I think that advanced character tokens are like saying "look, i'm going to pay you but for god's sake don't make me play your game". One could dare to think that skill training has a little design issue.
The problem with anything that someone does not like is that they have to criticize those who do. People have given good reasons why they think it was a good addition to the game, and people have given good reasons why they would rather not use them. Both were done clean without criticizing the opposite.
For years, I refused to even give Advanced Character a notion since I did enjoy training up skills. I had a lot of time on my hands then, and it was worth it.
95% of my characters on my 4 accounts are fully trained to GM from scratch. I added 4 new characters using the 7th character slots a few years ago to take advantage of their bank storage and to use them as scouts. Now, I want them to be a little more useful, but don't have the time I did to train them up. Using the Advanced Character token is just a small head start. It is common sense to anyone who has played the game long enough to know that your slowest gains comes in th 80's.
I just finished training one of my charcters to 100 Hiding. It took me 2 months. While it was fun doing it for 3 of my other characters, it was not fun training her. The 10 second skill timer, and then not getting gains even though she was able to hide, was just not fun. She was even
stuck at 76.2 for about a week. It was boring, and it took all the available gametime that I had, so I was doing nothing but pressing my Hide macro for two hours of gametime. I am not going through that again.
A friend of mine is critical about Advanced Character. All of his characters are fully trained. I had to remind him that all of his characters were trained during the powerhour days, when it was much easier to get gains. He laughed and said, "oh, yea, I forgot about that". His new bard is an Advanced Character after he gave up on it after a few hours of no gains.
