Well, I mean in theory it could be the result of the near daily posts on the forums about how Blizzard needs to do something about botting.
But… you are probably correct. 
…Why are people who use tokens complaining anyways?
You can literally straight-up redeem the token for 30 days of game time.
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If you bought blocks of time for the discount then the change impacts you, but if people were just buying 1 month at a time anyway, you are correct.
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People have said it hurts bots a bunch and I can see it, just sucks some normal folks got caught up in it, too.
You can never 100% stop them but I’m all for making their lives more annoying.
I can understand the argument, but I cannot sympathize since WoW token users aren’t using their own money for it.
I often wonder how many bots I could ban in a single day if my job was to get botting reports sent to me, log into the exact location the toon flagged was investigate and deal justice too in 8 hours
I’d make my GM toon decked out in some paladin judgement armour and when clicked ban on them it would hammer of wrath all the botters in the area and activate wings
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This clearly shows Blizzard can’t stop the bots or control them through the game by breaking or banning, so they punish everyone again, not first time and won’t be the last.
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Very few are being punished.
The only people it really impacts are those who redeemed tokens for bnet balance and bought blocks of time.
If you have a sub, nothing changes.
If you buy 1 month at a time with a token, nothing changes.
If you buy 1 month at a time with a credit card, there is a change. That change is easily circumvented though by adding a sub and once it clears, cancelling the sub. Is it annoying? Sure. Is it punishing? No, not really.
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Look at all these quarterly commitments!
Q2 has been insane!
That’s not true, people here in Philippines use game time cards to buy game time and they will be affected.
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I understand that, but that is nowhere near the ‘everyone’ you claimed. And scale wise, I’d imagine it definitely qualifies as very few.
It affects anyone using Bnet balance to get game time. Which is how I paid for wow for years as a teen before I had a real job and credit card.
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I just tested it and it’s still giving me the option to pay with Blizzard Balance. What is OP complaining about then?
How is “everyone” being punished?
I think there are two motivations involved.
The first is to curb bots and gold sellers, which seems to be the rationale behind eliminating the 30 day one time purchase option. Now when they ban accounts associated with bots and gold selling, the people banned lose $29.99 per ban instead of the previous $14.99 per ban. That increases their costs, but will it be enough to impact the number of bots and gold sellers? No one knows, but this is perhaps an experiment to see what happens.
The second motivation seems to apply to the elimination of the 90 day and 180 day purchase options. People that bought those got the same discount on a per month basis as the folks with 90 or 180 day recurring subs (e.g., $13.99/month rate for 90 days and $12.99/month rate for 180 days). Now if the one time purchasers of 90 days or 180 days want that discount, they have to subscribe instead.
The odd thing is that you could sub for 90 or 180 days one day, and cancel your sub the next, effectively making that recurring sub into a one time purchase, so I’m not sure they are gaining much. Perhaps they think there will be a lot of people that won’t do that and instead leave the recurring sub in place.
And as everyone knows, or should know, businesses that employ a recurring sub business model count on people forgetting to cancel when they meant to or wanted to. It’s a key aspect to profitability of that approach. It seems like Blizzard is counting on this, as it would add to their bottom line across a large pool of players.
Keep in mind that Blizzard in recent months has increased prices in many other countries, explaining that they were making adjustments due to changing currency exchange rates. (Interesting that they never lowered prices in other countries in the past when exchange rates changed the other way, isn’t it?)
But that exchange rate rationale doesn’t apply here in the US, and clearly they know that if they changed the base $15/month price there would be a rise up of player angst and anger that has rarely, if ever, happened before (bigger than RealID perhaps even, who knows). That’s particular true now in the midst of a pandemic, not to mention the recent several rounds of Blizzard employee layoffs in the US and other countries, not to mention that $200 million bonus to the CEO.
So here we are, with a new and more creating approach than adding another shop mount or bonus mount for a six month sub or discounting the cost of SL or any of the other usual ways of increasing revenue.
I’m just wondering, in my big bovine head, what happens in a few months down the road, if the 60 day one time purchase approach works well at increasing Blizzard’s revenue. Will they change it to 90 days? 120 days? 180 days? Eliminate one time purchases altogether?
/moo 
Or you can pay for a Visa gift card and use it like a credit card.
If you watch the customer support forums, you see many tales of those that forgot to cancel their sub. When they contact Bliz in a timely manner, the charge is often reversed, even tho it says all sales are final. This is by no means guaranteed.
And sure, does the sub go down when the exchange rate is low? Not so much, but neither have they increased the sub for inflation. It’s really not the big conspiracy everyone tries to make it out to be. It’s just business.
You used to be able to buy the 180 day game time with Blizzard Balance and get the discounted rate of 12.99/mo ($78). This is no longer an option. For players like me who use gold to tokens to blizzard balance, this will cost me an extra $24 of blizzard bucks a year. As it now stands, 6 months credit card “subs” get a special mount and a discount. Players who choose to pay for 6 months with their account balance no longer get either benefit.
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So why did they remove the 90- and 180-day options?
Any botter who cannot make the ~250k gold to buy 60-day game time is a lousy botter.