Calling all FTP games terrible, and saying that they are destroying the MMO genre is even more retarded though, so why dont you mention how retarded that idea is first (seeing that it's been constantly posted on every page) before picking out on far less terrible posts?
The Arenanet development team have discussed fees lots of times (of course you wouldnt know this if yu dont play / follow / read about the game) -
1) Just to clarify, the reason why GW didnt have fees wasnt because the game was terrible
2) Anet have had a purely anti - fee and anti - grind philosophy since the day they started out
3) Anet have stated many times that they do not need to charge fees, nor do they need anywhere near as much cash to maintain GW / GW2 servers as other MMOs do because they are built using a vastly more efficient engine with completely minimal amounts of data sent between player's computers and Anet's servers, while traditional MMOs actually need fees because their servers are a lot more expensive than Anets are.
4) The game originally didnt need a cash store with vanity items (though they did sell extra character slots, PVE campaighs, PVP access and skill unlock packs to enable people to get right into PVP without having to grind for skills and weapon unlocks) [Guild Wars 2 will automatic PVP unlocks from day one, no need to grind or pay for them anymore].
5) Arenanets business model started out with 'New Expansions as standalone games with a whole games worth of content (hundreds of possible hours per campaign mind you) sold at normal retail price for a new game - you buy the game once and you play it forever without paying anymore for as long as you want, what is so terrible about that?
6) When Anet first made GW, they actually didnt expect players would become hooked to it or play for a long time. They intended the game to have casual PVE that wouldnt take as long to complete as other MMOs (no grind, just mission based PVE - the only grind really was running from one mission to the next which was easy enough with any speed boost skill), and their end game was meant to have been competitive PVP. They stated that in their early design briefings, they expected that players would play the PVE campaign for absolutely no more than 6 months (as they would get bored after completing it a few times), and then they would either start to PVP or leave the game. Leaving the game to go and play something else after it was completed was what Anet thought players would do which was the reason why they didnt want to rely on active subscriptions or fees.
7) In order to keep players interested for more than 6 months, or bring back players that had enjoyed the game, but finished it and left, and to keep income coming in, Anets solution was a 6-12 monthly new campaign / expansion pack. And these campaigns were not your normal little expansions you get from other games with a few extra dungeons and maybe an increased level cap with all the content designed for level 60-70, and then level 70-80, these expansions in GW were FULL standalone games that you could play separately, start again at level 1 with a new character, and not have to play any previous campaigns to complete them.
8) What Anet did not expect would happen in Guild Wars - Players actually getting hooked and playing the game everyday for many hours and not leaving or swapping over to PVP. After the campaign was beat, PVE players stayed and started inventing farming builds to farm for loot, and began putting pressure on the game for a non PVP endgame. There was already some of this available with UW and FoW, but to add to the PVE communities interests, Anet released MANY PVE updates to the games like Sorrows Furnace and green skin unique weapons for farming during prophecies, optional title grind during factions (some people loved it, others hated it, some had mixed opinions, but it definitely kept plaers that wanted to carry on playing the game after completing it very very busy for many years), and then hard mode during Nightfall which added a whole extra layer of gameplay on top of everything that was in the game.
9) After the release of Nightfall came Arenanet's inability to keep the game, now with 10 professions, several hundred skills, and exponentially more secondary class combinations properly balanced - and they showed a lot of incompetency in doing so. They made the most ridiculous changes to PVP (like changing HA from 8v8 to 6v6 without consulting the players first - The PVP elitist community raged over this, and many many of the best competitive PVPers in the game quit for good), and also lots of silly changes to GVG that I'm unaware of as I didnt play it, but the PVP community was complaining about this too. In PVE, they made one major horirid mistake - 'Lets add Hard Mode to the game. ... Wait a minute, now the game is too hard, lets add powercreep to the game and buff every class up to the point where and PVE newbie can enter HM and easily win with minimal effort. To make it even easier, lets add overpowered consumables and PVE only skills ......'.
The vast majority of players began to hate the developers for their incompetency in keeping the game balanced, and GW now reached a state where the powercreep had gone too high, was an inbalanced mess, and also the PVE community was raging and complaining about all the mistakes and changes the developers made.
Arenanets response - 'oh ****, screw it, we fudged the game up. Rather than fixing it now, lets start again and make a better game thats easier to balance with fixed skills on each class, and no secondary profession. However this times lets also listen to the community feedback before doing dumb assed stupid stuff to the game (at least I hope so).
10) After this point they decided to start working on GW2 (for over a year before they released their intensions to the public), but then they announced GW2, they also released on final expansion for GW and made it clear that this was the last full expansion, and due to the team moving over to GW2, there wouldnt be much new GW1 content. But they still carried on making skill and balance fixes, despite the powercreep still being in the game, and added more endgame content particularly focusing on building the lore between GW1 and GW2, and ofc also the hall of monuments as a game crossover thing to provide rewards in GW2 for your achievements in the first game.
11) Anet stated that GW1 servers would never be shut down, the game will be kept alive after GW2 gets released, but due to there not being any new content releases for GW1 they would now have to add a cash shop selling nothing but vanity items to keep making enough income for GW1. They would also introduce the same cash stop method int GW2 from the start, reducing their reliance on having to release new expansions for income which will hopefully give them more time to think things through and not fudge up the second game (which shouldnt be anywhere near as hard to balance without secondary professions and far fewer skills and skill combinations due to half of the players skill bar being determined by their weapon).
12) And OFC, Anet with their design philosophy dont want players to grind, or pay fees to have to play GW2. This isnt because the game is terrible, this is because Anet are not greedy gold diggers. And as most people are well aware, GW2 is going to be the MMO equivalent of sliced bread
Phew, now how long was that post?
Now onto Turbine and Lotro / DDO:
.... Jokes, I dont know enough about those games to give a huge wall of text.
