people running around in heroic gear they didn't earn

[Bensten]

The other point I was making is how gear is traditionally used as an indication of experience and skill, since it is traditionally earned by defeating content (thus if you have a Glorenzelg you have taken part in a successful Lich King kill... It doesn't however take skill or experience to buy Glorenzelg with coins, therefor if a coin shop is introduced to the system you can no longer relate skill/experience with equipped gear..

This point was never challenged or disputed, despite that it was the main point I was making, and from a completely neutral standpoint, it's not a negative or a positive or an anything, it just is. These are observations, I find it most annoying in this thread that the actual points made in my post were ignored in favour of instead forming a coin shop defense program to instead try to make it a personal dispute effectively about things I didn't even say or suggest.

The realm is up and running for way too long to judge people by gear. You can get T10 without stepping into any meaningful raid or just be lucky doing VoA. You can get a char to about 5.3k GS with some gold and some luck in literally a day - without using a single coin.

And what do you say about people getting carried to ICC10n LK achievements? Having a fresh 80 on follow while still stomping everything inside the instance with 9 people. A legitimate way to get achievements, that would still exist without any sort of coin shop.
You'd be surprised how many raiders get their **** toons carried to high achievements without really playing them and thus lacking any knowledge, especially if they change their main role.

[taralej]

To be completely honest, this exact thing is why pre-nerf Cataclysm heroic dungeons (on retail) were such a huge controversy. I'm not speaking about donations, but the sudden increase in difficulty that required people to know how to play the game, as opposed to heroic dungeons in the dungeon finder (patch 3.3+ with all that emblem gear and whatnot) in the previous expansion.

Pre-nerf Cata HCs were when I had fun like I hadn't for years in this game exactly because of their difficulty.