Turbine's Greed Destroys Coast City

This post is a little late coming but I've been so wrapped up watching Ti3 that I've been neglecting Infinite Crisis.  For those of you who don't know Turbine "released" IC's new map Coast City.  However, saying it was released is a bit misleading.  It can only be accessed by people who are lucky enough score a key through some sort of key give away or pay $20, $50, or $100 for a Founder's Pack.  I can't believe that Turbine are monetizing the beta testing of this game.  Beta testers who are there to try to find all the bugs in their game and make it ready for mass consumption are expected to pay money in order to properly test all the aspects of this closed beta game?  That's ridiculous.  Let me say right away that I have a full time job and could easily afford to pay the $100, but there's no way I'm going to pay these greedy bastards to test their game.  Especially not when there are many other finished free games on the marked such as DotA 2, HoN, LoL, etc.

The thing that really annoys me is that the $100 Founders Program gives access to all future maps that are released.  So if you don't buy this you're going to have to pay the $20 to get access to each new map they release.  What's next?  When they implement wards in the game you'll have to pay $5 to use them?  When they give new items you'll have to pay $10 to access them?  I'm all for having micro transactions for cosmetic items, but I am not in favour of having transactions in order to access key elements of the game.  One of the main turn offs of LoL for me was that I had to either play the free heroes they were offering, save up tons of IP or RP or whatever it was to purchase them or fork out the cash.  This takes that nickle and diming to a whole new level.

I can't help but smile when I see complaints of the queue for Coast city taking 10+ minutes at times because there's not enough people around queuing up for it.  I can only imagine how much fun it is playing against the same 30 people over and over because there's such a small sample size of people playing.  I personally can't see myself paying to access any of these maps in Closed Beta and I really hope that they offer them up to us for free in the future because I really do enjoy IC and would like to see what it's like playing it with a more classic MOBA style map.

-HellFire