the free to play mmo trend (in Off-topic)

champions online is going free to play in November. as far as i know the list of formerly subscription games is:

ddo
eq2
lotro

no word yet from cryptic on whether star trek online will follow.

are there any i missed?

You ninja'd me.

Champions Online is gonna be free? Sweeeeeet. Finally a free superhero MMORPG.

sorry, the beta starts in november, here is the paragraph from the email regarding the timeline:

We plan on entering our free-to-play beta on November 9, and to launch the new, free-to-play version of Champions Online in the first quarter of 2011. We canﾒt wait to grow the game with you, and we hope youﾒre as excited as we are!

Is it open beta? :o

it looks like a closed beta with current subscribers invited in, but that isn't final. ya might want to search their web site or forums and see if they have a place to apply.

There are other lesser games that have made the transition. The belief is that all financially stable pay-to-play MMOs will transition to free-to-play as the expected profitability of each option changes. In other words, there will be a day (far off) when WoW subscribers slip off, and rather than shutting down the servers, it will become free-to-play.

LotRO reported a *doubling* in revenue after switching to the F2P plus optional sub plus optional microtransactions model...

And there's plenty of MMOs (or games which try to claim are MMOs) that either launched recently or will be launched soon that are built from the ground up as F2P (plus microtransactions and optional subs)... "Need for Speed World" and "Black Prophecy" being two of those I hold even a smidge of interest for.

And there's also EVE-Online, where, while not exactly "F2P", you can still play without paying cash at all (and about a quarter of the active accounts run like that) by exchanging on the game's internal market in-game money for "one gametime month tokens" purchased with cash by other players that want ingame cash.

A lot of balance issues come to mind when one brings up microtransaction type of games... Having experience with a game of that type, I don't think this is a good sign.

i am not so sure of that, many balance issues have come up long before micro transactions and i have been playing mmo's since 1998. if a dev team is good at handling balance issues before micro's they will likely be good afterwards. if they aren't good, they need to hire someone who is! ; )

By balance I don't mean one class vs another, I mean the occurrence of those who spend massive amounts of cash to dominate. There is one person on my server who spent approximately $20k to get one item, the hardest hitting weapon in game for his class. He spent more money on other stuff too, yet few acknowledge him for his skill, merely for his, erm, hard-hitting-ness.

most games don't offer micro transactions that have that big of an impact on gameplay. micro transactions are typically items that have little impact or at least they are balanced in that there are many available. was this a unique item sold by the game itself or a rare / unique drop sold by another player?