Fury will be a Pay to Play.
A pricing model for Fury hasn't been released yet. The developers said only that it would not be free except expansions (the GW model, in which online play is free, but you have to pay 50 dollars for each new stand alone chapter every month), and it would not be a monthly fee (Like WoW, where you pay $XX a month).
I dunno where you heard that, but in the end, Pay to Play is actually good. Why, you ask? Well, an MMO simply can't run for free, because unlike an FPS in which people pay for their own servers, or an RTS, in which the game is often run from your computer, an MMO has to have it's own server structure. So, if it's not going to be free, then there are three options:
1) Pay for expansions every X amount of time (Guild Wars model). This sounds good in theory: You get to pay only for the ones you want, and you don't have to pay by the month. However, what do you think happens when the developers begin running out of good ideas? They're not going to cell an expansion if it has no content. It needs missions, skills, and classes. Well, they're going to start watering it down, but the new content, which inevitably copies old content, will be overpowered. I've seen it happen in Guild Wars since the first open beta, and I strongly oppose it now that I've seen the PvP die due to new, overpowered skills. Just as bad, it also causes schisms in the community between those who bought the new expansion, and those who didn't. Finally, since they've got to sell the chapters to keep the servers running, they try to make them as necessary as possible (hence the overpowered skills problem). Now, imagine that you're a new player to Guild Wars and you want to be a competitive PvP player: You're going to have to pay at least 120 dollars worth of chapters just to get to step 1: All skills. That sucks no matter how you look at it. It was nice for the first year (how long chapter 1 lasted), but then it faded and now it's dead.
2) Micropayments. This is where you pay X amount of dollars for a single item, or some such, in a game. This method is mostly used in Japan, so I haven't seen it often. GunZ the Duel uses it, if you want an example. The problem with it is that the new items are inevitably overpowered (else why would you buy them?), so then it just becomes "Hmm... The devs released a new item that's better than the last one I payed for... Guess I'll have to shell out". (This method is unlikely in Fury, cause Fury uses random drops and a lottery system during PvP battles for almost all items).
3) Monthly fees. Oh noes, teh monthly fees. Well, yeah, paying 15 dollars a month is a pain in the ***, and it gets expensive, but the pros are that it keeps the game in a balanced equilibrium that doesn't mandate new content every 6 months just to keep the servers up. The problem with it is that not everyone can afford it. In my opinion, monthly fees are the lesser of three evils, but keeping them small is preferable. 15 dollars is to much, to me, but I'd gladly pay 5-10 dollars for a good game that doesn't get more watered down and unbalanced every six months, and doesn't divide up the community.
Oh yeah, and RuneScape is free due to huge, obnoxious adds and P2P members that somehow got suckered into giving 5 dollars a month.
