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So I guess my philosophical issue is, am I a MMORPG kinda person anymore? I no longer have desires to spend 14 hours of a day camping a zone for an item, I rather prefer to log on for two hours here and there, and then log off. The problem is that MMORPGs in general reward those that are most likely to cause greater profit. CoH isnt really interested in players like me; they prefer the people that are enamored by the game.
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You make a lot of good points that I've discussed w/ my friends a lot, however I would argue with this one. You raise the issue of what type of player creates the greatest profit for the company, and as we all know, profit is equal to revenue minus expenses. The revenue any MMOG company gets from a player is relatively fixed (i.e. $15/month). The expenses, however, vary widely. They have fixed expenses, but in fact the more a person plays their game, the more expensive that player is. They consume more bandwidth (which is very expensive). They have more customer service issues (also very expensive). They are more demanding on the design/updates of the game (very expensive).
In fact, the best MMOG from a pure business profit standpoint would be one that had 100k players that paid their monthly fees, but never played the game, never needed assistance, and never asked for changes. I could run that game off of my PDA, and if I could make $1.5 million/month to do it, I'd start right now.
This isn't a realistic scenario, but my point is that casual gamers are where the money really is. They are interested enough to get more people into the game, and to not quit, but don't consume resources. The scenario above would fail because people would eventually stop paying money, and the game would die. A game that consisted of purely powergamers who played 60 hours a week would go broke, guaranteed. Sony probably made more money from people who forgot to delete their accounts when they quit playing than you can imagine, because they are zero expense and all profit.
