Jeff Strain sounds out of breath on the telephone. He apologizes for the lousy connection, tells me he's on a cell phone, and informs me that he's been involved in "crazy meetings" all day. The reason for Jeff's "crazy meetings" is NCSoft and ArenaNet's recent announcement of Guild Wars: Factions, the stand-alone expansion for Guild Wars. Guild Wars, of course, is the other great MMO success story of 2005. A subscription-free MMO developed by a group of ex-Blizzard employees, Guild Wars has done the seemingly impossible in the months since its release. It's managed to pioneer a whole new type of MMO business model, gather up a dedicated fan base of over a million players, and survived the World of Warcraft behemoth launched by their former employer.

"It's pretty exciting." Strain says to me over the phone. "We were really breaking some new ground with the business model for Guild Wars." Strain quickly goes over the history of Guild Wars and the basic premise behind it's development -- using streaming technology to deliver outstanding subscription-level content for free, along with two massive retail expansions per year. "We didn't just want to offer new monsters and new quests and new treasure, though. Factions has got that, of course, a ton of it, but what we wanted out of our retail offerings was a completely new play experience."