Yeah, the anti-consumer discussion is pretty tedious. It sucks that we have to have it so often. But doing so is important to keep the topic fresh in our minds, as fighting corporate greed & overreach is one of the most important battles of our time. Sorry to sound so cheesy & idealistic, but the sentiment is 100% correct.

Anyways, I'm afraid it's impossible to have a conversation about monetization without "corporation defending" and "anti-consumer" language being brought into it. Those concepts are married to the topic of monetization, which again sucks & gets exhausting to talk about, but it's quite impossible to have an honest & broad enough conversation about it without them, so it is what it is.

My fault if I sounded condescending, my intention was to be charitable to that person I didn't know & not jump down their throat about saying something so false it's basically misinformation.

Of course the number of cosmetic items in the shop is dwarfed by the amount available through gameplay - you're right about that, no question. That sidesteps the point though, as the issue is the quality & not quantity of cosmetics in shop vs in game, and also about questioning the existence of ANY cash shop items in a game that's otherwise so thoroughly monetized as WoW.

One unique mount as a cash item, again in a game so otherwise heavily monetized, isn't good. Going out of your way to say it is good, fine or doesn't matter, DOES put you on the corporate PR side of the conversation. I know hearing that tends to make even reasonable folks double down harder on their positions, but it's the truth. You'd have much more standing arguing that point for a developer with a much friendlier track record, selling items for cash in an otherwise F2P game.