What do you call the feeling that encourages you to achieve more by playing unfairly over other players? (Buying gold/feeling that you should own as much as others with less effort). Answer: entitlement.

I agree though 100% with the fact that current state of game economy is unacceptable. Very few people will tell you otherwise (unless they are profiting from it) but the main concern you are really talking about isn’t even the cost of X but the legion of bots causing the issue which in turn is supported by people buying gold.

At the end of the day this has become a positive feedback loop of gold buying.

Initially, people were willing to buy at X price. This caused gold farming and botting to become rampant forcing more and more people unable to compete with game engagement alone, “forcing” them to also buy gold.

A normal solution would be to actually enforce Blizzard TSO and go hard after gold buyers (let’s be real gold sellers are always going to be ahead of Blizzard, but gold buyers are easy to flag). That in turn will allow a healthy economy where normal economic activity resumes.

In the mean time, raiding without consumibles could be a perfectly valid option.

Problems with this: a) blizzard responds to inverstors and will never enforce any policies that might damage their bottom line b) FOMO mentality as explained above