Quote Originally Posted by danfda
Absolutely screw the monthly license thing.
You could have stopped right there. This is unequivocally my stance, I refuse to pay subscription fees for games. If I wanted that (which I don't), I'd go play WoW or some other MMO. Sorry to be blunt about this, but CA does need to get their act together about patching. Memory tells me that STW and MTW were reasonably stable at release. Some view RTW as miserable at launch, I didn't mind it that much. M2TW at launch made Oblivion look like a bug-free game, and that's saying a lot. My hope is that in the future, CA will spend more time polishing and refining what they have, and stop taking away all the so called "little things" like cityview that really round out and add that extra layer of polish to the games.

I'll play advocate here though for a moment. IF they tried to go with a subscription model, it's a given that they'd have to invest a very significant, serious amount of time in the multiplayer aspect of the game, which they've effectively demonstrated with the current title that MP is essentially an afterthought. People don't pay monthly fees for patches, they pay for rather significant regular content updates, the exclusivity of subscription-based online play, and regular/reliable online services.