The price of free

I don't know if it's the economy (are we still in a recession? I can't tell anymore), but there seems to be a certain  amount of frugality in the video game market. It manifests itself in the form of "free" video games. Now, my feelings for this business model have been mixed since Dungeons and Dragons Online. I was really excited when it came out. After an hour or more of waiting for it to download, I was finally able to roll my character (a half-elf rogue by the way) and go kill some shit. It didn't take long for to me realize that rest of the server was populated almost entirely by dual wielding dark elf rangers. Apparently these guys and gals paid real money to pretend to be Drizzt Do'Urden in a digital space.
And so began my love hate relationship with micro-transactions.
CCP has launched an opened beta of a MMOFPS that can be found here. It's an EVE Online tie in. Even though I never played Eve a little research made me wish I had. The universe is rich with lore and exciting systems are in place to govern battles, diplomacy, skill advancement and so forth. Apparently, CCP plans to tie Dust 514 in to this world. Not just in terms of story telling, but in actual game play. Such that, Eve Online corporations will be hiring Dust 514 players to do battle on their behalf in order to favorably alter the playable landscape.
This amounts to something that is conceptually amazing, provided Dust holds its end of the bargain. But that's a big "if" and it scares the shit out of me. Mostly because of the micro-transaction stuff.  But so far the beta has everything that I would want in a game, even despite the fact that I'm not a huge fan of the FPS genre. So let's take a look:
Skill based advancement system- Check
Sweet sci-fi stuff like spaceships and clones- Check
Gain skill points even when you aren't playing- Check
Super deep customization of equipment load out- Check
Assholes that spend their allowance to get gear that owns you- Double Check
Well, that last one kind of sucks, unless of course you don't mind throwing down the coinage to be one of those A-holes then it's probably pretty awesome.
But despite the beta being relatively fun in and of itself you're left with the feeling that something significant is being left out. Because, well, it's a beta test. So despite a bit of herky jerky camera work here and there, and some latency issues, this might shape up to be a great game. Just jump on it quick because the skills take so long to level that you run the serious risk of senior players being permanently better than you just because they started first or paid for skill point boosts.