WoW Won't Sell Trading Post Currency On Its Own, Game Director Confirms

gamespot.com:

Trader's Tender won't be sold as a standalone product, but may be included as part of various deluxe editions or bundles in the future.

By Cameron Koch on

World of Warcraft won't sell Trader's Tender as a standalone product, WoW game director Ion Hazzikostas has confirmed.

In mid-June, fansite Wowhead datamined an assortment of icons representing various amounts of Trader's Tender, a special currency used to purchase rotating cosmetics via the game's recently introduced Trading Post. With so many different icons of varying amounts made public as part of the datamine, many fans feared developer Blizzard might be looking to turn the Trading Post into another microtransaction store and Trader's Tender into a premium currency that could be purchased with real money. Trader's Tender is currently primarily earned in-game by logging in once a month and completing various monthly activities, something players worried would be upended by the ability to buy the currency outright.

Speaking with GameSpot, Hazzikostas cleared up some of the confusion surrounding the datamine. He said definitively that there are no plans to sell Trader's Tender as a standalone product. However, the team does think it makes sense to offer various amounts of Trader's Tender as parts of various bundles, such as expansion deluxe editions. As Hazzikostas pointed out, players who purchased WoW's latest Dragonflight expansion received a one-time reward of 500 Trader's Tender. Blizzard will likely look at doing something similar in the future.

«In the past, we might have offered as part of a deluxe edition or some big bundle, a specific pet of our devising,» Hazzikostas said. «Well, many players would look at that [pet] and say 'I don't like the look of that,