Pop into the Destiny 2 Eververse Store today and you'll notice that they've got something special on sale: The Iron Emote Bundle, "a limited-time bundle for Guardians who remember the Iron Lords." It contains one Fireteam Medallion, one Gleaming Boon of the Crucible, and the kicker, an Iron Lord Exotic emote called "Salute of the Lords." It's available for direct purchase for 1100 silver, which works out to $10 in real money. Sorry, bright dust not accepted.
Basically what you're looking at, then, is a $10 emote, and that's not going over super-well in all parts of the D2 community. As the original post in this Reddit thread says, "Locking it off behind a $10 paywall would be one of the dumbest moves to pull at this stage in the community/developer trust rebuilding. This isn't some random sparkly emote, this is the goddamned IRON LORDS WE'RE TALKING ABOUT."
Of course, that complaint is contingent on the emote not being available elsewhere, and that hasn't been confirmed yet. But it doesn't show up in the Eververse engram preview, nor is Saladin offering it for sale or as part of his loot pool. So it's possible that the emote will drop from gameplay, but it really doesn't look like it at this point.
The problem isn't that players who are willing to purchase this emote (Tim) will have some sort of advantage over those who are not (me), but simply the principle of the thing. Destiny 2's third season is widely seen as sort of a reset, a chance to start over and address the shortcomings and complaints about Destiny 2, and so far it's been going reasonably well: Mars is nice, there's plenty of stuff to grind for, the Exotic updates are cool (the Huckleberry is fantastic), and the Escalation Protocol is a lot tougher than anyone expected. In principle, being able to buy stuff directly from the Eververse Store, rather than rolling the dice on engrams, is a plus too. But ten bucks for one emote? That's pretty steep.
I've emailed Bungie to ask whether the Salute of the Lord emote is available through gameplay, and I'll update if and when I know more.
