I agree with the statement about payed subscriptions going away being a bad thing, the fact that it's resulting in lower quality games.

I'm fine with paying a subscription with ZERO pay to win items. I prefer all items being in game and having to earn them.

Subscriptions were, and are, widely hated. There was no obligation on developers to reinvest a lot of subs in making new things for the game - and a lot of temptation to pocket a large chunk after costs as pure, shiny profit. Delivered to your door every month by people paying over and over for the same existing content.

Pretty much no major MMOs (except that one) have been able to maintain a subs model at typical subs prices forever; essentially, MMO subs are now a method of milking early players for extra cash during the initial months.

I agree that it's death has often tended to spawn P2W in one of its many variations, which isn't a good thing, but let's not forget that while alive it acted as a beautiful cash cow for developers, and players didn't necessarily benefit a great deal from that either.

The reason MMOs exploded in number, and every IP and it's dog was looking at them, is that they were phenomenally profitable thanks to the subs model. As some turned to F2P to revitalise themselves and avoid collapse, it did the thing which "free" always does, and started crowding out and killing all but the highest quality competitors (or forcing them to go free as well).

On the other hand, this year world of warcraft released a one patch long expansion that split it's sub numbers clean in half, not that they care because it's turning a profit still.

Thats the other side of the coin, sometimes a subscription doesn't gurentee quality and then you're both paying more money and getting nothing in return.

If all goes well, I expect to see the first two years as 'busy',with a good number of players, if the game is fun and good, word to mouth will keep it going, I'd be really looking, not so much at the founders, but at the first group that comes in as 'casual players' and monitor how long they stick around for.
I think it's a race for the devs to keep reaching milestone after milestone, to keep the momentum going and to get as close to the original idea for EC as they had in the start.
What Wow is to Warcraft(the game) EC is to DoW, expensions etc included.
I think that as long as they keep a clear view and strategy and meet all the milestones they have a pretty good chance.

I disagree. Especially about the adding more content part.

Over the next weeks the core of the game gets a pretty good test and a lot of yet unknown bugs will be found. It is always good to fix bugs earlier than later because that allows the developers to single out and fix bugs much faster and cleaner than it will be in the beta for example. It prevents code being written based on already buggy code. One bug fix now might prevent ten others, shady workarounds or even large parts of code being rewritten in the future.

The main purpose of this is not for you to have fun or be hooked to it 8 hours a day, but to ensure a smoother development process down the line. So that our game is better when it is finally released not in alpha or the beta.

The problem is that people tend to have a hard time accepting that. Look at the cesspool that is the SC community these days...

While this is likely true, will the game development at large maintain discipline and not knee-jerk to what will be cries for nerfs/buffs to this and that, while 2 xeno factions are not in game? I do hope so. I hope there is not accidental overdevelopment, if you get what I mean.

Everquest? Ultima Online? Just because they're from a time where less people had access to fast (and cheap) enough internets and good rigs, and before MMOs truly became popular, doesn't mean there weren't several games before WoW, all with sub models, that were big successes for their time.

All of these games (and WoW, and a game I will talk about in a minute) have in common that they have actively delivered new content at a regular interval, despite your claim that they mostly pocket all the money they receive. And why would they? Players have short attention spans unless you give them new stuff to keep them subbed, it's only common sense and we've seen it happen often.

A lot of subs that failed did so in WoW's heyday, and while trying to emulate WoW to boot. That proves nothing about subs as a viable concept or not, the death of those games is due to WoWs dominance first and foremost. FFXIV: A Realm Reborn is currently very succesful, having 5 million subscribed players.

And on the note of them being "phenomenally profitable", I've seen the profit margins for WoW after all their costs, and it's not that great considering they are a run away success. Don't get me wrong, they're earning and have earned tons of money, but unless you emulate their success to the letter you're not going to see it being "phenomenally profitable". Just look at SW:TOR and how much people they needed to keep subbed to break even, and how long it took them to do so.

So to sum it up:
- There were more successful sub MMOs than you claim.
- There are STILL, at this very moment, more successful sub MMOs than you claim.
- Claims regarding profitability of MMOs very exaggerated.
- Claims that subs encourage developers not to invest in new content provably false given update tendencies of successful MMO titles.

That doesn't leave much of your post standing...

I don't know a great deal about mmo's, but this is the impression im getting, just from what ive read or hear and see:
WoW isnt anywhere near death, but it there is a sharp decline.
You see them experimenting with different ways of earning money, recently that gametoken thingy.
Several other mmo's tried but could not reproduce the formula, for whatever reason.
A mmo like wildstar is or is going to be f2p soon.
So there seems to be a trend that a sub mmo is going to be a thing of the past, whatever the reasons may be.

My own pov:
I played WoW for a bit and I didnt mind the sub at all.
I also play(ed) several other mmo's that are f2p, and a lot of times its just full of jerks.
The problem is damne dif you do damned if you dont: f2p has a chance to attract masses of people who will play very casually or even grief etc.
Having a sub puts more on the line for people in case of bans,then again, the sense of QQ and entitlement does seem to hit the roof sometimes:OMG I PAY MONEY TO PLAY WHY CONTENT IS DIFFICULT.

EC's concept so far is a good one I think, you can start out spending little, then if you like it you can 'expand'your acount with more slots etc.
What might be an interesting incentive is (bi)monthly(?) contests where certain teamfriendly like actions and behaviour gets rewarded with rtp points, a free characterslot, or a weapon/outfit?
The carrot instead of the stick approach.

@NoahWard , werent you able to write a book about griefing and player behaviour from your time at EVE?

I really think our biggest issue thats causing all our discontent as of the current week is how founders access is being handled

• the waves were suposed to be captains+ sargents, and warriors. But instead we are getting higher ranking captains and some times not even that order. and we arent getting "Wave 1 captains, wave 2 sergeants, wave 3 warriors" we are getting Wave 1 wave 1.2 1.3 and when the "Wave" doesn't happen it just raises peoples blood pressure.
• you will say "oh but servers to see if they can handle the load" Servers should already be ready to handle the load, they knew people were anxious and this slow wave is like saying to a bunch of kids "we know we said all kids in this class can have a cookie, but only if you brought a bigger box of crayons to class Even though we said it would be in order for all kids who brought the 64 pack then the kids who got the 32, then the 12. But you change your mind and decide the crayola brand ones get it first, and the rose art may or may not get it tomorrow. oops the oven broke, or we ran out of dough tough luck today kids."
• and i don't even get the the Xenos pack on the 23rd got in but the Xenos pack on the 21st didn't. that's just hear say really.

But yeah just observations of mine

Correlation is not causation. Several MMOs didn't do well, financially. Some of them were subscription based. Can we conclude from that that subscription fees just don't work? Not really, there are too many factors involved to be able to make that call, even before we consider subscription fee MMOs that do not fit the diagnosis (FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, again).

WoW itself is quite old by now, way past the expected life span of an online game (five years, in case you were wondering). A decline now really is not symptomatic of anything but its age. Also, it's good to realize that WoW, right now, has more subscribers than it did at any point before its first expansion. You know, back when all game media was praising it into the heavens and putting on big eyes as it broke record after record? It's only "in decline" compared to its golden age, it is nowhere near the gutter yet.

The "for whatever reason" part of your post is, in my opinion, this: Several games tried to be WoW, but everyone who liked games like WoW was playing WoW already, where they had friends and guilds they liked and which generally kept them playing the game. On top of that, whatever game tried to "kill" WoW by being WoW was always WoW with less content, since it only just released while WoW had been pumping out new stuff for years. So you go play a new game, constantly think "Huh, this is like that other game I played, but there's less of it, and all my friends are there and not here..." and what do you do? You go back to WoW!

Now WoW is "in decline", about 5 million players less than at its peak. (maybe closer to 7 million, but who's counting?) and what do we see? There's another subscription MMO with 5 million players now... what a coincidence?

Maybe it's not subscriptions that don't work, maybe it's making a subscription game that is exactly like an already established subscription game and hoping you will steal their members that does not work. Planetside 1 was subscription based, and very successful at the same time as WoW. Why? Because it didn't compete with WoW. Sounds reasonable, yes?

(Ultimately, neither of us can prove our point, though! We lack the data. But at least all of the evidence we do have fits into my theory, while you have FF14 and PS1 to explain.)