Originally Posted by
vizzle
This is about having a sense of achievement. Games are fun, but what makes MMORPGs stand out is that you can be the big dog if you put enough time into it. Do you think people enjoy spending 200-300 hours doing the Insane achievement? No. So why do they do it? Because it sets them out, it's a badge of honor. The same goes with mounts like Mimi's Head, Invincible, Ashes of A'lar: these are all signs that the player was in a guild that could clear those raids back in their heyday, or that they farmed the crap out of it until RNG was finally nice enough to them (and there are the few cases who got it on the first go, but it doesn't put the point aside). Those mounts are not only revered because of how cool they look, but also because of what they mean. It's a prestigious thing to have heroic gear early on, amazing mounts.
But when you open it up so that any idiot with money can get those things, you're allowing him to bypass the entire difficulty of attaining it, and so you're rendering any of the difficulty unnecessary. The prestige goes away, the shine goes away, because what you worked for, other people can just buy the exact same thing. It becomes sullied and muddled.
I play(ed) the game for fun, yes, but part of the fun was the prestige in knowing that I made my character as best as it could be. I don't care if other people had the things I had, because they all had to put the same effort that I did. But when you can just buy it? That's ruined. Knowing that people could just open their wallets and get all the stuff that I worked my ass for makes it all null.