World of Warcraft Classic feels the scourge of the WoW token as a ring is traded for $13,000 worth of in-game gold
As spotted by GamesRadar, the impact of the WoW token—a way for players to purchase game time, which they can also sell on the auction house for gold—is being felt on the Wrath of the Lich King: Classic servers, with one rare item selling for over 3 million gold in a GDKP auction.
A GDKP is an auction within a raid. Players bid on boss drops with gold—however, the profits are split evenly among the raid when the bidding is over. Have deep pockets? You can snag yourself some rares. Dirt poor? You can just skip the bidding and walk away richer. Everybody wins. Well, in a healthy economy, anyway.
In a reaction clip from Twitch streamer Guzu to streamer Prefoxfox, we see a ring called the Band of Callous Aggression sold for 3 million gold. For context, that's 15 times the amount a player can actually carry. Cold Weather Flying, a spell that was intended as a gold sink back when Wrath of the Lich King was initially released, costs 1,000. Now it's just pocket change for the moneybags of Azeroth.
To earn 3 million, you'd need to clock an unthinkable amount of hours farming or have a galaxy-brain understanding of virtual economics. Or you could just cough up $13,000 (around £10,000) in WoW tokens. Either someone's found a way to clone themselves—we've got a capitalist wunderkind on our hands—or there's a gamer with a lot of money. I'd wager it's the very latter.
WoW tokens are intended to be a safe alternative to the swamp of gold-selling websites, curbing a black-market economy by offering an official means to turn cash into pixels. While there are definitely perks to this—significantly dampening these sites' bargaining power—it's not exactly great for inflation. They've been in the main game for a while, but their inclusion in
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