In Cheap OSRS gold money equals gear and thus power. Ever since it's release entire countries have made farming Runescape gold a job. Even with bonds there are a hundred websites where you can buy gold at a better price - that's why pretty much none cares about bonds. Rather have a legit way to buy it instead of a shady 3rd party website. The legit way also doesn't require bot farms to generate money, which is a real problem.

Another nice thing about bonds is the act itself of giving a bond to a friend who you think could use a month 2 weeks of membership, earned with in-game gold. I spray bonds at my friends to get them to play.

As a runescape/eve player, the system serves to only benefit the game positively as has been explained in numerous posts. If you have a subscription for an mmo, I should be able to pay it with ingame gold,as long as I can find a willing buyer.

Yeah, EvE however took it a few steps further than that which honestly ruined the game in a lot of ways, and is a can of worms that CCP makes too much money off of to close...

Offering a legitimate in-game way for players to convert real money to in-game currency that someone legitimately farmed isn't a huge issue on its own.Eve's problem is that it's economy is inherently screwed up by money moons. And that awful Monopoly system that they had for blueprints. It turned into ultra wealthy barons controlling the markets with mega corps.

WoW tokens on their own are fine, it's the price controls and opaqueness in transactions(which raises questions of whether blizzard is injecting gold behind the scenes), and blizzards historically lazy approach to banning bots that make me skeptical.

If WoW tokens were instead changed to something that could be bought and sold, with market forces determining the value, I'd care very little about them. At that point, they are only an incentive to get gold.

Bonds exist because whether or not they did or didn't people will always buy gold from other sites.

Bonds were added later not immediately with release. Give it time and I bet your equivalent wow tokens will be added as well.

Honestly, the ability to buy and sell game time in game and with real money is the 1 form of MTX I will always support. People already sell gold and this effectively cuts out the scammy middle man while being beneficial to both the buyer and seller. It also doesn't negatively impact the economy like Gold Sellers do.

The world of RMT is much less risky than you think it is. At least, if you're buying.

Just buy from someone with lots of rep or history. Regardless, almost all the power lies in the hands of the buyer since you can just chargeback the purchase.

This merely offers something that people already do illicitly, but gives them an official channel to do it. Doing it that way, Blizzard gets the money that would otherwise go to gold farmers, the player selling game time gets the gold that they would have gotten anyway, through illicit means, and the users in game get to enjoy their subscribing to their favorite game without paying real life money, by bulk osrs merely using currency that they get from playing the game naturally. Everyone wins with buyable game time.

The only time that it's not a successful or ideal model is in a game where there is no real life market for that game's currency.