Uber upgrade?

[FenrisWulf]

@gekko:
Hm, there actually is a fairly interesting ethical question among all of the flak going back and forth. unrealshadow suggested that the original poster could always purchase an elite item if he really needed one, and you posited that purchasing items is the spawn of the devil because it supports hackers and botters.

Through this, you're making the unsupported assumption that all items sold must be botted or otherwise produced through the use of hacks. This is likely true for any of the item-selling sites that are advertised in BNet channels; the sheer volume of merchandise doesn't correlate to the natural rarity of the items being sold. There is no requirement, however, that I bot an item in order to sell it. For instance, in the last ladder season, I found an Arioc's Needle -- worth very little, of course, but still an Elite Unique. If I went on eBay and offered this tidbit, and someone purchased it for, say, $0.02, where have we broken the rules of the game, and where have we betrayed our morals?

I would think that the problem does not lie with purchasing items, but with purchasing items produced through hacking. It is a fairly difficult procedure to actually determine which case a particular instance might fall into, but no more so than with general public trading, entirely within the game. Is public trading no longer acceptable behaviour, either?

EDIT: Removed my last line. I think that I might have gotten a bit carried away in my devil's advocacy. :)