World of Warcraft's gold rush has upended Blizzard’s economy

Blizzard had announced players would soon be able to convert World Of Warcraft Expansion Legion EU CD-Key Tokens into Battle.net balance, but the company never said when the feature was coming. When it was added to the game on Feb. 6 it wasn’t even during a normal server maintenance.

The rollout caught players by surprise.

A token was selling for 58,000 gold early that morning. The price had been hovering between 55,000 and 60,000 gold for a couple of months. By Tuesday morning, the price had rocketed to 115,000 gold. Gold-makers were panicking; the value of WoW gold relative to real money was in free fall. Players predicted tokens climbing to auction house prices as high as 200,000 gold.

The trend then reversed, and the price fell all the way back to 60,000 gold on Wednesday before recovering to around 80,000 Wednesday night. Over the weekend, prices have been fluctuating between 80,000 and 100,000 gold. When prices climb too high, people start paying cash to buy tokens and get gold, but the people with the gold stop buying tokens.

Prices fluctuated so much because nobody knows what a WoW Token is worth now. Since the WoW Token interface also doesn’t let you know how many tokens are actually for sale at any given time, it’s unclear whether buyers and sellers are rushing into and out of the market at different price points, or whether a single gold-rich buyer using a low point as an opportunity to liquidate can send the price skyrocketing.