I did not have this on my bingo card for 2023, that’s for sure. This is obviously huge news for the game, and particularly for goldmaking.
Ethics of the token
r/Classicwow is predictably up in arms about this proclaiming the death of classic. To this seems very weird, considering the absolutely staggering amount of GDKPs out there, and the fact that the classic community came up with it’s own term for goldbuyers with “swipers”. The RMT economy in wrath has been absolutely insanely huge, and the rampant botting has been a huge issue for the game for a long time.
Official tokens means a significant portion of RMT money now moves through blizzard, where it can only be turned into game time. This makes botting a lot less profitable. What ultimate effect this has on botting is uncertain, but pretending like this materially changes the “P2W” nature of classic wow just seems like hyperbole to me, but then again I’ve never really been a classic purist so my takes don’t matter.
Token price
At the time of writing this post the token was selling for 14 000 gold on EU realms. On the face of it this seems a little expensive to me. Comparatively the EU retail token is selling for 329 000 gold.
Typical farming gold per hour in Wrath is 400-800 gold, whereas in retail you can typically earn 30 000 – 50 000 gold per hour depending on method and timing. With these numbers farming a token on classic would take you 3 times as much time compared to retail. Obviously the token has been out for just an hour when I record this, so very few people have had time to buy one for real money to put up for sale. I expect the price to fall, based on an effort equivalency I would expect the price to end up around 5000-6000 gold, but I don’t have a crystal ball.
Edit: the token price is now down to 9000 gold on EU, so the price was definitely too high initially, it does seem to have stabilized so it will be interesting to see what happens.
Taking advantage
Now If you want to use this to play Wrath classic for free, then you are in the right spot. I’ll be taking a look at methods to generate the gold required to play Wrath for free!
It is about 10k now on EU Nethergarde Keep