Uber upgrade?

[nameless noob]

You say that buying items encourages dupers and botters; well so does trading for items! And I'm sure that everybody who plays Battle.net has traded for items, where as only a small fraction of them have bought from one of these sites.

Zooooom! This is the sound of a point being missed!

Yes, but by who?

The point(s) that you have missed:

1) Not all items available for purchase with Real Money ™ are Duped.

2) Not all items available for purchase with real money are botted.

3) Not all items available for purchase with Real Money are doped OR botted.

4) Therefore, at least SOME of them are legit. (And possibly a majority... no way to tell)

5) An item that you trade for MAY be duped.

6) An item you trade for MAY be botted.

7) An item you trade for MAY be legit. (possibly a majority... no way to tell)

8) An item that you did not find yourself MAY or MAY NOT be legit.

If the reason you oppose item purchase is that any such purchase might not be legit, then in fairness, you must similarly oppose item trading. With so many known hacks, one can not be even reasonably sure of items one did not personally locate.

Real Life™ money throws everything off, because the limit for "too much money" is far, far higher than the limit for "too many items". Stockpiling (ie, botting, duping) makes sense, as does mass-producing hacked items, because you will have many different prospective buyers offering $$$, which you can never have enough of, instead of items, which you no longer need.

A good argument. But if you'll forgive the expression, you're simply pissing into the wind here. While Blizzard has done what it can to eliminate duping, they seem to have given tacit consent to the Cash-for-items crowd. This has grown over time and is in many respects just part of the game... So regardless of the logic you present, it just ain't so. Sorry.

"I have a life, I bought because all it did was trade time for money." Much like "the hitler argument" this one is so commonly used (despite completely missing the point of the debate, in this case), it's hard finding the energy to bother arguing back

I'm familiar with the old Usenet etiquette rules, and found Adeyke's comment amusing. Something of a "we'll never agree, so lets just drop it and you can claim victory". Hence my response "Let's make it a draw?". But I guess nobody dropped it...

Did you know that no matter how bad the problem, my Father would never call a plumber or an electrician? He could do the work himself. Never mind that it involved hours of cursing and or sweating in the attic or crawling in the basement. Never mind that an expert could do in 15 minutes what he spent a weekend on. It was a philosophical thing with him. And perhaps with you?

The decision to trade Money for Time never misses the point. The decision to do so or not is fundamental to the whole discussion, and I submit that there is no RIGHT answer to the question it raises.

The reason I wrote anything as all on this topic was the holier-than-thou almost puritanical position so many of you took in response to the mention that a desired item could be purchased. That you'd rather be cursing in the 120(F) degree attic is your decision and I'll not claim that you're evil or wrong... but when somebody casually mentions that they've considered calling an electrician to fix a similar problem, you should treat them with similar respect.

Personally, if a repair looks like it'll take me more than an hour, I call a professional. Shame on me?

-nameless noob