For me I’m totally against buying power with real money, and so any money trading game is a no go, there are several personal reasons, while not an RPer it does break my immersion to know that XYZ item costs real money, and also that playing more costs me more.

In EQ2 (that I play) there is the station cash though, on one hand the fluff appearance items I’m ok with, I’d even buy some myself if I saw something I liked. But there are also pots that increase your XP gain for a set period, ridiculously expensive for the meagre benefit but in a perfect world I’d get rid of these.

Long term, even if a real money game had the same or lower cost as a subscription game, I’d be suspicious because of the way that RMT games encourage the developer to alter the game to increase revenue. In the case of EQ2 there is a risk that a decision will be made not to make XP gain easier when for gameplay reasons it makes sense since it could harm their RMT sales, in this case I’d expect the bulk of the subscriptions revenue to guide this decision, but its still there as a conflict of interest.

While in comparison subscription games encourage the developer to only do things to keep hold of the player, a subtle difference and one that long term I think will keep the big money coming from the subscription model because the games will be better quality.

Let me give you an example of such a game: WoW at the time of Naxx40.

The top raiders were raiding 6 days a week and long into the early hours each night. Consumables stacked so most of the bleeding edge raiders had a string of potion buffs as long as your arm. Moreover most bleeding edge guilds were on servers with a lot of other very competitive raiders and the zones that spawned needed herbs were heavily camped. Repair bills were very heavy and raids wiped all night long.

Even paying your repair bills required hours of farming let alone providing consumables.

For most people who were that into it the solution was to buy gold from gold farmers. Of course players who could play full time could herb all day and wipe all night.

For most players you simply couldn’t operate at that level unless you could play full time or were buying gold.

I just think it’s interesting that when people say I’d never play a game where rich people have an advantage they forget that WoW was like that. And of course there’s Eve and its plex system.