To play people online, get demos early ect ect.

They are paying to use their own connection which they already pay for. P2P

Again, I have found that most people are incredibly poor judges of who is actually cheating and who is just very good.  Some cheaters are blatantly obvious, but those are very, very rare and are usually banned by a server admin pretty fast, if you find a well moderated server.  Players that are super good, are often cleared by ghosting them.  I have been a server admin on a few servers and have ghosted many, many players.  The amount that were cheating was small.  When I see people bitch about cheating on PC games, I think of how many times I was accused of cheating by mediocre players that couldn't understand that is was possible to go 20 kills to 0 deaths on a CS map if you were good.  I was, at my best, a good player, but I was never an all-star or upper tier competition worthy.  Even at that though, I have been accused of cheating over 20 times when I was on a streak of doing very well.

But, of course, it is easier for people to bitch instead of researching what actual cheating looks like for most people.

The rules of online PC gaming have remained close to the same.  Find a good server with active admins and the quality of play is alot better, and actual cheating is eliminated pretty quick.  Every once in a great while you run into a cheater who is a decent player who is good at covering their cheating, but they get caught eventually on a good server.  VAC isn't that great, but server admins that know what they are doing can cover for that.

I give that post a 9.4.

I can't speak for the cheaters on PSN cause I don't play a lot on it. But cross game chat is nice, but not worth $50 yea to me. shrug. Ill keep my ps3 and PSN. Only good reasons to have live for me is I love a lot of there arcade games. Also many more people play online on live than PSN it seems. The real reason people play LIVE so much is cause it's the online system all there friends play.

Also anyone that thinks steam is not as good as live is just wrong. End of story. I play games all the time on steam, L4d (VS), BC2, CS and i never see cheaters. Don't assume because someone kills you there cheating k. Maybe there just better than you. Idk like i said i never see cheaters. It does everything Live does and it's free. Only think is you need a PC for it, so I can see that part of it.

What's the difference between paying a developer to improve the servers or gaming content and paying a company to improve the online service ?

I do understand that MMO subscriptions need to be more expensive, but in the end whether online service or MMO, you pay for being able to play and for more content.

Which then begs the question of how much people should pay to hire a babysitter for shio to make sure that the posts coming from shio are actually constructive and beneficial to read.

On that note, there has been issues with the PC side of Game Room, and how people hacking the ROMs has resulted in cheating in the scores.  This does get revealed through the videos that are put up.  The 360 doesn't have this issue.

I would suggest they are paying for it because
A they have a 360 and
B they want to play games on-line.

The fact that you can play an on-line game on a PC or a PS3 does not alter the fact you need to pay on a 360. If you wanted to play games on those platforms then feel free (free get it chuckles to himself).

Of course other features exist which are gold features but I highly doubt the vast majority of gold users have purchased the gold access for any other reason than to get full access to all features most notable on-line gaming.

the incredible ability to talk online and p2p gaming (non server base gaming) I can't wait for sony to start charging for psn yeah!!!

I'm just saying that the costs and how they are structured are different and for different reasons.  MMOs are not really analogous to XBL, PSN, etc. 

I give that post a 9.3.