I prefer civilized discussions. Even in feral areas like online forums.
I suppose the big difference here is you feel that the token circulates well with the in-game economy. I don’t personally care about that.
My feelings on the matter is if I spend enough $20 bills, I can get anything in this game without ever actually putting effort into it. It severely undermines the effort itself.
I see absolutely no difference between paying money for gold and then using that gold to buy achievements or gear, and simply buying the achievements and gear on the AH. In my mind, this game has already become “pay to win” like every other F2P MMO out there.
The only difference is they masquerade it as something different because there’s a currency exchange involved.
I can utilize my disposable income and turn it into online rewards whenever I wish. Oddly, that ruined the flavor of the game for me. I learned with the introduction of this token that perhaps I just wasn’t as into the journey as I thought I was, that it was a combination of the journey and the reward that drove me to continue playing.
But now I can just buy the reward, so why work on a video game for it when I can spend more effort in my career and get the in-game reward? Actually, this is a win on my part. Or at least, it sounds like it should be.
My career is doing much better, but now I’m rarely even logging into WoW. That’s certainly not on the token alone, but it’s a big factor. I’d likely still be raiding just to hold a healer spot for that AOTC mount at the end of an expac. But maybe I’ll just spend $20 on it if I’m still around.
Why though do people buy to begin with? Some can’t do the group content, some just don’t have the skill for it, they don’t have enough friends or guildies who can do it, they don’t have the time to sift through LFG and find the runs they are after.
Selling became a thing for two main reasons, players who can’t do it for the above reasons and to allow players to bypass the lower content so they can do something they want to do, like higher end content.
I have pugged maybe a dozen runs this entire expansion, it’s just not worth my time, and if I didn’t have my guild I would for sure look at the option to buy boosts otherwise I would never get enough gear or stats to play at a higher level and therefore probably not even play because pugging lower keys and raids is a nightmare.
What we have now is a few LFG advertisements and some chat spam, what we will end up getting are in game mail, in game whispers and a thousand players who will /yell with their advertising. On top of that trade chat will end up much worse than it is now.
Be thankful you no longer have the in game mail and whisper spam happening.
and therein lies the flaw in your argument that boosts are not a problem. if pugging is not worth your time or effort, that is a social design and game design problem that should be answered with something other than real life cash.
the availability of these boosts undermines design philosophy on an MMO and the actual ‘problem’ is that the content is not worth the effort. You just said it yourself. That problem exists because of boosts. blizzard should look to fix in game systems that help with these underlying issues instead of opening shop and creating a market to cash in on people who are having these troubles.
Wow, this really is the new hot topic. Okay, I’ll play. Again.
It is a problem and these are the reasons it is a problem:
A) It break the integrity of the game.
Titles, mount, achievement are framed in the game as items to be earned, not bought. When you buy them, you are breaking the frame, and therefore the integrity, of the game.
B) It is unethical.
It’s like me paying my grandson RL money to give me Boardwalk in Monopoly. It is corrupt behaviour based on a corrupt ideology that money should entitle people to anything they want. (Which is what led to the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal.)
C) It is dishonest.
Since the in-game framing is that those items are earned, it makes it look like the buyer earned them when they did not.
D) It casts doubt on, tarnishing, rewards earned legitimately.
Now I don’t have any of those things and probably never will but that doesn’t mean I can’t look at this behaviour and see it is a corruption of the game.
And sad because if folks are willing to sell out their integrity for a title in a game, they must be easily corrupted for real rewards in RL and last thing the world needs right now is more ethically-challenged people.
But adding the token didn’t combat the issue, it legitimized it.