Kirun
Buzzfeed Editor
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In games like EVE Online, Ultima Online, and Albion Online, access to higher-tier zones comes with a very real cost, just not always in the form of a direct fee. The risk of losing your gear, ships, or even territory effectively functions as a currency sink. At the end of the day, you're still "paying" to participate in that content. It's just happening through risk and replacement costs rather than an upfront toll. Similarly, in Anarchy Online, the Shadowlands had a kind of "ongoing" economic cost. Players needed to constantly invest in things like nano kits, gear upkeep, etc. just to sustain themselves in those environments. Again, not a literal entry fee but functionally very close.
Those systems are all operating on the same underlying principle though, which is that access to high-end content is tied to economic investment. The difference is just in presentation. Those games obfuscate the cost through mechanics like risk, attrition, or maintenance, rather than making players pay directly for entry.
That said, in EVE, UO, and Albion, there's also an added layer of player-driven control. Guilds or alliances can dominate certain areas and effectively charge for access, either directly or indirectly. In those cases, the "fee" becomes part of the emergent gameplay and player economy. What MnM seems to be doing is stepping in as the middleman by formalizing that cost into a system rather than leaving it entirely in players' hands. This does remove some degree of player agency and emergent interaction, but it also arguably reduces friction, conflict issues, organizational headaches, etc.
At the end of the day, though,
Khane
is right. There's nothing especially groundbreaking here. It's not a new concept so much as a more explicit and structured version of systems that have already existed for decades.
