Which in a way relates to Irregardless's post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5345217. One of my favorite MMO's Ragnarok Online won't get locked away and lost when Gravity decides to close it down, there are plenty of backends and open source projects that support the game.
I really prefer playing shards to the original game. Less/no grind, I can whiz through most of a MMO including the minimal story in a few months, the price isn't necessarily the issue, I just don't care to compete with millions of other people and devote several days a week to survive at that level and stay up to date (let alone be on "top".)
I want to have fun, I don't need artificial constraints to surpass. Thank goodness for these emulators, which are fun now and will continue to be fun when pocket-sized in the future :)
Online in its final packaging perhaps, but what effort would it take to get running locally? If one can play offline for a couple of minutes, the online portion is likely not as critical as it's being portrayed.
