Are subscription game item shops the third Trammel?

I would respectfully disagree. Greed is a sin plain and simple, there is nothing you can say or do to change that. Cuz its the way of western life does not change the fact that you are taking more then you need.

Like all great empires, greedy USA will fall soon. you can not keep up the lie that usa is now. Does blizz need 2+ bill a year to make great games while only being tax around 40-60%

My whole thing is we need to TAX the $hit out of the rich and we need to do it fast. We will spend billions on bombs but we cant give everyone health care or schooling. We live in a backwards world

You have to understand in USA 1% owns 90% of the wealth there is something wrong with the tax system.

Posting in an extremist reply. Just to point out that out of 10 responders there is roughly one nutter behind a keyboard...

...or in other words, both of you serioulsy can't believe that.

Not obscure at all, Mr Gordon Gekko's comments from the movie are referenced often.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7upG01-XWbY

Personally I don't think these evolving "monetising" schemes are related to piracy at all, it's simply the industry trying to squeeze as much money as it thinks it can get from it's product.

John Smedley worded it quite well in several interviews where he essentialy says that the wealthy players help the company to provide a cheaper game for less wealthy, the RMT model works well in this way.

The problems come into play when RMT gets "crowbarred" into a game with an existing subscription model & no benefit is given to the existing subbers, if the introduction of RMT into an established game were to have the knock on effect of lowering the subscriptions costs to it's players they would be far more accomodating to it as a model.....but that is not happening, & so quite rightly the subscribers perceive that this is just the company being greedy, or unethical, or downright squueezing more from them.

I second the opinion of the earlier poster about hitting players who enjoy MMO exactly for the cosmetics of the games, and that why should they be getting their playstyle "taxed". This is where DDO serves as an interesting example, because it has set it's store up in a dofferent way, however even it's store isn't fully immune to items/features being in the shop that players feel should be included as standard in their sub, at least there faction grinding can earn you the reward & the shop serves as a way to pay for a time/effort shortcut.

RMT can co-exist with subs & bix sales but it's not the what, but the how that has been done badly/clumsily so far, much greater attention to the whole "big picture" needs to be done when taking this multi-monetised approach, DDO gets it more right than most, SoE got it wrong in my view, but these are evolving trends, & they can change, what matters to the companies is not just how much extra cash they make, companies actualy are interested in how the changes are percieved, but they don't always listen well enough to their own customers advice & opinions.

My apologies to you then Loktofeit, I completely missed that reference...it's been a very long time since I've seen that movie. I guess I was blind-sided by dealing with so many forums/blogs where peep's views posted are to the extremist of extreme, thus I assumed it with yours. I retract my comments.