You would be right, if you would buy game time directly for gold, but you buy WoW tokens. Those are bought by players for money and those players sell them for gold. The gold stays in the game.
WoW token basically make blizzard a gold seller and people buying them for gold are basically blizzards “gold farmers”.
They have more to do with it than you think, since WoW token give an incentive to get gold for buying game time (among others) with it and while some of it is just circulating, a good part of it comes from farming.
Actually I didn’t and the token are bad for letting people get a month worth of subscription or for them to buy the expansion for it. It’s the incentive to farm gold for it, which is a problem.
That on the other hand would be “Pay (gold) to win” and absolutely inacceptable:
“Recent leveling changes make me accumulate high amounts of experience, lets reduce that?”
I truly dont see why we need a gold squish and what it will accomplish.
It wont change a thing because people with loads of gold will still have loads of gold. Its just a smaller number.
The economy works just fine and lower numbers wont make a difference.
If anything, we can maybe use more gold sinks like mounts and other stuff like we had in the last few years.
I was referring to Black Market AH and that new NPC with the cosmetics that cost 100k+ each, my bad for not clearing that up. These cosmetic items are not from other players and are strict gold sinks.
Consider the following comparison:
I have the option to pay 200k gold to lower the difficulty of encounters so that I end up clearing the content and earning gear, achievement, mounts and titles from it or
I have the option to pay 200k gold to another player/group to boost me so that I end up clearing the content and earning gear, achievement, mounts and titles from it
The end result is the same, the cost is the same and therefore the means to acquire it is also the same. What changes is who is the direct receiver of the gold. In the first case it’s a gold sink since it gets removed entirely from the economy, in the second it switches hands and remains in the economy.
-=EDIT=-
Going on a tangent, but I really like the idea that Blizzard did with the NPC in Emerald Dream where we hand in crafting materials to earn reputation. It is a great way of acting as a sink for crafting materials and therefore “balancing” their value in the player market, because if the materials are really cheap I will take advantage of it and convert them to reputation (which indirectly means gold via the renown satchels) and dragon isle supplies (which indirectly means gold via conversion to those boulders in Loamm Niffen).
I was thinking that they could add a somewhat “inverse” of that sink where players can spend gold to convert it to either player power or outright convenience and its cost being determined by frequency of usage similar to how the token value increases/decreases based on supply and demand.
In the first case everybody can use it, even those who in the second case would be those boosting. There is a reason for difficulties in a game like WoW. Blizzard would probably even increase the difficulty again, because people would make sure they use it all the time. It would never be only for those who would boost otherwise.
It is not the same at all. And the cost of that being a gold sink would be too high.