no. no no no. you can't charge money for something that's competitive because then you alienate your consumer base. it will make you quite a bit of money in the short run but this kind of nickel and diming will run quite a few players off regardless if they can afford it.
My personal opinion is cosmetics are a great way to make money, including unique looking weapons that have identical stats as the normal ones you can buy. if people spend tens of thousands of dollars on their 12k hondas to make them unique you can bet your *** people would love to rice their mechs out
what happens when you charge for stuff like this aside from what I mentioned before, is in the competitive community you immediately alienate players between the can's, the can not's, and the "that's too unfair's", where the top levels of competitive must require quite a bit of money to compete. a better model and, I can't believe i'm saying this is if you have tournaments that require a buy in, but these can't be half done either, they would need good coverage, management, and decent rewards whether digital or otherwise, on top of the usual challenges of creating a legitimate competitive base for things like videogames.
I understand though that it's tricky for a company to make money on a free to play game without inadvertently aggrivating their player base.
Edited by Battlecruiser, 27 May 2012 - 01:46 AM.