Originally Posted by
PenguinChan
The easiest solutions would be to make them weak, add gold alternatives to NPCs and some kind of token system / badge system to buy better ones that are stronger than either of them. And of course conjured group versions so that those who can't / don't play as much can still end up using one in content that they're doing together.
For gear, as it stands now, it has a good base system. Make it so you have to gather things yourself, and you use crafters to make the gear itself through commissions. Otherwise, have the normal crafted gear be mediocre and just a catch-up / fast-pass to just enough ilvl for current content (LFR / Flex and Heroic dungeons) at max. Honestly turning professions into cosmetic focused and commission focused paths are way better than having them give you a bunch of useless gear / consumables over time.
At least IMO - because the effort to actually make crafters relevant again would be very difficult to balance both fun and frustration dealing with commissions. I'm totally fine with them going back to Classic / TBC days and making crafting actually fast-path you to greens or blues earlier on. While the more powerful purples are only gained through content itself or rare recipes for the crafters themselves / commissioned.
Just spitballing at this point, but you get the idea there are multitude of ways to decouple gold value from power. Not all equal to one another, but it's better for them to try systems out than to just keep it the way it is now.
I forgot the b.net currency exchange existed, lol. Remove that and then the token loses an insane amount of botting value as well. So if you did that, while also making gold a lot less useful for any power gain in-game - it'd definitely help a lot. As keeping the token there would still deter RMT bots. But at that point removing the token would be a morals choice from Blizzard - not a large monetary gain one I suppose.
But now that you mention the first part about buying things with gold outside of WoW, I doubt Blizzard will ever remove gold for b.net currency, which is sad.