It's going to be pretty unpopular, but I agree with you 100%. The thing is, I have to wonder why people who go to these lengths even play WoW. It seems to me like EVE, where this type of insanity is actively encouraged by the game's actual setup, would be much more their speed. Where's the challenge in stocking up metric assloads of money in a game like WoW? But then, maybe it's because they'd actually have much more cutthroat competition, for higher stakes? Hmm.

This old argument reminds me of the old flame wars over twinks in the BGs. Average players quickly learned to stay away in droves once twinks took over, because it was no fun to get stomped by someone who methodically went to batshit lengths to trick out gear, when all you wanted was to have a bit of diversionary fun to break up the monotony of questing. Any time someone pointed out how obnoxious this was, they either got told to L2P or were greeted with grandiose romantic notions of how twinks didn't do it because of some perverse love of roflstomping average players, no! The real meaning of it was in the challenge of twinking their toons, fighting other similarly tricked out twinks! Hell, that argument played out in the comments of this very blog more than a few times. And then Blizzard gave twinks what they always wanted (at least, what the disingenuous ones *said* they always wanted), in the form of xp toggles...only they would be forced to only fight other twinks. And we all know what happened to twinking after that.

I hardly think it's likely that casual players will ever be completely run out of the AH--after all, PvP is totally optional, but *everyone* needs money to play. But I can't get excited about this kind of thing. It kind of depresses me, tbh, as does the majority of this column's content. Bean counting to this kind of insane degree just seems like a spectacularly joyless way to play a video game. (And, for the record, the Gordon Gekkos out there would probably LOL at my comparatively paltry WoW "bank account", but I've never wanted for anything I needed or wanted, including the various gold sinks and vanity things. Of course, as a raider that works hard to get things, people who buy their way to things like Tabards of the Lightbringer make me want to hurl. And I see no fun at all in that, but hey whatever floats your boat, Veruca.)