Yeah, a year from now you'll see which schemes work and which don't. Anarchy Online has been doing a no monthly fee for the base game, trying to sell their expansions (which then requires a monthly fee), and also doing some weird shit with in-game advertising.
MMORPGs are have to be competetive, and they will learn from each other's successes and failures. So support the games with features you like, and if you're a member of the lowest common demominator, your favorite game will still be thriving in a couple years.
Guild Wars has very few servers. It's mostly P2P, which is gay and impossible for a persistent world like WoW, but great for something completely instanced like Guild Wars.
Learn a bit about distributed systems. Guild Wars is P2P. How else do you play with other people in your instance? When you visit a town or a place with a lot of players, you are then playing on one of the central servers.
This way the company only has to maintain a small number of machines since only a small portion of the players will be in the towns at any given time. Everyone else is communicating between themselves, and only with the people that they need to.
Linear Mode
