No, I won’t. Not because I am bound from doing so or otherwise directed to spout a scripted narrative, but because I don’t agree with that assessment. Let me try to give a little insight into this if I can and I’ll break it down between the Character Boost and the WoW Token.
Some players may recall an old promotion called the Scroll of Resurrection. It allowed an existing player to send an invite to someone who used to play WoW but had stopped, for whatever reason. We found that as we released expansions and the level cap grew, players who were interested in playing again found the prospect of trying to catch up to their friends daunting. With the Scroll promotion we provided the returning player with a boost to one of their characters so they could jump back into the game and play (also giving the sending player an incentive in the form of a mount).
The promotion was hugely popular and helped returning players jump back in. What of those who never played but wanted to join their friends in Azeroth though? We eventually created the Character Boost, which addressed the major hurdle to both new and returning players and allowed them to join their friends at the beginning of an expansion.
Yes, the promotion and the introduction of the Character Boost (which was included for free with the current expansion) was a source of revenue, but much of the reason for their creation was to fill a need that would hopefully benefit the overall health of the game. For all of our character services we tend to settle on a price that makes it available but not so available that it is likely to be utilized without serious consideration (which is why the boost is available with the current expansion but extra boosts have a cost).
As for the WoW Token, it was simply a way to help address the very real problem of gold selling services. With a game as popular as WoW the market has always been too attractive for gold sellers to ignore, it is a billion dollar industry. We have a lot of different preventative measures in place as well as active investigations that try to deal with it, but as long as there is a market for it the prospect of removing it entirely is impossible. Those services often facilitated account compromises though, so as means of helping counter what is out there, we created the WoW Token. This was to help people who had a lot of gold but not much in the way of money to buy game time/battle.net balance, and those who had money but no time to exchange it for gold, safely.
I’m sorry, Meowlena, while I am not at liberty to discuss recent events, you appear to be misinformed regarding our CS staffing. The reduction in force that we experienced took place back in 2012.