I've made many vanilla accounts for gold farming. Every time I have had to use a CC or paypal to get the account fully activated...until now.
Last night, I decided to sell 600K, and started one of the new 'starter edition' accounts on a new email, and tested to see if they added trading or anything to the trial, but alas they did not. So I went to add my vanilla key. After, it comes to the payment page for your subscription...I went to a different browser window to add the email to my paypal, and after doing that I accidently closed the wow window instead of the paypal one. I said **** it and logged back into battle.net and see that the account had it's 30 day gametime applied, and there was no subscription, just the end date.
I have tried this before and it never worked as a full account until I set up the subscription, so this isn't how things used to be.
I logged into the account and invited to guild, did my gold shuffle and took my $460 and ran...since I did no f2f, I even still have the vanilla account...
Not claiming this as an exploit, I suppose it is as intended, but not using a CC or PayPal is a definate change...it has never activated to a full account before.
And a plain vanilla key is giving vanilla and BC content...at least if it is put on a starter account as of right now.