[Venjenz]

The analogy to final exams is logically absurd.

In WoW, most people purchase gold for mundane shit that makes their time more meaningful, which would relate to all the times a college student spends money to maximize their time. A better parallel, if we must go down this road, would be:

You are a college student. Instead of using a computer and a word processing program to write your papers, you choose to use a circa 1953 typewriter with no correction ability. Instead of using a mechanical pencil, you choose to use a circa 1850s pencil that you sharpen with a straight razor. Instead of a pen, you use a quill and inkwell. Instead of using the Internet for assisting you in your research, you are a die hard adherent to the card catalog (if any still exist) and reading through library books. And when you are taking your physics or engineering final, instead of using a calculator to crunch numbers, you do all the math and arithmetic by hand with your 1850s pencil.

A player in WoW who paid real $$ for their epic mount rides that epic mount to BWL or AQ40 and then dismounts and enters the instance where their final exam takes place. Xiangtao the gold farmer isn't there to raid for them, he just farmed the gold that paid for the convenience of getting there faster. And when the raid is over and the repair bill is tallied, instead of sharpening the pencil with a straight razor, you just click the mechanical pencil.

Buying gold is a timesaver. The player still plays the game, they just maximize their useful time. As others have said, when you are no longer in college, and you have a job, wife, home, children, etc, then you'll see that free time becomes a far more valuable commodity than your "MMO honor" and saving 20 hours per week of mundane and, quite frankly, useless farming of maintenance coin will take on a whole new light.

When you have 80 hours of free time per week to devote to MMO play, then farming is no big deal. When that free time drops to about 20 hours per week, then farming Scholomance and Stratholme for the 4,000th time will seem really, really pointless.