There's a stink currently going on in the forums for Battlefield Play4Free. While I won't pretend to understand the difference between a "Veteran Weapon" and a "Legacy Attachment" (probably similar to the diffrence between the NES and ROB), the bottom-line is that users paid for a virtual good to give them an in-game advantage and are having it replaced with a different type of good that gives them a not quite as big in-game advantage.

This demonstrates one of the things that has always bothered me about microtranscations for multiplayer games. When the game shuts down or changes to decrease the usefulness of virtual goods, what happens to the users who spent money on all those virtual goods? Do they get a refund? Or do they lose their investment?

The key is that the user has to feel like he got his money's worth from purchasing a virtual good. For more permanent items such as avatar clothing or in-game weapons, this has to come from how much the player used the item - in other words, time. In this case, the players didn't have the weapons for very long. While this was done for competitive balance reasons, many of the players who purchased the item are understandbly upset and have lost the trust in the game that made them want to purchase the items in the first place.

The moral of the story here is that a child won't be too upset if you take away a toy it purchased with its allowance if it no longer plays with the toy, but it will get upset if you take away a toy it loves or just purchased. Then again, why is anyone putting themselves in a position to take away a child's toy in the first place?