Whether you pay a monthly fee, buy cash shop items, or simply just play without paying, you are making some kind of investment in your MMO of choice, a combination of time and usually money. As I have pointed out before on many occasions, the major difference between MMOs and many other games is that MMOs are consistently changing. In fact, if you were to quit an MMO and come back two years later, what you might find may be drastically different than what you saw when you last played. Features are balanced, new updates are released, storyline progresses, and more.
An important factor I make note to remind people of is that your subscription fee pays for now. The subscription you pay for June 2010 has no bearing on July 2010, or even December 2010 and beyond. It is because of this that I stress that players should get into the mindset of “I’ve paid $150+ since I’ve subscribed for over a year.” Blizzard could care less if you subscribed to World of Warcraft in July 2008; if you are not subscribed now you will not play on their servers.
I point this out today because whenever I see a notice of a huge update to a game, or a game is shutting down, certain players feel that they are entitled to get their subscription back. Not the pre-paid subscription, as developers are always good about reimbursing players who paid for time past the shutoff date. What I refer to are players who believe they are entitled to their past subscriptions back as some form of compensation for their time.
First of all, your money is spent. Developers don’t shut a game down because they feel they’ve bilked enough money out of it and it’s time to close shop and live in the Bahamas for the rest of their lives. Your past subscription money has already been paid out, likely to some developer so he can feed his family. To put it short: If the developers had the kind of money to refund everyone their past subscriptions, then they wouldn’t be shutting the game down.
Secondly, and this is a crucial one: Please don’t act like you assumed the game would exist forever. Every MMO is going to shut down one day. It may be ten months later, ala FURY, or it may be over thirteen years later, ala Ultima Online. No matter how long it takes, it will happen eventually. Our characters may be a multi-year project, but like any good pet we know that one day that character will be lost, and instead of thinking about how we will be post-burial, we choose the present to have as good of a time as possible.
Third: In certain cases you do get compensation. When Star Wars Galaxies launched the notorious NGE updates, they refunded players who had purchased the latest expansion pack under the assumption that the game would be as it was. Many times when cash shop Korean games change services, they also offer players compensation in terms of in-game currency that they had spent.
In a sense, this article is primarily dedicated to those players of Lord of the Rings Online who expect a full refund of their past subscriptions because the game is going free to play, as well as World of Warcraft players who expect a full refund because Cataclysm is going to make The Barrens slightly less suitable for Chuck Norris jokes. The same goes for all games, however.
I tell people to vote with their wallets, because when the developers see their subscriber/cash-shop purchases plummet, if they are decent they will start listening to the community. Otherwise they will fall, or in the case of FURY, send emails to their ex-customers calling them losers.
MMO Fallout 