Well, I'm sure you know, but it's your choice to buy the collector's editions. From a pure financial standpoint, you could save a tremendous amount of money just buy buying the regular versions.

Currently not buying collectors/ and going 6month sub to save money, one xpac at the current 60$ price and sub is 204$ a year aprox, its still more than any other 2 games combined, atm with a expac every 2 years, its 174$ a year, thats still a mighty price for a single game, CoD could release a new game every 4 months and still be cheaper than the new model, what im saying is that they need to make new expacs cheaper or free,

Yes, it should be noted that expansions cost significantly less than brand new games (US$39.99 vs. US$59.99 in most US stores). If you choose to pay more, that's fine, but whatever you're paying for collectors editions, it's probably likewise US$20 less than the "cost of brand new [collectors editions of] games".

First off your math is wrong.
$13 a month times 12 months is $156. Also, half of the Collector's Edition price (how much 1 year of it is worth) is $45. Add those and you get $201. Divid that by 12 and you're spending $16.75 a month to play with the collector's edition. Buy the normal and you'll pay a bit less. That's a few gallons of gas. It costs less for a month of WoW than it does to fill up your car once. People act like spending $40 every year or so is a lot when they can save that much by eating out less and changing the thermostat.

For the amount of time you can put into this game, I'd say that money is well worth it. Think about the amount of money you'd have to spend on console games to even come close to the amount of content WoW has. Conservatively, I used buy 4-5 new games a year for my 360. That doesn't include the rental fees for Gamefly or going to the local rental store. In WoW, I average about 25-30 days of playing time per year on my main alone. Not even half of what some friends of mine play. Just a thought on perspective.

The real issue is getting new players in the game. The WoW Battle Chest is $19.99 that gets you up to BC. Then WotLK is $39.99 and Cata is another $39.99. The next expac will probably be another $39.99. So just to get a new player ready to play to max level for the next expac, you need to spend $140. Of course Blizzard does those funky sales occasionally, but for the majority of new players, this is what they have to spend to start the game. For long time players, $40 every two years is not much, but for new players this is getting out of hand.

@Eyhk: Um, no. You're correctly noting that when they release new expansions, they make it cheaper to get the older ones (you note how you now get BC with WoW), but pretending they will stop doing this in the future, and thus incorrectly calculating the cost to get to endgame once the next expansion is released by not dropping the cost to get the current game and expansions from present day prices.

Right now on Amazon, you can get WoW and the three expacs for about $90 US.

Two ways to see it I suppose:
1) doing a sale means folks have to grab it when it's on sale, or pay more. This means some will be leery of investing in the game because they don't want to buy everything at once if they're not sure, but can't be certain what the price will be when they do decide to buy it.
2) People will see it on sale and buy it right away to grab the price.

I think long term they need to just lower the price or bundle things, rather than have the sales. But that's just me. Maybe when Mists comes out, bundle Wrath and Cataclysm as one expansion, since Classic and BC are already togethor. Make that $20 or $30.

Especially given Cataclysm is only 5 levels, I wonder if it'd be possible to skip it, I doubt it, but oh well.

Alternate idea for the collector's editions....if you just want it sitting on your shelf, unopened, then take notice of WoW's declining popularity and simply pick up the collector's edition later. At my local Fry's, there were three dozen CEs for Cataclysm, clearanced out at $30 this past weekend. I could still find Lich King CE's there last year, too.

Upgrading from a free trial to Cataclysm was $79.99 this past weekend, and I am pretty sure that is normal price.

People fail to realize that most mmo's have a new xpac ever year or so, Guild Wars, final fantasy, eve online, everquest (in the beginning) it's actually kinda odd that it takes blizz 2 years for a new xpac when everyone else can do it faster.