Should World of Warcraft be F2P?

MMORPG's suck

still play lich king on pirate server, and i'm happy

atm they have the lowest subs around 5 million but that hardly noone is playing

Don't know..
Instead of WoW
How about warcraft 4.. oh wait
I mean GW2? xD
1x pay play forever?

Also let the rich people keep playing WoW xD

Where is the "idc" option?

Nah, they make far too much $$$ from subscriptions to make it F2P. I don't even want to think about how much money my parents/I have chucked at Blizzard; I've been playing WoW since a couple of months after it was first released in Europe... though now I've got enough gold in-game to pay for my subscription for a while. ;)

There's about 5 mill subs, it's more then enough to make Money, plus they're planning on releasing a new xpac practicly every year, and that's alot of Money on expansions at least. When they hit the low 1-2 mill, then they probably will have to switch to a F2P system. That system Works better for games with less players, look at SWTOR, it was a commercial failure when it was sub, after it went free to play, the number of players kept on rising, and while it's still not a lot of players, there's sizeable number of them still as subs, plus all the shop items and lockboxes (whatever the equivalent name is.. cartel packs?), means lots of Money for Bioware/EA there, SWTOR is earning Money and they said they have no plans to close it, only more expansions.

I played WoW ever since 2.4.3 TBC, back then it was something entirely else. Went back from school, bam shut the doors to your room, throw the school bag to the bed, fire the WoW launcher up, connect and off you go. WoW was life for me back then. WOTLK was my favorite xpac although by that time I was already playing less. When Cata hit, it wasn't the same game, I still went on to play, but wasn't really guild-raiding or doing arenas etc, it was more casually, I didn't like the class changes (they were awful), didn't like the world, didn't like raids...I kept on going. When MoP came, I played it for three months, it was cute, but also dumb, and I stopped playing - there simply wasn't a reason for me to play.

WoW was great when it was so special in the beginning, and because so many cool people played. I suppose those people made it so cool...ever since WOTLK, the old playerbase has been dying out, and when MoP hit, practicly everyone I knew has stopped playing or played something else then WoW. There siply wasn't any reasons to stay.

I suppose that's why there's less and less WoW subs, but then again, they're still at a healthy number and probably won't be switching to F2P any time soon.

My 2 cents.

You can pay for your subscription with in game gold now. Costs about 25k gold for a month, I can make about 50k gold without even trying every month, so It's free to play for me already.

There is no way WoW will become free to play, there's still a big player base and as long as Blizzard is earning money off it I don't see it changing any time in the near future.

Edit: I played it from part way through BC up until Cata playing basically all day every day. Once Cata hit I became a casual player. Have only played a couple of months of MoP. Played WoW to the point I can barely play any MMOs anymore, just start getting bored basically straight away.

It should have been a one time payment only from the beginning. That's why Guild Wars was always better. This subscription thing is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen lol.

Wow, poll results is really weird right now:
Yes & no are tied
126 Banana (I don't care option)

I believe you are on the wrong server if you feel no one is playing anymore. No one you know is playing anymore? Probably.

WoW has more subs than the next top 5 mmo's combined; it isn't going F2P anytime soon.

I love warcraft series, but what they did with WoW is horrible. At the moment, i could play WoW but only F2P not pseudo trial with limits.

But that's not going to happend, so i do not care, and i won't even dare play on private servers... Buglands.

rather have free server transfers and a lower subscription fee than to make it free2play if they did that i bet a lot of people would play more [again]

tbh I really want WoW, but paying a monthly sub and then paying for DLC's is a pain, Guild Wars 2 went free recently and I have had a blast with that and it was only released in 2012!
I understand why WoW isn't free because of the server prices but still its been 11 years and 6 DLC's with more most likely to be on its way.
I like how they have the F2P until Level 20 but come on, they earn a f ton with those DLC's as it is already, its about time it becomes F2P :/

I would play it if it would be buy to play. But heh, maybe after getting my new PC I'll have enough money to throw into WoW :P

blizz makes more then a billion dollars per year thanks to world of warcraft, why would you think they would make it free to play?

now that you can buy game time with gold. the game pretty much IS free to play. i bought 2 years of game time with nothing but gold recently....

im free to play for years! lol

So it can ruin more lives than it already did? I would say not. Also, it may have decreased considerably in number of players and is no longer the most played game in the world, but it's most certainly still successful enough to be worth the costs of maintaining the servers up. It will NEVER become free2play. You think Blizzard is stupid enough to stop the constant stream of money? Why on Earth would they do that?>

WoW died after 3.3.5, Cataclysm broke so much, MoP tried to cash in on pandas, WoD and Legion are trying to cash in on nostalgia.
Sadly I don't think the player base is increase even if (by some miracle) the game does transitions to an F2P model.

No, even if they have a million subs it's still making them money. I do feel they should expand their current trial from 20 up to 60 though.

WoW still has far too large of a customer base who returns every expansion to clear the newest Tier of raiding or try the new Arena seasons, going Free to Play is not something I never see them doing in the future. They have a pretty good system going on, the people who are diehards are playing 5+ days a week; throwing lots of money at server changes, faction changes, name changes, power leveling, etc.

f2p =/= making no money

Valve makes about 18 million USD per month from Dota2 and Riot makes about 110 million USD per month from lol. Both are f2p games.
source: http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/24/dota-2-makes-18m-per-month-for-valve-but-league-of-legends-makes-that-much-every-5-days/

Well if they go f2p expect to see a toxic community, lots of kids, lower quality overall in everything including people playing it.
If they lose enough subs, they might do it as a last resort to make money from a dying game when the time comes.

F2P no
B2P yes

They now do "Starter Edition" which you don't have to pay for. It's a very striped down form of it. no mail, only bid on AH, can't trade, only can lvl to 20, etc. It sucks but technically it's FtP. https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/world-of-warcraft-starter-edition

They also started something called "wow tokens" you can buy them in the store for real money and sell them on the AH, or if you have enough gold you can buy them from the AH and it credits your account 30 days play time. If you grind out enough gold each month you could play with out having to pay a dime.