For me it sounds like another failed venture. When I first heard about it, I thought they were simply porting over the chinese-only Battlefield Online game that EA had, and it looks like I was right. It looks like a WarRock 2.0.

WarRock was a BF2/Counterstrike clone (it was released late 2004 in korea, came out 2007 here in the US) "Freemium" F2P game that got ported over here by K2 Networks (the same guys who are buying and revamping APB). It had an "urban" mode that had diffuse-the-bomb and team deathmatch on small maps, and a medium and large combined arms BF2 style game on larger maps.

Where it got ugly was you needed to earn credits to rent your guns, and the guns went away after 1/3/7/14 days. Even the engineer couldn't have a rocket launcher without renting it.

PRoblems abounded in the cash shop. To rent a gun for 1 week, you needed to pony up 4000+ credits. You got perhaps 50 credits/game, 100 if you topped the leader board. If you had a "gold membership" account and payed every month, or plopped 15 dollars down in the cash shop, you got an extra weapon slot and free cash. If you bought weapons, you could also buy flak vests, etc, which could only be bought with cash. There were also guns that could only be gotten by cash, like 20-30 dollars, that shot 2x more than the "free" guns and did more damage. And they went away after a month, so you needed to pay that fee every month. For a month, it could take you 20-30k credits, for just RANK 1 gear if you outfitted all classes.

To top it off, if you didn't pay, like 1/3 of the MAPS weren't available to you.

The game rewarded people who payed 15-30 dollars/month and punished you if you played for free, because you could never get the better guns, and when you could get the middle-of-the-line stuff, you suddenly needed to grind your ass off every week to even keep it. And the people that payed got an extra weapon and say, didn't have to make the decisions you ha to and could take both an HMG and a rocket launcher, or an AT weapon and mines, etc.

Originally Posted by Gamespot

When you combine this system with real-world money, it's hard to shake the feeling that you didn't buy a mediocre game as much as you invested in a shady pyramid scheme. The retail version of War Rock includes a nice set of maps, a couple of cheap dog tags, and a few in-game goodies, like the mostly pointless M134 minigun. But you also get a free one-month subscription to the game--which makes you wonder exactly what you are subscribing to. As it turns out, signing up with your credit card earns you XP bonuses, a monthly allotment of dinar, the ability to create password-protected servers, or even another weapon slot, depending on which service you subscribe to. You can even purchase in-game currency with real money. But when you pay, you aren't paying for the game or the privilege of playing: You're paying either to gain an advantage because you get the good weapons, or to access features you'd expect to already be included in an online FPS. And in some cases, you're paying for features that don't work.