To me its quite clear that Hilmar is trying to make amends and find a way to get back into the good graces of the community, while simultanously reckognizing that as a manager of a business he can't simply close his eyes to what is taking place on the market.

Fundementally however this MT movement is less the future of the market and more the result of repeated failures in understanding how the MMO market actually works by developers.

Lets start at the begining. World of Warcraft was and is a fluke... say it with me people. Every MMO developer since the success of Blizzards WOW has been trying to capture that same wide audiance, as a result the games have been dumbed down and often simply trying to re-create that formula. What developers have failed to realize is that this market doesn't actually exist. World of Warcraft is what is often refered to as an "oddity in the market", something that happens for which there is no formula, no marketing strategy or answer to. It just happened and its success can only be attributed to a trend that took flight.

The next game on that chopping block is Star Wars Old Republic. Like many MMO's before it they spent unheard of amounts of money in an effort to create a game for "the massess" with some false sense of security that this market actually exists. It doesn't, the people who play World of Warcraft will not quit WOW to start playing this game. The result is that SWOTR will end up initially drawing fair numbers as a novalty, than slowly declining and eventually landing where Hilmar see's the future of MMO's going, the MT market. That however is not the future, but rather the place MMO's go to survive an otherwise certain death. It is not a victory to have your game free to play with an MT store, it is how we identify a failure. Yes financially these games that fail to bring in subscriptions recover thanks to a smaller audiance who likes the game and is willing to shell out the extra cash to play it, but this market is not the one they are after. Hence while surviving in this economy through MT after a failed attempt at being a subscription is hailed a victory and somehow attributed to being a future, it remains nothing more than the only option for a game developers game when they fail to meet their economic targets.

Saying MT is the future of MMO's is a traggic and very misguided notion. If your game is forced to be a MT game because you failed to successfully manage it as a subscription game, you have not succeeded, you have failed.

Its true that some games start out as MT games and they are very successful, but they are successful because they set that as a target, its a game designed for that audiance and its mechanics are built on MT as a foundation. There are a few exceptions but exceptions like Dungeons and Dragons Online are exceptions because even if they where not designed to be MT games intentionally they inadvertanly function well on that system. Its a coincidental design that worked.

Eve does not work with MT for one key reason that will never change. Its audiance doesn't like them. When CCP added the MT market they effectively added a feature to the game that Eve players see as insulting, its a feature for an entirely different market that does not exist within Eve. At this point however Eve players are indifferent because the MT market is meaningless, it doesn't affect anything. If the MT market ever does actually offer "pay to win items", the Eve community response will be definitively hostile. Think about it. The mere mention, that sometime, it might be possible that maybe they might add some gold ammo like items (even if it was just a rumor) all hell broke loose. What happens if they actually pull the trigger on it?

MT in Eve is a door that is forever closed. Openning it would be the equivilant of putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger, I hope Hilmar and CCP's investors are smart enough to realize that. If the game fails as a subscription based game, it has failed. There is no "alternative methods" on which this game can succeed.