I’ve been downloading every MMORPG I can get my hands on for a top secret project that’ll hopefully go live some time this week. These days, “PC gaming” is more or less synonymous with “publishers drooling over World of Warcraft’s profits,” as every major company pushes to get their WoW-killer out the door, stretching the limited MMORPG playerbase over more and more virtual worlds. And why not? MMORPGs are licenses to print money, even the bad ones—and let’s be honest here, 94.34% of them are insufferable garbage. MMORPGs are virtually piracy-proof, require monthly fees to play, and their server and bandwidth costs aren’t nearly as high as publishers hope you believe. If you can make a living selling virtual currency, or even farming that virtual currency, you can make a God’s honest killing on even a barely successful MMO.

Yet, despite the genre’s transition to the mainstream of gaming and its position as the poster child for PC gaming, little has changed since EverQuest, Ultima Online, and the MUDs before that. These are games designed to feature a lot of content that takes a lot of time. It’s funny, then, that the free MMORPG trial, the frayed end of the rope publishers use to string new customers through several thousand hours of life-destroying addiction, matches the content of their games so perfectly. Funny in that “how and why do people stand for this” sort of way.

My hard drive is no doubt a fragmented mess at this point, having been on the receiving end of over a dozen MMORPG installations and uninstallations over the last several days. Every MMORPG follows that same installation process: (1) download 2 GB file, in either .exe or .zip flavors; (2) extract 3 GB of install files from initial download; (3) install 4 GB game; (4) spend upwards of an hour downloading years of patches. It seems to me like there’s more than a few ways to optimize this procedure, like oh, I don’t know, including those 500 MBs of patches with the original client for starters. But MMORPG players are gluttons for punishment. This is a genre that until recently featured interfaces so unusably terrible, players defended the acrobatic keystrokes and developer-mind-reading telepathy required to use them for baring those unable to decipher them at the virtual gates. The only MMORPG that offers a free trial experience that functions as something other than a metaphor for rape is, unsurprisingly, World of Warcraft, whose small client streams content as you need it, and doesn’t require a single patch. It’s no wonder they have ten times the subscribers as their closest competition.

However, not all MMORPGs offer free trials. Typically, when you buy a PC game you own it now and forever; if you really want to play SimCity Societies a decade from now, you’re more than welcome to. But when you purchase an MMORPG, you’re merely paying for the right to log on and pay your monthly dues. If you don’t like the game, you’re left with a very expensive (and very ineffectual) coaster. Surprisingly, many of the MMORPGs that don’t offer free trials are the ones that need them most: City of Heroes with its unique, comic book setting; The Matrix Online with its love of tradition and its upholding of the crappy Matrix video game legacy; and Vanguard, if only to prove that it’s not quite as unplayable as everyone claims. Truthfully, there’s a lot of sense in not offering a free trial in the first few months of an MMO’s life, as the influx of tourists degrade the experience for early adopters. Still, when your entire business model is built around trapping unknowing players in a deep pit of addiction and then extorting a regular fee from them so they can continue to enjoy their drug of choice, it only makes sense to give them the chance to get hooked in the first place.

Basically, what I’m saying is this: Spending four hours just to extract a single sound file from an MMORPG is unnecessarily painful. If I was actually interested in playing any of these, I’d have lost whatever whim inspired me to download them in the first place between the time I finished extracting install files for twenty minutes to save someone a few bucks on their bandwidth bill and confirming my e-mail address.

Oh, well. At least my trek through the poo-colored hills of MMORPGland allowed me to rediscover Guild Wars, which, it turns out, is excellent. Shame I was too busy wishing it was World of Warcraft back in 2005.