I've been playing a lot of star trek online, because it's star trek and there's no alternative, it really would be shit if it wasn't. The way micro-transactions are so tightly weaved into the game is ridiculous. All ships are bought with micro-transactions. All decent gear is bought with a micro-transaction backed currency, which also requires grinding and grinding against a time wall. Most of these time walls can be sped up with more micro-transactions.
It's not as bad as it sounds. The game is perfectly playable and fun paying zero, i've never paid a dime. There's a ton of single player content and actual star trek characters with the real voiceovers. The amount of actual content that has been created over the years is massive. You can grind it all, or just wait as it's going to come anyway just from playing. Most people run multiple characters because you can only grind so much per day of the time backed/currency backed currency, which comes out to $0.30/day/character. Most people would run 10 characters on WoW though so w/e, there's different classes etc.
Now to the point of the lockbox. On top of all these microtransactions, you have the lockbox. The best of the best ships are only acquired via the lockbox, but they can also be traded on an exchange for an insane amount of the grindable currency, which isn't really grindable, the only way to get massive amounts of it is either to play that exchange, or buy keys to these lockboxes and sell them on the exchange for this currency for the massive amounts it trades for.
It breaks down roughly, 1 key = $1. 1 key = 4 million EC on the exchange. One of these lockbox ships could go for 1 billion EC. Hundreds and hundreds of real dollars.
If you look at the forums, or the in game chat. These people defend this to no end. They literally sink thousands into this game. Tens of thousands.
Look at this thread forum, just look at it.
https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1236720/how-much-real-money-did-you-put-into-sto-to-date
(pic related)
These people are sick. This is pure gambling addiction. It's not even pay to win, because pvp while it exists is dead as fuck. It's all PVE.
Also the chinks that run this game now will auto-ban you if you even mention the name of a 3rd party gold seller in any in-game chat (like this goy in pic related, who actually used one), and they'll ban you if you play too long for botting. So it's perfectly possible to sink $10000 dollars into an account, and then get banned and loose it all with zero recourse. Their support is also non-existent, you can complain about your ban, or being ripped off when you bought something in game and it fucked up or you never got it after you dropped $100, and there's only a 10% chance support will even tell you to fuck off, 3 weeks later. There's something seriously wrong with this model and the people who support it. I hate government regulation but this needs to be regulated.