Oh please - stop with the PR attempt (Score 1)

Microtransactions: This would be the payment model that has so much going for it: 1.Instead of playing the games to win items you buy them.. so the point of playing is to allow the folks with money to burn work less? 2.The model that relies on a few people subsidising the rest of the player base, hoping that the urge to compete will cause people to shove coins in like some fruit machine that never pays out. 3.Lets companies who can't come up with outstanding original products to compete with World of Warcarft give in and try to beg for spare change instead. Welfare for failed MMOs? We don't need to improve our products or stop churning out crap, we can just rip people off to get money instead.. YYAAYY. 4. How about crafting in games? Didn't the 'fluff' items used to come under the skill sets. Interesting to see that Cryptic on other news sites are saying that solo players wont need to be in 'guilds' to win the same items. Not going in your nice little shop are they? Even if the items on sale do stay at the 'cosmetic level' does anyone really think that if this games gets established that someones eyes wont light up with the chance to claim they've boosted profits with a little 'greying' of the line between cosmetic and useful gameplay items. 5. The argument 'Other games do it' Most games give a way free items, for example pre-ordering boxed sets you might get a free mount. Given that most MMO games struggle to get one expansion pack out a year at best, it's going to be pretty much impossible to see a regular flood of items. Plus these are free things that come with buying an expansion pack and are not created for their own sake, they are little bits of blurb on the side of a box. Can anyone tell me a good reason how this all benefits the majority of game players.. please? Oh, and it's not a Free to play game, so you still have to pay a months subs up front, so all the cheapskates out there hoping to get a free game, well you're out of luck :) Not that I don't think my above arguments don't apply to real f2p games anyway. The price of a months subs for just about any of these onlines games is usually around, or less than, the price of a DVD that will be watched once and thrown in a pile to gather dust and never be seen again. To be brutally honest if you can't afford this each month you can't afford the prioce of the fancy graphics cards to run them. But that's not the argument here, this is just dumb. Only last year the studio was releasing interviews describing micro transactionas as dumb, I wonder whose been arm twisting for this. Surely that Star Trek IP doesn't come cheap...