It&#x27;s a bit different than this scheme, but I actually read a short story in Dragon magazine about 35 years ago (very likely 1980 or 1981) about an MMO where most people paid a subscription fee to play, but you could exchange in game currency for play time (and could even cash out into real currency -- leading to pro players who would compete for collecting the most in game gold).  It is an interesting twist to have the players front the real world cash.<p>As an aside, I always dreamed of playing the game I read about.  One of the cool things about the game was that your character continued in the game as an NPC when you were offline.  I always thought this would be very interesting way to have player generated content, where they would have to build defences to protect their player&#x2F;gold while offline.  Other players could launch raids to try to steal it.  No one has ever built a similar kind of PK system that doesn&#x27;t piss everyone off, but for me it&#x27;s a kind of holy grail of MMO functionality.  I hope I see it before I die :-)