WoW Tokens “antithetical” to Classic, but Blizz hopes you won’t notice

pcgamesn.com:

Classic WoW Tokens are here, and they’re not going away despite Blizzard’s own admission that they feel “antithetical” to the Classic World of Warcraft experience. The real-money item that can be sold via the in-game auction house functions as a way to effectively buy gold in the MMORPG, and its arrival this week has been less than well received. Leading community figures have condemned the move, the game’s biggest subreddit has gone into meltdown, and now Blizzard has put out a lengthy explanation.

Obviously sensing a need to respond following the outcry to news of the WoW Token coming to World of Warcraft Classic, WoW community manager Randy ‘Kaivax’ Jordan has shared a post on the official World of Warcraft forum discussing the move, which he says “wasn’t something we arrived at lightly.” Indeed, he tells players, “When WoW Classic started in 2019, adding something like [the WoW] Token felt unimaginable to us.”

The scarcity of gold in Vanilla WoW (the original base game) and its Burning Crusade expansion are a huge part of the experience. Everyone who played during those days will remember frugally saving up to afford their first mount. Moving into the endgame for Vanilla and BC, there’s a time investment required in maintaining enough gold to afford the consumable items you need for late-game activities.

All of this meant that the very concept of the WoW Token “just didn’t feel ‘Classic.’ It felt jarring, out of place, and was antithetical to what most of us wanted to relive about those early years of WoW,” Kaivax says. Yet here we are – so what’s changed?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it comes largely down to a demand for gold that’s been increasingly fueled by illicit black-market RMTs (real-money transactions) –