Honestly I don’t regret paying a subscription for WoW. Maybe it’s different now, but when I played it felt fair. You got reliable servers, frequent updates,somewhat reasonable balance changes, and seasonal events. You didn’t get any loot box bullshit, just playing the game regularly generally got you the rewards with minimal effort.

Sure expansions also cost extra, but that was $30 and about 1 every 2 years.

For a game that ate all your free time, it didn’t hit your wallet that hard.

Unfortunately it works the same way as with StarCitizen, you’re aware it’s a ripoff, but if you want to play this particular type of a game, pay up or leave.

With MMORPGs specifically, here are the options:

• Free to Play. Enormous cash shop, often pay to win. Usually these games actually require the most money to play on high level, or waste your time by slowing down the grind and having an optional “premium” sub, which effectively makes it a sub MMO.

• Buy to Play. Much less predatory, rarely pay to win, but often with huge cash shop. Get ready to see tons of cool cosmetics that are only available through micro transactions, and the base game often receives scrapes from the table. Still, some of these games like TESO effectively force you to pay a sub by introducing a mechanic (like bottomless reagent bag) that make the game without them miserable on high level.

• Pay to play. Most obvious predator, nobody needs this much money to develop a game that already charges almost full price for base game and for all new DLCs, but also usually has the most tame cash shop. WoW for instance has a tiniest (comparing to games like TESO) cash shop with 20-ish mounts and pets nobody cares about.

This creates effectively a pick-your-Devil situation with these games. No good monetization, pick whatever feels least predatory for you