Which Subscription to Drop?

I theorycraft this from time to time.

Especially since I have been brooding about investing another $13.95 into ATITD for a while. For a couple months, maybe.

On the one hand, it's not really a big deal or a big sum. Price of a movie or two. A couple books. One good meal at a restaurant. We're not talking about a thousand dollar investment or even a couple hundred bucks that other people would drop on concert tickets, branded items, expensive and branded tech gadgets that get obsolete in less than a year, stuff like that.

With my playstyle, any MMO played for a month actually gives more gameplay value for money than a 50 buck singleplayer PC game that I painstakingly install (or completely neglect to install for years), play a couple times (3-5) and abandon for greener pastures and sporadic revisits.

Still.

It is quite obvious that only one MMO is actively being played at any given time. A secondary MMO is justifiable in the event of primary MMO boredom. Anything more than that is really on the level of a singleplayer PC game that is just being kept around on the offchance that I might jump into it again. At some point. In the far future. Maybe. But just in case.

Which makes sense if you've got a free MMO as tertiary backup. Like Guild Wars. And the tons of other free MMO options out there.

But not for something you keep being subscribed to for months and months.

I have to be honest, I have lost steam with both CoX and LOTRO. Each day that passes is another day that I grow further distant from both games. Yet it's hard to give up a certain attachment to both.

I've explored less of LOTRO, there are still a few areas that I would like to see. But that is sort of like chasing pretty art. The actual gameplay of progress bar incrementation drives me nuts. I don't mind the interactive story aspect of galloping around on horseback across pretty scenery, but there's really nothing at the end of the rainbow besides links to Tolkien lore and pretty art.

CoX faces the problem of finite content exhaustion. Yes, in theory, the mission architect changes this. In practice, we are still seeing the same 3 mobs in one location across the same maps. Any more tactical depth than that is not going to change until a version of MA that allows people to create their own map layouts and set spawns and so on.

Everything else is just cosmetic. And more and more, due to a certain neglect, the mindset has become less of a focus on story and social teamwork interaction to omgz0rs xp farm, fast mishes for leet loot and xp! (Issue 16 is not likely to change this. More cosmetics, if pretty ones. And a funneling of people into solo big spawn farms, perhaps.)

But I confess a reluctance to cancel the long running CoX subscription due to an attachment to my umpteen costumed alts and character names, the ongoing vet rewards, and to a lesser extent, the presence of an MA arc I put some effort into (though probably no one has found or played it since forever.)

I think at some point, I will give up the LOTRO subscription. I might pick up Aion for a couple months once it comes out. Maybe early October once the end September craze has worn off, and I'm sure that Singapore copies can actually play on NA servers.