Blizzard introduced new functionality to allow people to buy game-subscription tokens that they can sell to other players for in-game currency in the most recent patch to World of Warcraft. The price will start at 30,000 gold, and will fluctuate based on market conditions.
A few years ago, when I played World of Warcraft, I was able to earn thousands of gold a day on the Auction House, and had so much extra currency that I was able to spend millions of gold on rare cosmetic items.
Since a lot of players are now wondering whether they’re going to be able to pay for their subscriptions with gold, it might be a good time for a discussion of Azeroth’s economy, and how it has evolved over the last decade.
I’ve resubscribed to the game to see how things are today, which is kind of like smoking just a little bit of crack to remember the flavor. Ready?
Farming for Gold
There has never been anything truly scarce in WoW; nothing in the game is really finite except the time players put into it. Killing enemies who drop useful items or gathering natural resources causes them to respawn, so the limit on these goods is equivalent to the amount of time people spend harvesting them.
Unlike a real-world currency, there is no set amount of gold, either. This isn’t a zero-sum game where you can hoard a resource to bring up the value.
Gold in World of Warcraft is spontaneously created when you kill an enemy and loot coins from it, when you sell items to a vendor and when you complete a quest that rewards you with some currency. When you pay gold to purchase something from an NPC vendor or when you pay to repair your equipped gear, that gold ceases to exist.
Otherwise, gold passes between players in exchange for various in-game goods.
It took about 100,000 gold a year to keep your gear fully gemmed, enchanted and otherwise raid or arena-ready. That’s all most players bothered to earn, either by dabbling in crafting or just grinding daily quests. Since most gear in Warcraft either drops in raids and is bound to the player who loots it or is bought from vendors for special currencies like arena points, crafted enhancements are really all players need to buy.
The community creates more gold than players spend at vendors, even when Blizzard creates “gold sinks” to remove gold from the economy, such as vendors that sell special, expensive vanity mounts. The currency builds up in the economy, and, as with real money, it tends to flow toward a small percentage of players.
The reason for this is simple: gold is difficult to acquire in large quantities. Finishing quests or farming ore and herbs has never earned you more than a couple hundred gold an hour, so it would take you thousands of hours of grinding to hit the gold cap.
Because of that, players who have been able to learn what other players need regularly, and master the game’s crafting systems, have historically been able to earn thousands of gold each day, and could accumulate millions of gold.
I was one of those players.
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