Too many assumptions. It's not like Blizzard is going to let one person buy an invite and then sell multiple invites. There will be a limit to the number of invites a member can send out (unless Blizzard is !@#$ing stupid, of course).
Based on chatting with Bashiok, it seems that it's planned to be 10 invitations up, every day.
Sweet. Blizz puts in a cool feature that I was really excited about and then makes it cost more money then I will ever have. After 7 years of paying subscription fees, I have 20+ alts now all with fully leveled professions and fastest flying because I find end game raiding boring and tedious. Yet, this also means that since I don't concentrate on just one or two end game toons, I rarely have more than 4-8K gold on any of my servers. As far as this being a time sink, why? Why does it have to be a way to kill time for end game raiders, when (somewhat broke) casual players like myself would have a blast? WoW Pokemon really isn't my cup of tea and I can only solo old content raids for so long. Blizz keeps making the fun stuff for hardcore only people and I'll prolly just go dust off my XBOX and let my toons RIP....
I don't imagine that the invites by members aren't going to be gated somehow... Assuming a weekly, or daily cooldown for inviting someone you know to join the Brawlers guild and people who buy them on the BMAH comping (maybe even profiting) from their invites. Expect "WTS invite to Brawlers guild 50k" in Trade Chat very soon.
It may be that it's intended to be a guild upgrade rather than a personal thing. Like the GM buys it, and gets his guild access to invites, and then that's another selling feature of that guild. Now that we're all level 25, and we have all the guild perks, maybe this was something new to work on. Also, if there are 10 every day, I can't imagine that people will be able to keep the prices high for long.
In the end all that matters is the Realm first with this content. No one will be able to have a lasting monopoly it just isn't feasible. I know people have tons of god but why would someone waste a ton of gold just to troll a server? If someone is going to have a monopoly they would do it the first one to three day's in order to get a head start on the realm first.Its like with the realm first rep achievement. If you didn't level to 90 quickly you were behind. And if you didn't camp Scritch for his pipe you were behind.
It's going to be interesting that's for sure, but I don't think I will pursue it until after I've done everything else. Because I really don't need to show off to myself how awesome I am solo mio.
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
If this BMAH route is the only way to obtain an invitation outside of buying it from a player (because, let's face it: you're buying it from a player unless you have a really friendly guild), then that means that the only new stuff for 5.1 is either PvP or very exclusive PvE. I really hope they don't go that route and just go with the tried and true "long quest chain" route, because otherwise I'm going to be really angry I wasted my Powerup Rewards points on a game card.