It’s a game of 2000+ vehicles, so chances are many players do collect at least something. I’ve hardly met any player that just didn’t care. Whether it’s for a collection, simply an interesting vehicle or even connected to a personal story (remember, it’s a game about real, historic vehicles) every player I personally met wanted at least one event vehicle.
And all this time it worked to either spend the time, or if that wasn’t available a fixed sum of money to complete the event and earn a vehicle. Buying with inconsistent market prices becomes only relevant as the third option, after already having missed two different opportunities (earn, buy) to receive the vehicle.
Now, with auctions, it immediately goes towards even more inflated prices than the market, cutting out the stages to earn a vehicle or buy it at a reasonable and fixed price. This is a system that is, from a player perspective, worse than the market itself, which is already only intended as the third “last resort” option for those that missed something.
But the prices aren’t everything that’s just “the market but worse”, since the prices are not only inflated, but you are quite literally competing with other players to pay the highest amount in a given time.
And that’s another issue, competing.
On the market limited supply makes sense, it’s the third option, meant to let players that didn’t care for a vehicle but have earned it give an additional chance to players that for one reason or another missed out. Of course a player is better off playing or GE’ing the event, but by the time the market comes into play, those options ran out.
But with auctions, supply is initially limited. The period where every player is given equal chances is taken away, in favor of a less favorable version of the previous “last ditch” option…
And all of that from Gaijin to “help content creators”, which can be done in countless other ways that bring more benefit to both players and content creators, such as in-game weekly events for camouflages (tasks skippable with GE), or a GE skin store with weekly rotations, or even just a higher number of skins per update box, or multiple boxes per update.
All of these can also give quite a bit of income to Gaijin, so for them to have picked an auction over them still just puts into perspective what prices they must be expecting to see in those auctions…