So the two positions seem to be that Blizzard entering the gold-selling market would be either the end of illegal gold-sellers or the end of the game's economy. Make no mistake, I think the latter is far more likely than the former. Simply selling gold would lead to rampant, ridiculous inflation. I can't afford to fling money down that particular hole myself, but I know people who have a firehose of disposable income and nothing better to do than re-skin their toon every other day. Not even exaggerating much.
So ... what?
Well. First, I'll ask this question: how much gold would you be willing to pay to play the game for a month, for free?
A cursory examination of the current state of affairs indicates that you can buy a thousand illegal gold for about $7 US. That would make an in-game subscription worth 2200 gold. Would you pay that much? That basically means that, if you do one character's worth of Argent dailies every weekday, you get to play for free. Worth it? I'd probably do it.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is this: EVE has a model whereby players can pay real money for what are called PLEXes -- in-game tradeable items that can be redeemed for one month of play time. In this way, a player can "buy" in-game currency for real-world money by paying fifteen bucks and then selling the PLEX to another player, who then gets his month of play time without having paid any actual money.
I think that this is the safe solution to both problems. Offer some mechanism by which a player can spend real-world money to have a non-soulbound item mailed to them in game, just like the vanity pets work now. That player then goes into /2 or the Auction House, sells their [Scroll of Playtime] for, say, 2k gold, and walks away with the cash. The buyer then redeems the item, either by right-clicking on it (ideally) or through some Battle.Net hoodoo, and gets a month more playtime.
This way, Blizzard makes no additional revenue (but loses absolutely nothing either), since all that's really happening is one player is paying for another's game time, and gold isn't being manufactured, since the buyer still has to have the cash on hand to buy the whatsit. Inflation is headed off and players have a legal means to exchange real coin for digital, and since Blizzard isn't, strictly speaking, benefiting from the deal, they don't have any incentive to make players spend more money in other ways. Hell, they might even see a slight increase in subscriptions, as there might be players who aren't keen on the whole real-money thing but who would happily spend in-game gold to pay for their playtime.
The major drawback to this approach is that server population and supply and demand would influence pricing of the in-game item; since it's entirely a player-economy item, Blizzard has no practical ability to regulate how much it buys and sells for. Of course, that's kind of good news also, for a couple reasons: one, players can undercut (i.e. decide themselves how much gold their fifteen bucks should buy), and also, a self-regulating market won't have to adjust when gold supplies skyrocket in the next patch/expansion.
They'd also have to flag it such that it couldn't exist on the PTR, but that shouldn't be too difficult. Also, there's nothing strictly preventing gold-sellers from undercutting, but the players themselves could influence that by not getting too greedy with their own pricing.
Ha ha, what am I saying?
Seriously, though. Implement this, and ship each box of Cataclysm with an Authenticator, and see if account piracy doesn't take a serious fall.
You want more dangerous territory? A slicker slope? I got you covered. Make the new minipets not-Soulbound, and only give one per purchase instead of handing them out to all your toons. I don't think I have to draw a map from there, really.
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