Taking away some of the gold spots was a pain - and here's why your thought process is a bit off: You made it harder to get gold but you didn't lessen what the gold was used for. The same preps still exist and you still need them. So you're still going to get gold to get them, it just takes you longer. I don't know of a single vet who doesn't have the same exact prep bag - maybe less of the same items but the same items.

That's probably at the heart of all of this. You made it harder to obtain gold, harder to practice, and harder to get edges but you did NOTHING to make them less powerful. All you did was raise the bar which is a huge turn off for people.