I’m dropping this here. Charging $20 to access the Steam version of the game is not deceptive. If you don’t want to use the Steam client; you don’t have to. Steam does offer things like improved community functions, so that, the squads, gold and premium is actually pretty cheap, for what you’re getting. Also, people tend to forget that it costs money to develop, and support games (unless you think programmers and artists should work for free).
That said; I’m not a huge fan of the “free to play” model, but subscription based games haven’t done well, as far as I know, since WoW offered “free to play” options.
This is a slightly unfocused rant; if you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading.