Comment by danShumway

> There's a good deal of microtransactions where the person spending the money still wants everyone else to have to grind for it.

I'm not sure that having a system that's unpleasant for a portion of the playerbase and letting people pay to pretend that they've gone through it is all that better.

I've commented to the same effect elsewhere, but public prestige systems that can be paid to be bypassed are sort of self-defeating. They only work if a very small portion of the playerbase is cheating, which... I still don't think it's good design to set up gameplay incentives or monetization around a minority of the playerbase pretending to the majority of the other players that they've legitimately earned something.