It shouldn’t be, since you’re dealing directly with Blizzard, rather than buying things from other players. As games-as-service business models proliferate, though, they do seem to become more complex.

Technically, you can buy a token for gold, redeem it for battle.net balance, use battle.net balance to buy a token from Blizzard and sell that token for gold.

Since the token costs $20 to buy but only yields $15 in currency, there have to be huge fluctuations for this to be profitable. But people on Reddit were liquidating their gold on tokens during the first couple of days this feature was out, in the belief gold prices would reach 200k, and they’d be able to use battle.net balance they got from selling their gold to buy a lot more gold than they started with.

It did not work out for them.

He ran IGE.

Here’s the thing: Since this is essentially a stripped down budget tablet, why not skip the tablet part and let JoyCon connect to phones and tablets with a Switch app via NFC? Other than that Nintendo wants to make us pay $300 for a device that is basically an inferior version of equipment we already own?

I do not agree that Hextech is "mostly" for free rewards. You couldn’t get any Snowdown or Lunar Revel boxes without spending RP, for example.

And, barring some insane luck on shard rerolls, it would take years to get a Hextech exclusive without spending.