I for one am SICK of paying money every month to play a MMO... I stopped playing WOW right before the expansion came out because I could not see paying $40 for that expansion after I had been paying $13 a month for so long. If I am going to pay $15 a month to play a game, they they should give us the game for FREE and the ESPECIALLY the expansions for FREE...
I went out and purchased Guild Wars for $30 and could not be happier. It is a great game, easily as fun as WOW and there are NO MONTHLY fees!
I swear, the person who came up with monthly fees for games, must be the same guy who came up with bottled water!
$15 for WOW/MMOs, $12 for XM Radio, $50 for BASIC non-digital cable, and the list goes on... This is all stuff you can get for free, yet people are happily paying for them!
I am done... See you in Guild Wars as I drink my tap water and listen to my local radio station! (LOL)
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Okay, first off the money you pay for the game is put towards the time and work it took to develop the game. Nothing in this world is free: Econ 101. If they work, we pay for that work in some fashion. In this case, it's with money. The monthly fees is for monthly updates and server maintenance: MMORPG servers are not cheap to maintain.
Guild Wars is a good game, and it is free to play due to their server architecture:
"To support their fee-free approach to online gaming the server architecture developed for the game was core to minimizing the bandwidth costs associated with maintaining game servers.[24] Infrastructure design was influenced by the developers experiences with Battle.net development."
However, it's not for Mac. It doesn't run that well in Crossover at the moment, and I'm too lazy to have to reboot my machine into windows to play the game, then boot back to OS X to do everything else. Also the only time you see anyone else is in town, or when you're in a party. Otherwise, you're all alone in this huge world.
I like having the chance to bump into someone doing the same quest as I am doing in WoW. That way if I'm breaking my balls trying to complete it, I can just easily make the party right there and then do my thing.
BTW, bottled water comes in really handy in third world countries where tap water is infested with baddies.
The funny thing is that I don't even play WoW any more. I don't really know why I keep defending it. I think it has to do with my unconditional love for the game: no matter how badly it treats me, I'll never stop loving it.