Why not keep the clearance requirements the same. BUT MAKE SILVER KEYS PURCHASABLE WITH TOKENS (as an alternative to ce).
User pros:
A. Keeps Silver Keys relatively difficult to obtain.
B. Gives users opportunity to spend their excess tokens on something other than items to sell.
C. Keeps Shadow Keys and equipment obtained through use of Shadow Keys rare.
OOO cons:
A. Using tokens means less CE bought with $.
B. Less 4/5* items unbound and sold means less CE bought with $.
C. While still forcing us to gamble to experience new content, the table limits would not be so high.
Come on OOO. Hefty prices aren't so bad. It's the fact that you're forcing us to gamble if we want to experience new content that doesn't sit well with me. At least if we could acquire the Silver Keys through diving we could choose if we want to take the chance at a Shadow Key or play it safe and buy/sell token items.
C'est la vie. You don't have to worry about losing my business, I've never paid real money to play. I sure would love it though if you'd give me a good reason to stop play League of Legends.
Warning!! Long read about my younger days in another game.
@Happyapathy: Let me tell you the story about a game I used to play.....
Back in Twenty Ought Three, Sony Online Entertainment released an MMOFPS known as Planetside in the hopes of pulling in the shooter crowd. Development was lead by a few individuals that helped create the Starsiege/Tribes franchise, and set out to bring war zone scale combat to a player base that had never seen a battle bigger then 16x16 players (32x32 if you were really lucky). The end result was an FPS/RTS/RPG hybrid, with 3 playable factions, each possessing different styled weapons, fighting over 10 zones, with each zone capable of supporting roughly 400 players, who could all cluster f**k over one of ten bases before moving on to the next one. Not a single NPC existed in the game, and equipment and character management being handled through terminal devices. It stands out as one of the few MMOFPS games ever created, and is probably the only that was even remotely successful.
Despite its almost unknown launch, the game developed a small, yet fiercely loyal following of Shooter fans.... THE most notoriously difficult to please group at the time. Since launch, the game had gone through regular weapon rebalancing, weapon and vehicle additions, and its fair share of complaints over the high hardware demands. Every weapon balance or addition was always meet with huge resistance, and eventually turned into "this is going to kill the game!!!". Of course, the change was made, people adapted, and complaints moved on to the next update in the pipe....
This went on for about 3 years until the game designers made 2 grossly huge errors in content updates. For what its worth, the original design team had moved on to other projects shortly after the game launched, so we never knew (at the time) who made this crazy decision. Up until that point, the game revolved around a seemly impossible goal of always making every tool in the game a Rock, Paper, Scissors ordeal with the exception of being able to overwhelm a target through sheer numbers. As players developed methods and combinations that just utterly crushed the opposition, weapon behavior and damage would be modified to soften the effectiveness enough so they could have a fighting chance to push back.
That all changed when they introduced the first expansion (DLC by todays standards) called "Core Combat". This unlocked 6 micro zones with maps that simulated a large, multi-level cavern consisting of suspended rock platforms, small outposts, and a central energy core that was used to create modules that could upgrade the functionality of surface bases. It also granted players access to a unique, highly powerful set of weapons and vehicles that could only be obtained from terminals in the caverns. Their only offset was that they had limited ammo (a large battery) before needing to be discarded or replaced. Players would stock piles small amounts of these weapons in personal lockers that could be accessed from any base on the surface (a big deal since your loadout resets when you die). It had 2 huge problems. 1. The weapons dealt in AOE damage, and were initially very powerful. 1 or 2 soldiers mixed in with a small squad could hold a defensive position for as long as the devices had ammo in them. And 2. the average life span of a soldier was about 3 mintues.... (20 seconds if there were bullets in the air) giving very little opportunity to use these weapons past 3 shots unless you were already dug in on defense. If you were on offense, the AOE was also a friendly fire nightmare. The expansion also introduced the ultimate in alien explosive spamming technology... The Flail artillery unit. 2 or 3 of these units would make the outer portions of a base an instant death trap (for both friend and foe alike), which moved combat indoors in under 10 minutes of deployment (the attackers goal).
This instantly created huge balance issues when the weapons could be deployed above ground, and diverted a sizable amount of forces underground at a time when the active player count was roughly 600-700 (or 1 and a half zones) per server. Underground combat was seen as a chore, and players would only spend roughly an hour fighting over it before one side gave up to rejoin the surface battle. Several balance updates were made to scale back the power of the weapons, but the damage had already been done, and the content was there to stay. And with its $15 price tag, only a handful of dedicated soldiers found their way down there. After the first couple of months, the only reason people went down there was to retrieve flails and try to stock up a few weapons.... but at that point they were already being scaled back in power.
Some time later they released a second major update that utterly disregarded their basic design philosophy.... Battle Frame Robotics (BFR). This was added in response to player interest in having a Super tank, and/or BattleTech-esk mechs added to the game's arsenal. Initially it was thought that it was going to be a multi-manned vehicle (another core design philosophy), with heavy armor and low mobility. Instead what they developed was a highly mobile, heavily armored walker, with criminally insane firepower, and a rapidly regenerating energy shield, that could be piloted by one man in the primary unit. This was supplemented by 2 variants. One sporting more armor/shielding with a manned heavy turret operated by a gunner. And the other a lighter armored, jump-jet capable unit for higher mobility. And all of this available to players who bought the Core Combat expansion, and completed an attunement quest in the caverns. This had such a grand upset in combat that, until it was utterly beaten into a coma with the "nerf" bat, everything on the field was either a BFR or fodder for them. Over the next few months, change after change was made to nerf them so that foot soldiers could open a door without getting an express ticket to a respawn tube. Eventually they fell out of use when their mobility was heavily hampered, weapon power cut in half, shield power drastically reduced, and the highly effective tactic of "mosquito jumping" was in full use. That is where a player bails out of a scout aircraft at high altitude, lands behind the BattleFrame without being noticed, and uses a rocket launcher to destroy its shield generator. Without the shield, the unit was an easy target for tanks and man-portable explosives.
By completely ignoring the basic design philosophy that made the game possible to function, they had managed to piss of the players, cause irreparable damage to game play, and then forced to completely undermine those changes with a series of nerfs that would never address the problem they created in the first place. I continued to play for several months after to see what would happen, but I eventually moved on after, I think, 5 years of loyal game play. For anyone wondering, I moved to Guildwars at the request of a friend, and simply lost interest in Planetside rather then dramatically quit. Prior to leaving, they instituted a universal upgrade so that all content was available to everyone, and a recruits program where players could play for free with a level cap as a way to fight the dwindling player base. Last I heard, it didn't work out nearly as good as they hoped.
But despite the idiocy, I'm still keeping an eye on the development progress for Planetside2, and hoping to see that they learned from the mistakes they made in the previous game. So far it looks promising, but with SOE's track record, I'll be skeptical until I see the beta response and the pricing system they'll be using.
tl;dr
So for those of you that think optional premium content is some kind of massive insult to the players.... *enter Perry Cox* You have NO concept of it what it means to truly [screw] up a game so bad, that even the loyalist player base is starting to wonder if its self sabotage.