Future of CoX..

Never played Exteel but DR never had a cash shop; you either played the gimped free version or the open subscription version. Given everything else they tried (hello shoe commercials at log out!), I'm surprised they never tried selling rainbows directly or whatever.

Somewhat in the same boat, played the heck out of Exteel but never touched Dungeon Runner. I just assumed it funded itself through cash items ala Exteel.

Ordinary potions drop like rain. They are common. I end up vendoring a bunch just to free up bag space. There are special potions in the store that will drop in game, but are rare. Potions are also craftable.

By and large, CoH has done a decent job with their store: Character slots, special costume packs, and so forth, without getting pushy or putting any "must have" things there. As long as they also add new costume sets and such in game I have no problem with some special items in the store.

Then I can say that you ought to find any of the freemium MMORPG's that I currently play to be "acceptable". I have this feeling that you are attacking straw men here to a certain extent. It isn't at all clear to me what it is that you think is going to happen to CoX if it turns into a freemium game.

The publisher of high fantasy games mentioned a couple of posts prior to this one took an interesting approach that would solve your dilemma - they created a new server for the freemium version of the game and left the existing subscribers in their own "universe" away from the freemium people.

What has happened over time is this - Many people in the subscriber-only universe have slowly been transferring over to the freemium service. They see that the new server is full of new, enthusiastic players and they want a piece of that action. Meanwhile, they see that the new players are either becoming "gold members" (a close equivalent of the subscriber in the "old world") or are content to wield less power than the oldtimers, making the oldtimers the hot shots, at least for now.

Meanwhile, the game publisher is introducing many low-cost cash store upgrades that give the freemium players enough of the "gold member" benefits themselves that they feel like they are making a sound investment by continuing to play the game instead of leaving when the choice becomes "either become a subscriber or fail at the end game". One of the things said publisher has had to acknowledge as a result of its experiment is that, by and large, freemium players do not want to become subscribers. They prefer to make microtransactions and exercise freedom of choice over their gameplay. If they feel forced into choosing to subscribe or quit, they quit.

With the upcoming merger of the EU and US CoX servers into one server farm, it could be entirely feasible for NCSoft to create a second server farm that holds the freemium CoX game while letting the "CoX Classic" crowd continue to subscribe and play as they always have.

If NCSoft took that approach, then I can't see that anyone would have anything to complain about. At least, not until the freemium game started generating more revenue than the Classic game and started getting the lion's share of developer attention.

Because Cryptic totally made their own rules and created an imbalanced game. Champions Online is nothing like the paper and dice version of Champions from Hero systems. The CO devs borrowed some terms like Ego, presence, etc... but wrapped it around an arcade style combat system ala Street Fighter where you spam buttons like mad.
Some of the annoying things:
1) Blocking - instead of statistically calculating your defense, you are forced to block to avoid critical damage. As long as you block, you can't attack.
2) Enemies 5 level below you can still kill you but you get no experience if you kill them. Ie, if a level 8 mob attacks a level 16 toon, the level 9 mob can kill the level 16 toon in 2 mins or so but the level 16 toon will not get any xp from killing the lvl 8 mob.
3) Monthly Bloodmoon event - zombies give no xp. XP is only given after you complete the quest in the bloodmoon dungeon.
4) Lowbies are penalized with incredibly less mission complete xp. This discourages friends from teaming if their levels are more than 10 lvls apart.
5) Flawed collect items on indoor map - If the mission is to collect 10 items, the map will only spawn 10 items. If anyone on the team clicks on a glowie but there are other teammates outside the mission, the teammates outside the mission don't get credit for the click. Ie, the ones inside are credited 1/10 while the ones outside remain 0/10. The items will not respawn while people are inside the mission. The items will only respawn after 5-10 mins after everyone exits.
5) It is very very easy to create a crappy hero. Also, even after finding a good power combo, the hero doesn't feel super enough. After playing 8+ different CO power sets, it seems to me that CO heroes are underpowered compared to CoX supers.

There are more, but these are the few that make it a really frustrating game to play. I only play it occassionally with a friend since we used to play the paper and dice version of Champions. If it weren't for him, I wouldn't waste my time on this game, even if it was free.

If NC soft took the approach you're describing, I'd be fine with it - maybe my experience with freemium games is biased; only ones I've experienced have been of the money=rewards model.