Death - a hollow pit.

Anarchy had a great community.

Although it has been some months since I actually logged into the game, I have been using the third party chat program to talk with people on the servers. I have also been following what has been happening via the weekly updates in the FWM (Friday with Means). Which brings me to this post ...

I am bewildered. What happened?
I think they ran out of money. What they have done is sold out.

My belief is that an MMO is a virtual world. It should be separate from the RL (real world). We create our characters, are born and thus live in this place.
Since it is embedded within the real world, we would pay a subscription for access to it, in order to pay for the maintenance and development.
That is it. Only that.

Trading virtual goods for real money? Let's go with two cases here:
Second Life has always rented out "land" or "space" with a limit of objects hosted. There was always a real money to virtual money exchange.
Anarchy Online started out as subscription only but moved into a hybrid model, which means there is a free account to play the classic game, a subscription for one expansion or all three / four of them and now you can buy most everything.
Where has the challenges and achievements gone?

This also means that the veteran players (those who should know the most about the game) can now skip huge chunks of it, thus ways of playing are lost. Worse, is that these same "vets" are not in the starting areas and playing with the new players. Either they are blasting past with "power levelling" leaving the new players feeling slow and inadequate or they are simply buying their way past them.

Will it create some elitism? "Avoiding the unwashed newbies."?