LotRO growing, no plans for server-merge, says Turbine

Lord of the Rings Online is bucking the trend for new MMOs and actually attracting new customers.

[Nihilism]

it's good that mmo's are sharing the popularity around, blizzard's monopoly can't be a good thing, bu i hate the subscription model of gaming, i like owning what i payed for, eventually i can see mmo's getting cheaper per month and if so i'll be there, the old republic will be the one exception for me though probably

[Perjoss]

you must understand that after a normal game is released the staff that is kept on to maintain it is minimal to none. With an mmo this is almost the other way around, from creating new content to customer service to maintaining the silly amount of servers they must run, I'm not sure of exact numbers but I'm pretty sure the team that maintains wow is a lot bigger than the team that created wow. This all costs money so you are never going to get this stuff for free.

Free mmo games have greatly reduced support and they get much smaller content patches if any.

One thing that people fail to see is that if you look at the money to entertainment ratio of an mmo compared to other fun activities like going to movies or drinking or pretty much anything else for that matter, an mmo is stupidly good value and wins hands down (obviously you have to be into that kind of game in the first place).

[Tony P]

Some kind of SP mode would go a ways toward placating my similar issues with pay-as-you-go gaming. Multiplayer-only is too restrictive for me.

[Scudd]

I agree that paying a monthly subscription is crap when they charge you for addons aswell. Eve-Online got this right by releasing addons for free but i still feel that its too expensive. 5 quid a month should be the maximum they should charge. 15 quid a month and we are paying more for that than we are for our TV License in the UK. Looking forward to Guild Wars 2 if they manage to keep it free and maintain standards then i will happily pay for addons.