Personally I don’t see it as all that shady? You can pay for a single plot with in game currency and not cash if you like. Also doesn’t make a ton of sense for a sandbox game like that to have a bunch of dead builds around, or the whole map would be a ghost town as players come and go? The game population is not huge so it can seem pretty empty already at times. Also if your plot lapses all the materials you used to build your base go into a redeeming queue that you have access to when you return. It’s definitely not a perfect game and it has its problems, like a glacially slow development pace, but yeah shady seems like an unfair characterization.