Originally Posted by
Arguru
But that is assuming your general statement (and thus opinion) applies to everyone. YOU don't want to farm stuff/don't have the time, YOU don't find levelling a challenge anymore. Okay, all fine, but that's not going to be solved by selling 'time for money' and it will only insult the playerbase that can't/doesn't want to use the item store.
The thing is, everyone plays this game for different reasons and has different methods to get there. Personally I like PvP and I eschew levelling (though I enjoy the occasional raid), also I like to play the AO market. Hence, when I need something, I just hire people to powerlevel me and/or to buy the lootrights for whatever the hell I need.
Enter person B from my org, a froob who has multiple 200's, has never used the itemstore but still has lots of fun doing so. Said person is exceedingly wealthy for a froob and has worked really really hard to get there.
The thing is, selling 'time for money' will disadvantage both these people, since others can get to the same point by a simple swipe of the creditcard. Now, if this is fair I'm not going to discuss again as it's pointless, but it DOES diminish the 'accomplishment' greatly. I spent multiple years getting my current amount of credits, someone else can just buy token packs and sell them for 450m. While I didn't do that, my current amount of credits is suddenly less of an accomplishment because I could as well just have bought token packs.
Someone who has multiple 220's to their name... I respect that, I personally won't ever get another 220 as I *hate* the Inf grind with a passion, I'll just stick to making twinks. The guy I know with 9-10 220's to their name and multiple respected twinks.. yeah, that's an accomplishment. If FC were to indroduce 'buy 1000 points, get a char to 195!' (which was on their planned list fyi), yeah, that greatly diminishes that guy's accomplishments.
Not only that, enter person C, a casual PvP'er like me who decides to make a nice low-level twink like I have. They want to do six-slotter, but, alas. They didn't get the DB helm nor can they afford a Pioneer Backpack.. so they miss out on the Tutoring. Sorry, no sixslotter for you because you didn't spend 60$ on FC when that offer was available. This takes it one step further: it makes it that you can't accomplish a certain thing without spending RL money.
The point I'm trying to make is that for the grand majority of the players, the game is about accomplishments.. I feel really good about having multiple billions to my name and I've worked hard to get to that point. I have some nice twinks that cost me a lot of time to build, take my latest 15 forever where I'm currently farming pristine/mutated clumps in exactly the QL I want. A huge timesink yes, enjoyable.. hm well I'd much rather go out and hit towers too. But it's still that timesink that makes the end result an accomplishment, remove the timesink and it's simply not an accomplishment anymore. Back in the day someone who had 2.500 tokens, was either crazy for missions, or had a lot of money to buy token guns. You respected the guy who had 2.500 tokens. Nowadays, with dailies and token packs, if someone says they have 4k tokens... okay, grats?