An everyday event in the course of an expiring raid is making waves in the WoW community. It’s about the called price of a ring.
The chat rattles off, it’s just single numbers with a small m
for millions behind them. Then the process comes to a halt, no more lines are added, the eyes remain transfixed on the last digit: 3m
Insiders know what that means. The player Haroon paid a small fortune for a ring in World of Warcraft Classic
Converted into WoW tokens, three million gold pieces are namely around 13,000 US dollars Disbelief, anger and resignation divide the community among themselves in the aftermath. But what happened here and why do some people see this as a symptom of a completely broken economy? We explain it to you!
Two months ago Blizzard implemented the WoW token into Wrath Classic to curb the impact of illicit RMT.
Yesterday, a ToGC ring sold for 3 million gold in a GDKP.
That’s approximately $13,000+ USD in WoW tokens. pic.twitter.com/joopcvlBoU
– N_Tys (@N_Tys26) July 22, 2023
A ring to piss them all off
A ring was auctioned off at the end of a raid by means of the GDKP system This runs like any auction known from film and television. In WoW, it’s all about the distribution of the loot: Whoever bids the most gold for an item wins. Everything goes into a pot, which is divided among all players without a won item after the raid.
But three million gold is a sum that an individual can hardly earn. Naturally, many suspected another source of ingame wealth: illegal gold purchases from the Internet outside of the Blizzard economy. For the developer has been offering gold for real money for some time – officially, to cut off the business of gold farmers – but the number of tokens is limited. Three million could not be legally acquired this way since then.
Signs of a broken economy?
Whoever reads under the X-Post for a while quickly notices the mishmash of apparent feelings of the writers. Most find it simply ridiculous to pay so much money – whether gold or real – for an item. But for some, such transactions show how little the introduction of the directly controversial and to this day continuously criticised tokens seems to have changed. Illegal gold continues to find its buyers.
However, no one can prove how Haroon or Coldstaffp, who bid until the end of the auction, can raise such immense sums of gold. It was only at 2.8 million gold that the said last competitor waved off.
In any case, those who were allowed to reach into the pot of all the auction proceeds must have been happy. Such amounts of in-game currency are certainly rarely distributed after a raid.
Now it’s your turn: we want to hear your opinion. Do you think the discussion is justified or are those who denounce this going overboard? Is the WoW economy broken or are such things simply part of a normal appearance of a modern online role-playing game? Feel free to write your thoughts on this in the comments!
