If you're not willing to pay the usual 15$ fee or the 12 month subscription with discount then you must really not want this game back that badly. 10 year old or not "there is no other game like cox" " I don't have fun in any other game" etc speaks to me that it's worth doing whatever possible to get the game back and to keep it running.
This game isn't going to run at 5$ or 10$ a month unless many people have multiple accounts, buy lots of cash shop items or we end up with huge subscription numbers to pay for the games expenses or the game is flooded with ingame talking ads that nobody likes.
Do you have access to some numbers for that? Just curious where that info comes from.
I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that the cost to run a maintenance-mode CoH legacy game would be
much lower than it was when the game was running. They wouldn't be paying anyone to design new content for one thing. $15 a month for the previous more costly CoH made sense...I don't see why I should assume the same rate is needed for a cheaper to run CoH. And I'm not going to ignore the fact that the game made
more money after lowering the sub price to zero either. I don't think "$15" is a dividing line between profitability and non-profitability. There may need to be a carrot of some sort to get some people to play a game without updates.
$15 a month would push me from 2 accounts down to one I must say. It might surprise some to learn that because they can afford it that doesn't mean the same is true of everyone. It might not be "because you don't want the game back that badly".
Coincidentally, I'm in the process of changing banks because my current bank insists on hitting me with a $12 monthly service fee every time my checking account falls below a certain limit. (While they ignore all the money I keep in savings at that bank)
Is $12 a lot of money? Nope...but that sort of thing adds up across the board and I pay attention to things like that....which is why I'm able to live within a budget and not fall into financial difficulty.