EA Charging For Bad Company Weapons?

Word from the Battlefield: Bad Company beta test is that several weapons in the game's arsenal are locked, with "Available for purchase on Xbox Live Marketplace" notations next to them. In total 10 weapons are listed as for sale, with five of them also available in the Gold Edition of the game. What this basically means is that people willing to drop a little extra cash, be it in the store or on Xbox Live, will have more weapons to choose from than someone who scrapes together just enough to pick up the game itself. This is not the way microtransactions should be used. Cosmetic additions and extra maps are all well and good, but allowing players to pay in order to get a leg up on the competition is just slimy. Multiplayer games suffer from enough balance issues without this sort of thing going on. Where will this lead? Perhaps eventually they'll allow you to purchase a much better surrogate player to represent you in matches, taking the term "professional gaming" to an all new level. Maybe we can pay for ammo next! "Everybody down! He bought extra clips!" *sigh*

[via Kotaku]

Sadly, the only real way for us consumers to combat this practice is to vote with our wallets. By not purchasing the game and or not purchasing the microtransactions it could send a message to EA and Microsoft that we're not going to take it. Also these "Microtransactions" seem to me to not be so micro anymore. We'll have to wait and see if this is the case.