A coworker and I went to lunch randomly a number of months back and I discovered that he and his wife are avid WoW players on the server that I played on nearly 10 years ago. This sparked me to impulsively purchase 30 days of game time on my character, which was surprisingly still available on my Battle.NET account. I happily dinked around for a bit, leveled up my character from 70 to 90, and discovered the VAST amount of collectables that are present these days, which was quite shocking.

When I stopped playing WoW, players could collect pets by redeeming tokens/codes from blizzcon or other real world fan or collector activities, but today there is an entire mini-game surrounding battle-pets which can be collected in-game and also purchased via earned gold or simply cash. Additionally, Raid or PvP gear sets can be supplemented with purchased "cosmetics" and "heirlooms" which again can be purchased through earned gold or through the store with cash. It seems like every side-game activity has some kind of purchase available to "speed up" the time it takes to "earn" the appropriate currency required to redeem the reward. I've been out of the gaming loop for far too long to really see how bad it's become, but it was absolutely shocking to see it.