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It’s something that I’ve rather taken as a given over the last few months: the Guild Wars 2 folks know what they’re doing when it comes to subscriptions. They’re not going to make you pay monthly – which is a plus, of course – and that gives it a staunch advantage over the competition. That’s what I thought, until today that is. Today I sat down to write a piece about Guild Wars 2 and about its means of access and I couldn’t for the life of me work out exactly why a “subscription” as available in Guild Wars 2 is still relevant in today’s world of Free-to-Play and constant micro-transactions. Has Guild Wars 2 been given a free pass based on appreciation of an outdated method of sale or is this the sort of MMO price scheme people would like to see in the future?

At the beginning of the year we ran an article about the three major MMOs this year: Guild Wars 2, World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic. World of Warcraft has a major expansion and that always equals something of a major event in the gaming world, a point where everything stops online momentarily while people find out exactly what all the new fuss is about. With Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard hope to show that their user base is still in its millions and that it’ll increase exponentially when new content is added. The Old Republic is about to go entirely free to play, another string to a very well strung bow. It’s a reaction to something though and it hints that perhaps The Old Republic wasn’t doing as well as EA and Bioware would have liked as a subscription-based game.