It did so while also increasing the availability of mats to make those consumables. Alch in particular has never been easier to max and the mats for greater prot pots basically rain from the sky when you start farming them.
Any scarcity is a perceived one created to drive up prices for sellers.
Any and all attempts to defend gold buying or selling can be summed up with
I’m too lazy to actually play the parts of the game I think are boring and I feel entitled to skip those parts completely by using my debit card.
If that level of play isn’t sustainable, then the answer is that the game wasn’t meant to be played at that level in the first place. Don’t blame Blizzard for banning people who buy gold just to support a certain level of sweatiness.
It’s actually easy to answer this question. Vanilla is NOT like retail. Vanilla as a game, functions primarily by giving the player the feeling of participating in a vast, alive, game world. One of the reasons Vanilla raiding is about raid preparation (farming), not difficult mechanics, is because that’s part of how it produces the MMO feeling of an alive world. The player is REQUIRED to spend time interfacing with that world to progress through content.
Allowing people to skip farming kills the game. People raid log. They stop going out in the world to herb or mine. They stop doing dungeons. It becomes harder for people that want to play the game legitimately to form groups and participate in the economy. Inflation caused by cheap gold literally penalises those who play legitimately. The social interactions that define the game collapse, and all that one is left with is a retail-like husk. The appeal of Vanilla is in its MMORPG aspects. Take those away, and there is no reason to play the game at all anymore. You might as well play retail.
Facecancer is 100 percent correct. Even before the recent addition of alchemy procs, mats for consumes were incredibly easy to acquire in SOM. Unlike Classic, there are tons and tons of herbs to pick and lotus flow like candy for anyone who bothers to actually go out and pick herbs. Herb bots are basically unheard of on Jom Gabbar. There is NO SCARCITY. And yet, prices have been high. Why? Because of gold-buyer driven inflation and market manipulation.
Gold buying is killing the game. It must be stopped, and yes, players that buy gold need to be banned.
This is patently false. Gold buying always has, and always will, inflate the economy and makes everything cost more. If there was zero RMT and zero bots in game then everything would be cheap enough that everyone could use it. As the total amount of gold on a server climbs so do prices. Period.