In a vacuum, I'd say these microtransactions in and of themselves are benign. Nothing offered gives me an advantage in pvp. None of it makes me more powerful in PvE, and thus more desirable to be in your raid group.
But we aren't in a vacuum.
The game launched in fall of 2014 w/ more problems than any of you need me to document here. But for all those problems, there were and still are so many things it did right. To name a relevant few:
- Art Direction
- Look, sound, and feel of gear
- dressing up your character, using different shaders, etc
Now there are plenty of players who could give two shits about how their character looks. My good pal T-44 gives zero fucks about how his characters looks. He puts on the most powerful gear with the best stats, even if it means he looks like something from the liner notes of a Tool album. I haven't really discussed the sterling boxes with him. I imagine he'll think they're dumb, but I don't think he'll give a shit as to whether or not he gets all the different 'fashion' options
I, and a lot of you, are not those types of players. I've infused a helmet that dropped at 270 something up to 320 just because I thought it made my hunter look the coolest. Spending a ridiculous amount of marks and armor materials in the process. So when I saw the reveal for the April update, and all the cool gear the characters were wearing, I was at least happy that there would be unique new sets to earn that didn't make me look like some angsty teen notebook drawing.
But I can't earn that stuff. I'm GIVEN three free pulls of the slot machine lever per week to try and get pieces I want or don't already have. Then am given another two free pulls for auto-piloting through whatever weekly crucible mode is featured and a braindead 260 light PvE activity. Then if I really want I can pay $2.00 per play on the slots.
So yeah, it's still just cosmetic. But up to now (other than the temporary SRL gear and emotes), anyone I saw walking around the tower in game, or people in my raid group, etc; all of the coolest looks were made up of things that drop in the game. The coolest looking stuff is all things I could get from playing the game.
Now, from a design standpoint, there is an incentive on the part of the developer/publisher to save the coolest looking/most interesting stuff for microtransactions. Something rad and super rare in year one like The Fermi Solution, where you knew someone had worked their ass off earning rep for Dead Orbit, or was incredibly lucky, maybe we start to see less and less of that. It plants a seed in the minds of the playerbase that can't be unplanted. Now we will constantly be asking questions like:
"Did they change infusion because they knew it would be much less frustrating for the player, or because they wanted to make it easy to make the real-money stuff easy to max out?"
"Does this raid armor look meh because I just happen to not like the aesthetic, or is it because they actually wanted to me to want cooler looking stuff?"
Whether it is actually affecting the game design or not, they can't take back the doubt it instills in the most hardcore. Anything in the game now that is seen as grindy, or inconvenient, etc.; I'm always going to be wondering if they're making a problem so they can sell me a solution in six months. It feels the opposite of empowering.
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tl;dr: on the face of it microtransactions for cosmetic stuff is a non-offensive way for the game to generate revenue. But it comes with a cost, and a loss of some trust.
