Runescape tried this back in 2007 along with completely disabling PvP; it was a very unpopular change for the vast majority of players who were not buying items.
I stopped playing the game around that time, so I have to thank Jagex for getting my school grades up.
The grand exchange (auction house) and the trade restrictions that landed at the same time pretty much killed the game for me.
Prior to the G.E., RuneScape had a thriving, complex economy. Players made money transporting goods from harvesting areas, either on behalf of someone or by paying independents for their goods so the independents could avoid going back to town. Players made money buying and selling goods - geographic arbitrage was very much a thing, as well as across time, and also across servers. People made money turning cheaply available goods into more expensive goods.
When the G.E. landed, it basically killed most of the economy. Harvesting stuff could still be profitable, and players could still make money transporting goods from harvesting areas to the nearest bank so people grinding levels wouldn't have to leave, but basically everything else became irrelevant. There's no point in selling anything anywhere yourself when you could take it to the G.E. and get a sale with no effort.
Less of an issue but still sad, the trading restrictions also killed the generosity of veteran players. 'drop parties', where a rich player leads a group around town dropping valuable items, died off as valuable items would no longer appear in the ground for others. Gifting people stuff was no longer possible if it exceeded (fairly low) thresholds. Very sad.
How is that any different? It would be fine if schools banned children from bringing cash to school. If there were a multibillion dollar bullying and gambling market going on at the school, I'd demand it.
My issue with that is that the kids are losing something because someone else is doing something. Very similar to one kid being disorderly in class and everyone losing the recess.
Imagine being a kid in that room and being annoyed by the kid being disorderly, because you want to learn. Now you lost your rights because of that kid. You never did what he was doing, you never contributed to the disorder he caused, if anything you were also victimized by it. And then the power figure in this equation goes and chops away your rights along with his. First lesson in unfairness where the wet grass is burnt alongside the dry grass, because to the powers that be, the rights and allowances you had are mere acceptable collateral damage. Suppressing dissent was more important than protecting what is yours.
Are these schools in Stalin's soviet union? One kid causes disorder so all kids must be purged to make sure there won't be another naughty child in the future?
Believe it or not, teachers (your sao-called "power figures" here) are generally not a bunch of untrained dumbshits unable to think of kids with more granularity than as the entire collective group making up a class. They have the skills and training to identify the sources of disruptions along with ample resources available for correcting them without calling forth damnation and hellfire on everything in a 5 mile radius. Hammers are awesome, but it's not all that hard to grab a scalpel when a situation calls for a scalpel.
With trading. Market price is not only price. With skins there are lot of preferences. Starting for weapons they apply, not all people use same guns as much. And they might prefer one style of skin over an other skin.
If you are not in to extract most possible value, you might trade a more expensive skin for weapon you do not use in style you do not use for less expensive one for weapon you use more in style you really like.
This sounded odd to me as well. Most lootbox games today has no trading at all - you can pay to unlock items for your own account, and that's it. I suspect the more accurate way to explain it is Valve successfully prevented authority interventions than this being more consumer friendly.
I stopped playing the game around that time, so I have to thank Jagex for getting my school grades up.