Professional Farmers

[Walkiry]

Items bought with real money throw off the balance of the game in both PVP and PVE.  If everyone could just buy anything that was not BOP, the difficulty of all PVE encounters would have to assume DMF epics and HOTW on every caster, warriors with full DI gear, hunters with full BDS.  And any sham/pally/warrior who felt like competing in PVP at all would be compelled to buy the hand of Rag.
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I'd say that part of that problem is Blizzard's decision to make post-60 progress an itemization race, where people who just hit level 60 are assumed to be in the same bracket as people who've farmed MC, BWL or *Insert Uberinstance* for months. This is specially egregious in PvP.

You can easily mail your level 30 alt 100g or so and start decking them out with gear much much better than what it would be expected from that level, or even go with your 60 alt and plunder some resources for crafting good items for said alt, get a friend to race you through an instance, whatever; yet people won't think you're cheating, they'll (mostly) settle for "cheesing." After some playing you'll outgrow them and won't really make that much difference when you reach level 40+. At level 60, though, it's a different story. There you're supposed to go through gear to get to better gear, and use that gear to get the even better gear, all with the same level 60 requirement.

BoP is supposed to help with that, but when you have some of these "uberitems" achievable through BoE stuff, either crafting, ingredients to turn in a quest or whatever, then suddenly that just-turned-60 person can be at spitting distance of the loot with just a few $ and an appropiately placed farmer, instead of having to go through months of gathering X and Y by themselves (or their trusty guild).

Oh yeah, you can't buy the Hand of Ragnaros, you can only buy the Sulfuron Hammer (or the Sulfuras Hammer? I can't remember which one was which). HoR will need you going through MC, at least once if you're very lucky.