Would the player friendly badge gear of old hurt the WoW Token sales and the boosting

[Echo of Soul]

In earlier iterations of WoW casual gearing was a lot more player friendly. Do whatever content you want, get badges/points and buy the second best gear in the game over the course of a few months.
This lowered ingame toxicity by a lot because now casuals weren't forced into high end content for their gear, they could do LFD, LFR and daily quests so friction between casuals and high end players were a lot lower.

However now we have the WoW Token. Casuals with limited time can buy a token and then buy a boost from one of the boosting communities and get their gear that way.

So if Blizzard were to reintroduce the player friendly badge/valor system casuals wouldn't need to buy boosts as much which in turn would hurt the WoW Token sales. A lot of casual players started quitting about a year ago when they realized that they were second class citizens and didn't have any meaningful to look forward to gear wise but I could imagine that a lot of the remaining casuals bought boosts through the WoW Token so that the revenue for WoW stayed roughly the same.

[Lochton]

In earlier iterations of WoW casual gearing was a lot more player friendly. Do whatever content you want, get badges/points and buy the second best gear in the game over the course of a few months.
This lowered ingame toxicity by a lot because now casuals weren't forced into high end content for their gear, they could do LFD, LFR and daily quests so friction between casuals and high end players were a lot lower.

However now we have the WoW Token. Casuals with limited time can buy a token and then buy a boost from one of the boosting communities and get their gear that way.

So if Blizzard were to reintroduce the player friendly badge/valor system casuals wouldn't need to buy boosts as much which in turn would hurt the WoW Token sales. A lot of casual players started quitting about a year ago when they realized that they were second class citizens and didn't have any meaningful to look forward to gear wise but I could imagine that a lot of the remaining casuals bought boosts through the WoW Token so that the revenue for WoW stayed roughly the same.

Nope, won't hurt the WoW token at all. People get the token due to many reasons, gearing is only one of them.

[Argorwal]

My memory of valor seems wildly different than these forums am I going crazy?

I remember a handful of slots for valor of the next highest gear (239 right now for example) and virtually never included weapons.

Not even close to a decent gearing method for casuals outside a few slots.

[The Stormbringer]

Might be some slight sales losses, but I don't think it'd be that much. People do boosting for more than just gear, after all. There's mounts and achievements to keep in mind.