Article: http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/15/ea-kills-its-controversial-online-pass-program/#rGKlmxfwC1h8B0KH.02

It is about time that this happened. The online pass and serial numbers in games were annoying as a way of trying to deal with used games. Things like expired and invalid online passes ruined the system. EA was trying to make money off of used games by forcing players to obtain an online pass to access certain content in the game or to play online. The problem was that all of the online passes expired at a certain point and they would not generate new ones, even for the people who bought them. They were just handed an unused old one that had already expired, causing much frustration. Trying to obtain help resolving the issue was a long process that often ended in failure. Now, they have finally decided to transition them out and just use a downloadable access key much like DLC for various games and it only took a few years.

The question now is how will they try to p

This is a reply to an original article by therealfinn

http://my.mmosite.com/4043191/blog/ritem/world_of_warcraft_the_facts_on_private_servers.html

World of Warcraft has tended to shift its numbers from "subscribers", which are people paying for the game, to "active accounts", which are the number of people actually playing the game in the past set number of months. This largely inflates its numbers and prevents people from knowing how many people actually play their game. At the same time, they are not actually lying about the number of players. Free MMOs are in direct competition with all the others and they tend to offer the same quality of service as many P2P and B2P MMOs now that the overall quality has declined. P2P MMOs have not been pursuing development of what can be considered as "triple A" MMOs. they create the quality that is presented in many F2P MMOs, but the only thing they have to support it is a license to some kind of popular character or title. 

Pursu

So Scarlet Blade is the American version of Queen’s Blade. It is an MMO with only female characters and primarily relies on sex appeal. Armor merely changes the type of skimpy clothes that your character is wearing. It does not even try to hide this fact and try to profit off of it as well. They are also selling some founder pack stuff with limited time items.

Story:

The story starts off with the character’s group being under attack and communications are offline. You (something called an Arkana, which seems to be despised by some people as well) have to restore it and start solving some sort of mystery behind everything. It is confusing when the NPCs all communicate to you through some sort of wireless system rather than in person, but it makes sense considering the level of technology available. The good thing is that there is a little voice acting at least so it is not as boring as other games.

Gameplay:

I am going to have to state something right away. I REALLY hate the login

So recently, EA and their Maxis branch released the new SimCity for PC. The catch was that this was online only as a form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) to deal with the copyright infringement. Unfortunately, when you make a game online only, you need to have servers that can handle the number of players. This means that servers have to be prepared ahead of time before launch so that everyone can log on once the game is officially released. As we have seen with other games, including MMOs, this never happens. A game's population tends to peak during the first few months and it declines until the death of a game with the rare spikes that occur when expansion packs are released.

Over the years, EA has experimented with numerous forms of DRM. The earliest form was probably CD keys that restricted people to only 1 allowed online at any given time so that people could not share keys. They used online authenciation to try to curb that, but some people just disconnected their Internet