The Unintended Consequences of Keystones Not Depleting and Why It's Bad for the Game

In Case You Missed It

Starting in 11.1, Blizzard is awarding players that time all 8 keys at whatever difficulty, 12 or higher, to have their future keys immune to depletion below that level (12, 13, 14 etc.). At a glance this is a small, but nice quality of life improvement for people around title cut-off range so that they can't brick their way into too many homework keys if they have a nice floor of keys already timed.

The Issue

Currently title range on NA servers is some mix of 15-16-17 keys depending on the dungeon and there are a couple thousand characters who have all 8 keys timed at these difficulties. Because of the immunity to depletion is only dependent on the key holder, next season these characters would have the ability to be INSANE boosters and key sellers. Essentially every key would be a tournament realm key where the party could do an absurd first pull with no penalty and infinite retries. Selling title and IO score is nothing new, it happens every season, but with how much easier this would make it I would expect to see a huge increase in high key sales. Each character buying title naturally drives the .1% cutoff higher, meaning the goal post for players trying to achieve it on their own would move further and further up. Personally, I don't feel the small perk of this system is worth this trade off, and I don't see a graceful adjustment that prevents abuse like this from happening.

TL;DR Characters above title cutoff have huge incentive to sell title to other players due to having unbrickable keys at title range that can essentially be ran like the tournament realm with huge first pulls and infinite retries.

Armory post: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/the-unintended-consequences-of-keystones-not-depleting-and-why-its-bad-for-the-game/2052746