A bit dramatic eh ?
The real point to my mind here is that it's not possible to maintain high quality new content once or twice a year on a 5+ year old game for free. No rentability.
They can't even do that with overpriced DLC that rare ever goes on sale and never changes price even 5+ years later! It's stupid comment like this that makes me question if you buy DLCs blindly and have no actual idea what Content is in them. It takes 6 months, and hundreds of people buying a $20 DLC, just to make 5 Buttons and a few passive buffs, which are broken for the first 3 months?! Modders make even more content then that, with very few bugs they fix in hours, for free! How can Modders do BETTER for FREE than what actual Devs are doing for a JOB with most likely much higher than Minimum Wage pay 5 days a week for months at a time.
This is why a Subscription won't work, cause they will get steady income, and not have to actually change anything! They won't improve DLCs, they won't come out with them more often, they won't lower the prices! They are just sticking on a Sub, they never mentioned actually CHANGING anything or IMPROVING anything cause there is a Sub. We'll still be getting over priced, shitty DLCs with little content.
So taking you want another system than DLCs, If i had to make a caricatural statement l would say they have the choice between subscricption or micro-transaction on one side, and no more content after 2 or 3 years of exploitation on the other side.
With that being said it's obvious you can't predict everything's gonna happen from a new sub system and i expressed my concerns earlier. I'm still convinced it's a mistake to think about it on a "one game" level. Should be considered at the "catalog" level.
What I want, is better Quality DLCs. I would pay Full Priced $20 DLCs, if it was WORTH the $20s. THAT is the biggest Negative about it. Not that the DLCs are expencive, but that they should NOT be that expencive. As people have pointed out, look at the Humble Bundle sale that just happened. Hundreds of people buying the game now, myself included, now that the DLC prices are actually worth the content they have, which is just a few bucks.
As for Prediction, you can make a very highly educated guess, by looking at History, by following logic, and understanding that ultimate, the Company does not give a shit about it's players at all, and hasn't for years, and this 'test' is just to see how much hate and pushback they will get from the Community before forcing the system in place as the only way to play any of their games, old and new, and yes that includes updating the games to force them to play through the Launcher you have to Sign in to continue playing and then restricting access to accounts that don't have a Subscription.
And it wouldn't even be hard for them to set it up.