Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Microtransaction in Mechwarrior Land!

When I first saw that Mechwarrior Online was going to be using microtransactions to generate its post-Kickstarter revenue, I turned my nose up at the thought of paying for things that I could just earn with time.  I was patient, after all, and the things I couldn’t earn were things like slots for additional mechs and paint jobs to slather on my ride.  The biggest attraction was a set of incredibly expensive color patterns, that I could, for a nominal fee, buy and slap on the old mech-a-rooni.  For only 750 Mech Credits (a little less than four dollars if you buy Mech Credits in a $15 portion, which seems to be their baseline price-point, though larger MC purchases lead to higher overall credit counts) you can permanently unlock a paint job on a particular kind of Mech.  For 500 Credits you can unlock cool looking military colors.  Other “premium” colors cost more, so I’d have to foot the full bill of 1,000 Creds (five fucking dollars) if I wanted to paint my mechs such laudable colors as “Obsidian Black” or “Grey.”  And if you want to unlock the single coolest “Phranken” paint job pattern for your mech?  You’ll need to throw down 1,250 Credits to be able to use that paint job for a given mech.  If you want to use it for a different type of mech, you’ll just have to buy it again.  The paint job pattern you buy for your Atlas will not work on your Cataphract, or vice versa.

I don’t know if insane is the right word, but it’s fair to say that it’s pricey as fuck to paint your mech fancy colors.  Especially when you consider that additional mech bays are a meager 300 Credits, a single dollar if you purchase Mech Credits fifteen dollars at a time.  You can, theoretically, buy Mech Credits in increments of $100, but that’s a heroic amount to throw down for paint jobs and parking spaces.  Well, and Heroic Mech Variants, variants reserved for paying customers, but those variants cost quite a bit, often still clocking in at twenty or thirty dollars a pop, even at the more favorable Mech Credit exchange rates that come with purchasing Mech Credits in larger amounts.

The whole affair smacks of microtransaction fever, the fever that has drawn such ire in Dead Space 3, though it’s alloyed by the fact that MWO isn’t a “pay to play” game.  This, after all, is how they make their money.  And while I might consider $30 to use a mech called a Pretty Baby absurd, someone paid for it, and it’s keeping the lights on in a studio who made a game I love to play.

So maybe it’s not that big a surprise that recently, in the midst of playing a shitload of Mechwarrior Online, I actually bought some Mech Credits.

In my defense I meant to spend them all on mech bays.  I really did.  But then I bought two additional mech bays and I realized that I had so many Mech Credits left, and my Cataphracts looked so drab with their standard-issue paint jobs.  If ever there was a time I was going to buy paint colors and paint schemes, this was it.

So fuck it.  That’s what I told myself, I mean.  Fuck it.  I got this money, I’m gonna fuckin’ spend it.  I wanted to look a little fancy, and part of why I bought those mech bay slots was to keep my prized fleet of Cataphracts.  So I dropped 750 Credits on a Tiger Stripe paint scheme that I could use for any of my Cataphracts whenever I liked (a single use of a pattern costs on a given chassis costs a meager 75 Credits, for context) and 250 Credits on three different mech colors so that I could use them on any of my mechs (they were on sale!).

In the end I’d burned through half of the fifteen bucks worth of Credits to get fancy paint jobs, most of which could only be applied to two of my four mechs.  And I had enough Credits left over to buy three whole mech bays, if I chose to do so.  Right now I’ve thrown down on two more, and I’m waiting to see if I want to buy single use patterns on any of my mechs.

It’s been a pretty blasé experience, but I came to an important realization along the way.

I don’t mind microtransactions.

This revelation is not necessarily applicable to all situations.  I’m livid when I buy a $60 game and I’m asked to spend more money out of the gate for little nuanced bits and pieces.  But in MWO, where I’m (on an intellectual level at least) spending 15 bucks to help support a group of people I believe in, I actually don’t mind so much.  The functional aspect of it is less unsettling to me now, now that I know that buying an Atlas doesn’t mean you know how to use an Atlas (and represents a significant investment, since Atlases run close to $20 per variant) and that most of the Hero Mech variants have serious weaknesses in their stock loadouts.

The concept of value is obviously skewed.  I wouldn’t spend more money just to grab more paint patterns for my mech.  I like that my Cataphracts look like tigers, but I simply cannot justify buying virtual paint jobs for my virtual mechs unless I’m getting something else at the same time.

Value is an inconsistent quality in the land of microtransactions, and it can’t entirely be laid at Piranha Games’ feet; part of it is the diversity of materials that people appear to be willing to pay for.  Mech Bays have an obvious value (more space to fill with mechs) and Mech Purchases make sense too – giving mechs a cash value kind of ascribes a sort of hourly-wage value to C-Bills, I get it, it works in a sense – but paying as much as I did for paint jobs is tougher to justify.  I like that you can mechs look cool, it’s nice and if it gets Piranha Games more money, great.  But it’s not for me.  Still, the presence of that revenue structure means someone’s buying paint jobs, at least in theory.

I’ve dipped my toes into microtransactions.  My toes survived.  But I’m not willing to dive in that deep, not yet anyway.