"But I have to give props due to the fact they don't charge us for this additional content"

But they charge us pretty heftily for expansions, their subscription price is a little higher than most, and all the character services - Realm Transfers, Recustomization, etc. are actually priced pretty high considering what they are.

WAR's "expansions" are bigger than most of WoW's content patches, smaller than WoW's expansions, but free to all players, and they still have regular patches that add content. They generally treat their players a lot better than Blizz does, it's just too bad the game itself doesn't measure up to WoW.

Of course they don't charge us for this additional content, we're already paying for it. I think new content being patched in at no added cost is a fair expectation at $15/mo on top of the one-time game/expansion costs. I mean, that's $180/yr (per account, at the monthly rate), granted there's overhead with paying support people and operating the servers, but still - outside the cost of the game itself, you're easily paying for a fair bit of new content right out of your subscription cost.

For people pushing endgame progression, they need these new content injections more frequently, otherwise things stagnate and people quit until the next expansion. So really, that's why we pay what we do. For the new content. It's not actually free, it's just not an additional cost. Unless it's a lot of new content bundled together, then it's basically another game....

I forget if I had a point I was trying to get to.

You misunderstand my meaning. They charge us monthly subs but they don't charge us for these huge patches they come out with. I think that's pretty cool! As far as I know Blizz doesn't make you pay for "Blizzard" points to download a patch. I compare this to Microsoft points which is really just another word for "your money". You have to pay for these points for additional content for other games. So our monthly subs pay for the patches sure but when 3.2 hit who paid to download it? See what I mean? I didn't think it needed further explaining lol And for the record I'm happy with the patch so far. Un'goro crater was fun to run around in again, I look forward to getting the new raptor mount!

I see what you mean now. The big difference, though, is that on Xbox Live you're paying your subscription to Microsoft for use of the service for finding and playing multiplayer matches of any game you have for the Xbox, but when you buy content, say Halo maps I have to believe that aside from the normal middle-man cut, a substantial portion of that money goes to the content provider- which isn't necessarily Microsoft - Bungie in this case, if they're the ones creating the maps. You aren't paying Bungie a subscription fee, so you aren't really paying for new content to be added.
With WoW, you're paying Blizz for the game/expansions up-front, and you're paying Blizz significantly ( approx. 4X ) more than the base XBL Gold subscription price ($39.99/yr, last I checked). What's the same is that you're still paying for new content. The difference is that with WoW it's rolled into your base subscription price and (or rather, "because") it's mandatory, but with XBL games it's optional and you pay for it separately (because the content provider isn't the service provider).