I'm not sure if because its the "shiny new" or not, but F2P has the strangest connotations these days. I understand the consumer appeal of being able to try and play a game for free, but I am wondering why the market jumped directly from P2P to F2P being the MMO norm. What happened to B2P? Sure there are a few out there, but it seems whenever an MMO is transitioning away from a P2P system they jump immediately into the F2P pool.
Although I'm no financial guru, I'm not sure that its the best idea. I remember a time of expansion packs for games, when I would buy a core game and then come back to the store much later and purchase content updates at a much cheaper rate. I'm curious why so few MMO companies try this approach. The B2P model is certainly well established, but very few actually sell content like expansion packs. In my mind, this would promote companies to develop real content and deliver it to players in regular intervals.
I do like the way TSW handles their "Story Packs", and can't figure out why more companies don't do this. My only guess is that companies are afraid they won't attract a large enough audience when there is so much out there that is F2P. But I truly believe that players value content and have no problem paying $10-20 for a legitimate chunk of new content to play with. And if the developer could deliver these content chunks every few months, their revenue would be similar to a P2P model. The only difference would be that players would be allowed to choose to buy the content as they would any other product instead of "pre-payment" like a P2P model.
Of course, I could be way off and the income from QoL, vanity, and cosmetic items in a F2P might totally outweigh the income of producing legitimate quality content packs.