to have interesting or meaningful opinions anyways (or moms, who always take offense at that kind of thing.. Although your opinion is very valid mom, if you're reading this).

I'm comparing the rate of content releases by Blizzard to the rate of releases by NCSoft for Guild Wars, which is--by the way--free of subscription charges. They have a million subscribers, and they manage to release 2-3 updates a month. Blizzard, on the other hand, failed to get any patches out for the first 3 months, and still--9 "major" and 2 minor patches later--has failed to address issues that were plaguing WoW during beta. Then there's also City of Heroes, which releases the equivalent of Expansion packs *for free,* and has released 6 of them since their inception. They've also released patches that are too numerous to count. The MMOs that you cite with terrible patch times are the forerunners of the MMO industry. They were--by and large--the first guys out onto the pitch. Of course they were going to take longer to patch. But compare them to any of their competitors now, and they are sadly lacking.

Oh, and before I get any comments like "if you hate it so much you should quit..." I did. I cancelled my subscription a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, I'm on the six month renewal, so I still have 'till January before my subscription actually ends. I now play WoW about an hour a week, if that. And mostly that's just because I still pay for it. (I did, however, miss the entire 1.6 and 1.7 patches as I didn't play at all during that time).

Anyways, cheers!

While I agree with most of what you said, I have to disagree with the small excerpt above. If you check the Guild Wars ladder http://ladder.guildwars.com/ you'll see that Korea, if anything, is underrepresented on the first page. War Machine [War] and [KOR] were two of the top Korean guilds when the game released in April and have been conspicuously absent since the ladder reset last week. Incidentally, I'm a co-founder and officer of Idiot Savants (we're on the first page), and one of the few guilds that's existed since the game launched.

Europe's place at the top took most of us by surprise- in game they're known to have a hard time holding the Hall of Heroes (a round the clock tournament that culminates in a 2v1 king of the hill fight) and keeping favor (which opens the way to some of the high end PVE content). It's encouraging to see a large number of European guilds doing well- a week ago I had the impression that Europe would be a pushover division in the playoffs (kind of like the NL West in Baseball). I'm happy to say it looks like I was wrong.

The new skill changes have been good almost across the board. It was frustrating waiting for months without any skill changes to obviously broken mechanics, but when the devs finally acted they did a good job. The alpha testers I know say that the lead skill designer, Izzy, had his hands tied for a long time, but that he really knows his stuff. The devs have announced that there will not be any any skill changes during the ladder season (until February) unless an obvious bug is discovered (like Dust Trap doing 2x the listed damage). That's a good move in my eyes, after the fiasco they caused when they rebalanced skills in the middle of one of their previous tournaments, in essence neutering one team's(KOR) build without warning.

In all, I've gotten my money's worth many times over, and it looks like my guild will have a spot in the regional playoffs (and hopefully the finals in Taiwan). While the PvE no longer has my interest, at one time it did and it deserves a lot of praise. Neither part of the game (PvE or PvP) feels "tacked-on". The instanced maps do hurt the community aspect of the game somewhat- you eliminate griefers, kill-stealers, and PKers, but you also eliminate a good deal of tension and happenstance. It can be hard to find the community in-game. I found my niche by lurking, and eventually moderating, at some of the larger fansites, which is also how I met many of my current guildmates.

Hopefully you'll see us in Taiwan, and let's hope that the future expansions won't ruin the decent balance it's taken nearly six months to achieve.

Oh man, you have the most amazing insight into where this game is going! I'd just like to point out that the developers said right-out that the game is designed to avoid exactly this issue. Like, a year ago. (If you scroll down a bit, you'll see the question, "Am I required to buy new chapters?" They refer to "common areas" - these are the areas in the current scope of the game.)

If you think the designers won't be able to get around this problem, I suggest you take a peek at the game and the server structure. It lends itself to a modular expansion system pretty directly.

Guild Wars has some similarities to existing MMORPGs, but it also has some key differences. Like existing MMOs, Guild Wars is played entirely online in a secure hosted environment. Thousands of players inhabit the same virtual world. Players can meet new friends in gathering places like towns and outposts where they form parties and go questing with them. Unlike many MMOs, when players form a party and embark upon a quest in Guild Wars, they get their own private copy of the area where the quest takes place. This design eliminates some of the frustrating gameplay elements commonly associated with MMOs, such as spawn camping, loot stealing, and standing in a queue in order to complete a quest.

Guild Wars takes place in a large virtual world made up of many different zones, and players can walk from one end of the world to the other. In Guild Wars much of the tedium of traveling through the world has been eliminated. Players can instantly return to any safe area (town or outpost) that they have previously visited just by clicking on it in the world overview map.

Rather than labeling Guild Wars an MMORPG, we prefer to call it a CORPG (Competitive Online Role-Playing Game). Guild Wars was designed from the ground up to create the best possible competitive role-playing experience. Success in Guild Wars is always the result of player skill, not time spent playing or the size of one's guild. As characters progress, they acquire a diverse set of skills and items, enabling them to use new strategies in combat. Players can do battle in open arenas or compete in guild-vs-guild warfare or the international tournament. Engaging in combat is always the player's choice, however; there is no player-killing in cooperative areas of the world.

Players in Guild Wars can play with or against players from around the world in the global tournaments and arenas. And while players are initially placed in a region based on their selected language (so that there is a greater likelihood that others will be speaking their language) they can join up in the always-available International District to form parties and to play with anyone from anywhere in the world.

The lack of a monthly fee, has made Guild Wars a great introduction into the world of online RPG's for me. You can buy the game for $39.99 at Amazon and other places. I have been playing it for 6 months now so it's a bargain relatively speaking. They just released some new content for free in addition to the hours and hours of content the game already comes with.

Actually I have enjoyed Guild Wars so much I am now interested in WoW. This "no fee" introduction may help more people get to know this kind of game and then they can move on to the monthly fee games.

Guild wars will be selling expansion packs in the future, to add new content and pay the bills.

Oh no! Here come the GUILD WARS!

Let's not forget this week's Sorrow's Furnace update to Guild Wars

Let's not forget this week's Sorrow's Furnace update to Guild Wars

Meanwhile, Guild Wars is about to have a major update, even though I haven't spent a dime on it beyond the initial $30 for a CD key. Suckers ;-)

Personaly I refuse to buy WoW. Not only is it hurting the gameing industry, and destroying humans lives (some darwin, others not i.e. sweatshops).

I've always refused to play it on the sole fact that 15 dollars per month * 4 Million users = Much more money than they can blame on "server costs". I stick to Guild Wars It eliminates the montly fee and server loads by making everyting an instance.

For all you WoW or FF people out there who complain about the instance system in guild wars: Does it really matter that you have 1000 some people running around you when all your doing is trying to do is complete a quest by yourself or with your team. Unless you enjoy getting PKed, it's pointless for them to be around.

I'm sure more games like Guild Wars will come out in the future, thus destroying games like WoW.

Guild Wars is a "free" CORPG (similar to MMO, but without the bad parts). When I say free, I mean that you don't have to pay an online subscription fee. The game will run you $30-50, depending on how you buy it (you can buy just the account code at Game2Go for $30, and pick up a box set with installation CDs that will help decrease downloaded content for $50 at most game stores)

Maybe I'm just a fanboy, but Guild Wars has an attribute system that you can completely switch at just about any moment, many milestones by reaching different towns and armors, and also a Guild PVP ladder. It's definitely worth checking out, even if you're a skeptic of MMO's.

Oh yeah, it's FREE too.

• No monthly fee
  
• Excellent "end game" content
  
• PVE advancement supports PVP
  
• No monthly fee
  
• Fantastic graphics
  
• Skill based rather than item/experience based
  
• No monthly fee!!
  
• Everyone is on one big server in the US
  
• All your characters can share money and treasure amongst themselves.
  

Though I don't like the comparison because it gives the wrong idea, I sort of understand it. You seldom are really aware of your level/XP, as they advance well as you complete the storyline quests. It's easy to get started with, and has a pretty good story with it.

Also of interest: This game is the first project by developers ArenaNet, formed by a core of developers that all originally worked for Blizzard. You can visit their site for more info.

ArenaNet: http://www.arena.net/
GuildWars: http://guildwars.com/

Really, I can't say enough good things about this game... everyone I've introduced to this game has become hooked, no matter what they're gaming background. Seriously, quit reading this and give it a shot. Now. Click away.

If you like the concept of MMPORPGs, but don't like the reality of the endless grind to be competitive with the hardcore set of players - try Guild Wars.

While not strictly an MMO, Guild Wars has been designed from the ground up to alleviate the problems with most MMORPGs, and you can be competitive with minimal grind. Of all the games in this genre, GW is probably best suited to the casual player.

There's also no subscription fees, which is an added bonus. It's a fantastic game, and I can't recommend it enough (I play WoW too, and despite how ridiculously buggy it is and the crap support from Blizzard, it's a good game).

Let's see....
Guild Wars offers an online gaming universe for the price of the box; and that's it. No monthly subscriptions.
and
NCSoft hopes to create a large enough fan base to guarantee sales of sequels and add-ons.

I don't see how no monthly fee equals "more than just a monthly fee". They've already said that you can play forever. If you want to buy the expansion, then you get the advantages of it, but if not, keep playing the game you bought. And this summer, they're putting out a mini expansion - Sorrow's Furnace. For free. Not to mention the weekly patches, fixes, new quests and the like.

I'm not an MMO guy. Far from it. I bought this because I wanted something like Neverwinter Nights, and I haven't been disappointed. Everything but the "cities" (which are basically chat channels and places to form a group) are personalized for you and your group. The only PCs you'll see outside a city are in your group of 4/6/8 people. It's damn cool. Might be enough to make me drop my sig.

It has also been updated in the last few hours - http://guildwars.com/news/gameupdates.html

If you're a casual weekend gamer and you need some henchmen to help with a difficult quest and you don't want to bother any human players, the game always has a few frendly computer henchmen waiting to be recruited by the gate.

Guild Wars had a major update on the 15th. With new (free) content coming soon. Did I mention that there is no monthly fee, I think I did.

http://www.guildwars.com/news/gameupdates.html

Here are some screenshots I took recently, fun game.

NCSoft's Guild Wars no-subscription fee online RPG outsold WoW in this week's PC Games Chart.

WoW's good, but how much momentum will Guild Wars manage to pick up?

Almost every game does this. In Lord of the Rings: Return of the King there's actually a "run out of a crumbling building" level and where stones rain down on your head and block your path. So the biggest difficulty in the level is that you can't jump over a knee-high stone because THERE IS NO FUCKING JUMPING IN THE GAME.

This one really hits home, because it's exactly the reason that I didn't buy Guild Wars. Yeah, it might be a really fun game otherwise, but it's like your character is on rails. Hey, there's a cliff. I think I'll run off the edge... hmmm, nope there's an invisible wall preventing me from moving. In a game that's supposedly a cross between FPS and MMORPG, this is just super lame.

For all of it's fault, at least in WoW I could explore terrain, climb mountains, and roam aimlessly if I wanted to.

I've been playing Guild Wars recently, which like WoW is a MMORPG. The patching system they have implimented is quite remarkable in that you really don't even know it's there. The Guild Wars client, very unobtrusively, streams new content and patches while you are playing.

Monolithic patches are so 2004 :)

Another example of content delivery over the net is Guild Wars, where you download a ~70Kb client, which in turn downloads the actual content only when it's needed for the first time or if a new version is available. So far it has worked perfectly for me, and there is no hassle with CDs or any manual involvement in the patching/updating process.

If the article is going to mention TR and City Of Villains, it should also mention NCSoft's other upcoming MMO - Auto Assault.

And since I couldn't find it on those game's official sites, here are the ship dates from EBGames (which I'm sure aren't accurate, but hey):

* City Of Villains - 08/15/2005
* Auto Assault - 09/01/2005
* TR - 02/15/2006

This could get expensive. :(

(Although for the moment I'm still quite enjoying Guild Wars)

All I can say is Guild Wars.
The girlfriend enjoys the game as much as I do.
Can be played single player (with henchmen to bulk out a party) or co-op.
A great solution to Co-Op games. Have a peer, if you haven't already.

Try Guild Wars. It's not REALLY an MMORPG, since after you party up, the game creates an instance of a map section for your party only, no more "kill stealing" or such non-pvp annoying things people do to eachother.
It doesn't have this "time-wasting treadmill cycle", simply by capping the level at 20. You don't waste time "levelling", but rather in doing "quests" and gaining new skills.
The game is pretty analogous to playing a game like Magic: The Gathering, since the skills are pretty balanced, and the outcome of battles depends not on how much time you wasted "levelling", but rather on how good you play your skills strategically.

Oh and there's no monthly subscription.

The solution to item farming (and generally "endless levelling"), can be something like they did in Guild Wars where:

1. Every area is instanced for the party visiting it, therefore no "kill stealing", "training" or other non-PvP things players can harm others with.

2. There is a level of cap of 20, which can be reached in about 20-30 hours of gaming. What CAN be still upgraded are skills. The idea behind the game is that the winner of the battle won't be the one who played for more time, but rather the person who planned the best skill combination (you can have 8 skills per battle, out of 150~ unlockable) and has the best cooperation with party members.
Since everyone is pretty much the same, stat-wise, there's no reason to sell players. To an extremety, it would be like selling your CounterStrike or Warcraft3 player.
The game is then in a sense a lot like M:TG. It's not about the time you waste "levelling", but rather on how you strategically choose your 8 skills to use (think a 60 card deck) and how you use them. Just like a skilled M:TG player can beat a lower level player with a much weaker deck, simply by playing smarter.
Also, think first person shooters... as you near the end of the game, sure you get better weapons, but generally still use the weaker ones. The game becomes much harder, but you, as the player, can handle it better because you know when to use what.

3. Another reason I think people buy high level items for real cash, is that most MMORPGs have a monthly subscription fee, people think: "instead of paying 30$ for levelling my char for 2 months, i'll just buy one". GuildWars is free other than the initial cost (again, think M:TG).
What is planned tho, are optional expansions, which btw will be balanced with the previous "chapters", but will let you have more variety. Again, think about expansions in M:TG, the new cards are generally balanced like before, but since you have more choises, you can have better skill combinations.

Is Guild Wars an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game)?

Guild Wars has some similarities to existing MMORPGs, but it also has some key differences. Like existing MMOs, Guild Wars is played entirely online in a secure hosted environment. Thousands of players inhabit the same virtual world. Players can meet new friends in gathering places like towns and outposts where they form parties and go questing with them. Unlike many MMOs, when players form a party and embark upon a quest in Guild Wars, they get their own private copy of the area where the quest takes place. This design eliminates some of the frustrating gameplay elements commonly associated with MMOs, such as spawn camping, kill stealing, and lines to complete a quest.

Guild Wars takes place in a large virtual world made up of many different zones, and players can walk from one end of the world to the other. In Guild Wars much of the tedium of traveling through the world has been eliminated. Players can instantly return to any safe area (town or outpost) that they have previously visited just by clicking on it in the world overview map.

Rather than labeling Guild Wars an MMORPG, we prefer to call it a CORPG (Competitive Online Role-Playing Game). Guild Wars was designed from the ground up to create the best possible competitive role-playing experience. Success in Guild Wars is always the result of player skill, not time spent playing or the size of one's guild. As characters progress, they acquire a diverse set of skills and items, enabling them to use new strategies in combat. Players can do battle in open arenas or compete in guild-vs-guild warfare or the international tournament. Engaging in combat is always the player's choice, however; there is no player-killing in cooperative areas of the world.

Finally, unlike existing MMOs, all characters in Guild Wars inhabit the same virtual world -- they are not divided onto different servers or shards -- so players can always team up with or compete against any other player in the world.

You do hit upon the key issue, which is instancing - how much instancing can you have before it's no longer a MMOG and just a graphical front-end where people can connect and then go off into areas which only allow smaller groups? After all, this is how games like Diablo II work. I would argue that in any true MMOG, there must be some "Game" in the "Massively Multiplayer" (non-instanced) space. In CoH, you have this, but in Guild Wars, the game seems to take place almost entirely inside instances.

Still, it's a complicated issue. I might accept Guild Wars as a MMOG or MMORPG, but since NCSoft specifically says it is NOT one, I don't have to worry about it. :)

Bruce

The article only has it half right. The real reason why MMORPGs will have subscription issues is because of http://guildwars.com/.

The "casual friendly slayers" mentioned in the article are going to love Guild Wars (GW) and since there is no subscription fee the company (ArenaNet) doesn't lose out when they stop playing after a few months.

GW also has incredible and accessible PvP which is the only content that doesn't turn into grind (given a large enough community).

Personally, I'm sick of MMORPG companies monthly milking of their customers. Stretching out 60-80 hours of content into 400 hours is akin to watching a movie that repeats each scene five times... and you have to pay to keep watching.

GW is out on April 28th, once the word spreads about the true casual friendly play, lack of griefing, combined with the best fantasy PvP available... all using a pay for new content (expansions) model instead of a monthly subscription I hope it forces it's competitors to start treating their customers less like cash cows.

Two comments. First, there several other examples of "free" MMO games. Second, it's probably not really free, as in you will have to buy things in game to improve your user experience (like in Project Entropia).

For other examples, check out:
- Project Entropia http://www.project-entropia.com/
- Guild Wars http://www.guildwars.com/
- Roma Victor http://www.roma-victor.com/

I'm so excited about the http://www.guildwars.com/ beta this weekend. I can't wait for April 27 so that I play a game like this without a monthly fee. It's always been the monthly fee that's kept me from playing a MMORPG and now that some former Blizzard employees are releasing a game I'm ready for some action.

No no no.

A buys a full jug of milk along with a milk card. for $15, and a milk card buying certificate. The card entitles him to free refills for $15 per month, the certificate allows him to buy milk cards.

B buys the jug off A but has no way to get milk card certificates. If A gives B the Milk card, B still can't be sure A can't take the card back.

The jug alone is just an empty sad jug. (retail box).

C, the company that made the system, said that anyone can sell their jug and card and certificate, but won't allow the new owner to use the certificate.

B can't get a new milk card, can't reasonably be expected to use the old milk card, and has a worthless jug.

That is the problem.

I have milk, and I don't need a milk card.