Bashing what's standard is always popular, the difference here is that it's a fairly big name developer who has used the standard model that is bashing it.

To be clear, Runescape does use a subscription model in a sense. It offers the game for free in a very restricted form and uses advertisements to pay for the free servers. Subscribing unlocks all of the members servers and the other 90% of the game that you couldn't previously access. And that model has been massively successful, with over 1.2 million paying subscribers.