Borsuk wrote:
The way this becomes a problem is slow and often undramatic changes.... Like Rusting.
If two (3,4, whatever) years from now someone decides their guild needs an X class because of an encounter and you can drop $500 and have a fully geared/spec'd/gem'd X.... Then it's a problem.
The problem is that you don't go from zero to sixty. You don't go from today's state of play to that state overnight. The change is very slow and very gradual.
That's really all I want to avoid.
"Oh, it's 10 bucks for a Vanity"
"It's no big deal, it's just BOA gear for alts"
"It's not a big deal, it goes to charity and who really wants to level BS through TBC?"
"It's not a big deal it's only 1 peice of tier gear - and it's last tier's gear..."
etc.
etc.
This is a bit of a tinfoil hat response, IMO.
I understand where the concern comes from, but look at who we're dealing with: Blizzard has a history of at least
trying to preserve a certain spirit of the game (balanced progression) and unless the game is starting to go south to the point that they're giving up on it (something that I doubt would happen anyday soon), I just don't see them destroying the whole spirit of WoW's Progression model by allowing you to skip playtime with IRL money.
They know that Vanity pets come from a variety of sources, anything form easy to get, walk up to a NPC and buy it for a pittance, to killing things thousands of times, so they thought "a pet store wouldn't hurt".
BoA gear? I doubt it -- one, they want to make sure you are max level or near it before you're permitted to get your hands on that stuff, meaning you leveled a character once already. That is why the only ways to acquire BoA gear involve being either 80 (Argent Tournament/Fishing Derby) or 85 (Justice/Honor/Darkmoon Faire/Guild Levels). You could get a piece of BoA from your guild, but it requires Rep last I checked, and getting that much rep with a Sub-80 character would be quite difficult.
Leveling Crafting professions? While it is true they could tweak TBC content a little, I doubt they'd allow players to skip Burning Crusade areas entirely -- they had plenty of chances to do that already (they could have made Level 60-70 areas in the new Azeroth) and they chose not to, because they didn't want to completely invalidate an entire expansion. In fact, they're trying to get us to go back to TBC areas with Archaeology.
And last, but certainly not least, Tier Gear... they won't let us get Tier gear with Justice Points (at least not in 4.3), what makes you think they'd ever let you buy it with IRL Cash? They thought that Helms and Shoulders should be "Raid Onry", I just don't... see them letting you deck a character out with some IRL bucks.
Anyways, any idiot can predict that this new pet would fall to absurdly cheap prices when everyone who has a few extra bucks on mommy and daddy's credit card will try to cash in. I highly doubt $10 for 100g or less is really going to make a dent in the market. I can get 100g with 20 minutes of questing; that's not even minimum wage of $ per hour (avg $5/hr).
Edited, Oct 12th 2011 11:23am by Lyrailis