I found a lot of things in this review pretty spot on, and am curious if others feel the same. I do still regularly play one MMO which I love (GW2), but dumped all the others I used to play since I got fed up with their obvious shift to practices he discusses here. While Anet may be guilty of employing some, they are not imho deliberately destroying the play experience just to sell you a workaround since in game achievement tracks are still the primary focus.
One thing that keeping exclusive control of the server does is make a game, or at least the game in multiplayer mode, really hard to pirate. That’s a pretty compelling argument in favor for someone making the game.
It’s also a compelling argument for me to not buy the game, though, because it puts an expiration date on the game. Baldur’s Gate 3 sure had no problem moving copies even though it’s got LAN, direct IP connections, split-screen, and it’s available DRM-free. By contrast, I could have been into Mythforce, but multiplayer is tied to a server in that game, so no thanks. Cherry-picked examples? Sure. But it still doesn’t make the server-tying any more compelling for the consumer.