> The key phrase is "detrimental to the game". What does that mean exactly?
> Who defines what helps or hurts the game? Blizzard does, of course.

Things change over the time. If you go back to Vanilla Wow, neither Blizzard or any other player would have ever thought about gender, faction and race change. The key word was "learn to play your class". I think these features should have been ingame since the beginning, to be honest, as people can get bored and have no time to re-roll a new toon from scratch just because they got bored of race, gender or faction. In fact... after tons of qq, begging and proclaims... Blizzard offered these options.

Same goes for "real money for vanity stuff". They start with vanity pets and try to get some cover behind the charity factor. Later, charity will be gone and 10$ will be a full price for a pet.

People say "well, I do 10$ in 1 minute of my real life work, who cares get a job". It's not a matter of "how much real money you can grind each day". It's just a fact that Wow is deeply changing and old customers not always like that.

And to be really honest, I can't understand how they give full patches for free (3.1, 3.2, 3.3, ...) and have the courage to ask 10 dollars for a panda. I would understand a 1$ fee, maybe... but 10... come on.