Hot take: the wow token is a good thing, actually. I think its better to provide a means for people to buy gold from official channels than facilitate an exploitative industry of black market gold sellers that inevitably happens when you don't have wow tokens. There's a reason that classic and classic tbc have thriving black markets of near- slave labor companies from the global south selling gold (cont)
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while this doesn't happen with retai or classic mop, which have a wow token available to buy. Sure, it is "pay to win", but like, it is anyway? There's no way to consistently prevent black markets from forming, so I'd rather have the market be out in the open where labor laws protect people from exploitation.
For those that don't know what I'm talking about: its world of warcraft stuff relating to an item you can buy with real money that can be sold in the in-game auction house for in-game money, effectively allowing people to buy in-game gold for real world money. This seems bad intuitively, but in practice people will buy gold rather than grind it whether blizzard (the devs) facilitate it or not
and if blizzard doesn't facilitate it, the market will be filled with a black market with a long history of exploitation (*cough* see steve banon *cough*)
*doesn't happen as much in retail, like the black market still exists but to a much smaller degree because people are more likely to buy a wow token than go to the black market