Since the announcement of Destiny 2 coming to Battle Net, we’ve seen World of Warcraft’s in-game economy start changing and we’ve seen the value of WoW tokens skyrocket over the past week. How are these two things related? Who is affected by this change and how does it affect the Auction House?
To begin to understand how Destiny 2 relates to World of Warcraft, we must take a look at the WoW token. The WoW token is a token that you can buy with real money and sell on the Auction House for gold. The real kicker is, you can also buy a WoW token on the Auction House with gold. A WoW token costs $20.00 of real life cash. If you spend gold on the token and redeem it, it will become $15.00 of Battle Net store credit, Blizzard’s digital currency which allows players to buy anything on Battle.net. It’s Blizzard’s way of fighting gold farming by creating a legitimate way to buy gold. You spend twenty dollars and sell the token for whatever the market sets the price at. You see, the WoW token’s value depends on supply and demand. One day you may sell a WoW token for 80,000 gold, the next day it may be 100,000 gold. That’s why when Destiny 2 was announced as part of the Battle Net family, we saw a massive increase in the value of the WoW token. It went from 99,000 to 153,000 in the course of a day. Note: the current value is down to 125,000.
Why is that a bad thing? It sounds like it’s putting more gold into people’s pockets, isn’t that good? Not in this sense. The WoW token was a way that people with little money could pay for their subscription fee. But now that the rate has skyrocketed, it’s made the task of collecting the needed gold much more difficult. While it is a good sign for Destiny 2 that there is so much interest in it that it raised the WoW token in World of Warcraft, it’s bad news for the player who relies on gold to pay for their subscription fee.
What does this mean for the Auction House? It means that you can see the price of mounts and transmog gear go up. On my server, the Price of Vial of the Sands, a mount, went from 120,000 gold to 200,000 gold. The same can be seen with almost every valuable mount and transmog item across the board. This means that the players who have to farm the gold manually are at a severe disadvantage.
Is this a big deal? I would say so. It got to the point where Blizzard shut down the sale of WoW tokens because of the mass inflation. While they did bring the ability to buy and sell WoW tokens back up after a short time, the value was forced to decrease for a short time due to the outage. The fact that Blizzard had to step in to try and quell the massive inflation speaks volumes on the subject itself.
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