Yeah, I'm fairly interested in TERA which you mentioned before, and managed to get 50% off on it with a coupon I earned through Raptr. But the no-subscription, "premium mmo" game idea still compels me. If TERA doesn't fetch me within
3* 4 months, I'd wind up spending the same on that as I've spent on the Digital Deluxe of GW2, which I won't have to resubscribe to to see the improvements along down the road. That really seems more worth it to me.
Since the last time I quit playing WoW regularly over a year ago, I've discovered that even when I want to play the game daily, I often can't. Such is life. So I can't justify a $14.99 subscription fee for anything outside of WoW, where it is only justified by the fact I have dozens of friends there and I got Diablo III for free with the annual pass (which I must see through until December if I don't want D3 to be revoked, and I don't mind that because I get to sample Mists of Pandaria as well on the closed beta).
I was surprised to learn you become locked to a single game server in GW2 as well. You'd have to pay extra to change realms which sucks if you find out your friends play after you get started and they're elsewhere.. They didn't even do that to players in Aion, though in the end they've had to consolidate the NA servers twice now that it's F2P, which is why I'm not going back even though it's free.. Aion is good, I'm just pissed that I got screwed when I spent a lot of money to stay subscribed in that game over the years that it was pay-to-play. It's now a cash-shop supported free-to-play in the NA market. (No VIP subscription option like with EU Aion's F2P has, last I checked).
It also seems to me that they're preparing GW2 to be a cross between the GW1 model (which pretty much had only cosmetic and game-content unlocks in the cash shop) and the Aion NA F2P model where there's more paid service incentives, in case they want to milk it a little more on the way to creating expansion content. I did not have the time this past weekend to check out the cash shop at all, so I could be wrong. The beta players were given "free" cash shop currency to try it out but I haven't had much time to myself to do more than the marginal analysis I've done so far
edit: didn't even realize the game with 1 free month. I'll cancel before they bill me the recurring 3-mo sub I signed up for if the game doesn't compel me in 1 month though.