Maximum PC

There are certain things that I think people will pay for when it comes to monthly fees.

Persistent world that has regular updates and new sections added are a must for games with a monthly fee. A centralized server area that is always available and hack-proof, or at the very least has version/mod control. So to play with a friend with 17 mods on you also have to have those mods on.

Most MMOs are little more than FPS games played in third person. The differentiation is leveling a character. With the mash up of the two genres happening in varying degrees already (leveling your FPS avatar) it's not that much of a leap to have pay-to-play FPS games if they are as stated in the OP, very polished and addictive.

EA and Activision are battling for the designation of evil empire when it comes to squeezing consumers, enforcing absurd DRM, generating negative press, and pissing off the gaming community. It's no surprise that these companies would want to milk an ongoing fee-structure for games. It's the best of all DRMs, and that seems to be at least 40% of their product; DRM. Enforcing, oppressing and generally being dicks.

It's too bad but that's where I see this going. Not if a pay-to-play FPS can be successful, but a matter of when it will be forced onto a highly desired title.

I think the other enormous hurdle for evil empire gaming inc to overcome is the extreme price point that many other MMOs have had. Why is the 'standard' $10 minimum per month? If the shill was $2.99 per month I could foresee a lot better adoption and much less complaining. Then just like cable companies, cell phone companies, and every other consumer-hating industry out there they can nickel and dime for extras and micro-transactions.

The saying used to be 'the customer is always right' ... it's been changed in corporate society to 'the customer always has at least one more dollar they could spend with us'.

Paying for what? is my question...

If they provided tons of high quality redundant servers across the world to play multiplayer FPSes on that would be one thing that I might actually consider paying for. But to pay to have to connect to shitty peer-to-peer game sessions that lag or randomly disconnect and make you move the entire game to another console would be a joke. It's bad enough that you already have to pay for XBox Live to do nothing (disclaimer: I mean nothing in regards to game servers, not all the other stuff it provides).

The only way I would consider paying a multiplayer FPS subscription is if:
1) They provided a Free Demo of the multiplayer that I could use to determine if I wanted to purchase the game in the first place
2) They guaranteed high quality, fast servers that don't lag or disconnect
3) If you decided you didn't want to pay anymore for the servers, you could fall back on the current peer-to-peer community model

Black Ops supports dedicated servers, but they're rented afaik.

And I agree with you, paying for what? this Elite thing doesn't offer anything that wasn't avaliable on CS:Source servers since 5 years ago.

I have never paid for online playing other than buying the game to play online and won't in the future pay a subscription to play.

Nasty

MMO and FPS are 2 different things. In FPS game, every ping counts. Whereas MMO doesn't care about it.