[quote=@Inkarnate]
You're welcome to disagree, but lootboxes and microtransactions are paths to disingenuous business practices. Full stop. Given I've played SWTOR and NBA2k for what seems like an eternity, I think I have some merit to my issues with it. I’m genuinely pleased Battlefront got the shit it did in the press (Jim Sterling and many others) and I’m thankful that it got EA to get their head out of their ass for five seconds. Now if only others can understand this before gamer apathy sinks them.

Also, NBA2k18 was getting shit on from about all angles for its microtransactions, so I don’t think you know what you’re talking about for once.
[/quote]

I played SWTOR off and on from launch up until KOTET and the microtransactions are the only thing keeping that game going for better or worse, and it's mostly tailored towards people who want to cosplay or have aggressively annoying mounts. Free to play players having to drop five bucks for quality of life stuff is pretty much a staple of F2P MMOs which SWTOR is now since the point is to get players interested and engaged enough to spend the 15 dollars even for a month. The worst part of free to play isn't the lack of a run feature - back in my day we didn't even get the ability to run until level 15 and we had to go through at least Taris/Balmorra and half of Nar before we even got speeders - but the credit limits because the GTN is full of price gouging. You haven't really played SWTOR until you do the Dune Sea without a mount because you don't have 25k credits and you're in shitty gear because no one runs flashpoints due to no group finder. 

And despite the microtransactions, NBA 2K18 still did well critically and seemed to basically fly under the radar compared to BF2 and Shadow of War by virtue of more eyes being on those games.