A small tweak for Blizzard’s World of Warcraft is causing big effects for subscribers and the massively multiplayer online game’s economy.
Blizzard highlighted the in-game update in a video released Monday. As part of the tweak, WoW Tokens — an item that can be purchased with actual money or in-game gold — can now be used to add money to a user’s Battle.net account. Previously, WoW Tokens could be redeemed to add an additional 30 days on a user’s subscription time or sold for gold on the game’s auction market.
Cash in a Battle.net account is tied to other Blizzard games and can be used to purchase in-game items in games like Overwatch and Hearthstone or downloadable copies of games.
While the tweak has only been in effect for one day, it’s caused massive global spikes and fluctuations in gold prices for World of Warcraft subscribers. Via WoWTokenPrices, international markets saw jumps in gold to WoW Token conversion rates of 50,000 to 100,000 gold.
Global prices for WoW Tokens in World of Warcraft spiked after an update allowed for the items to be exchanged for cash usable in other Blizzard titles. Photo: WoW Token Prices
While WoW Token markets among users in Asia and Korea have largely returned back to pre-update rates, European and U.S. markets are still trading at above historical levels. As of this writing, U.S. WoW Tokens were trading at 95,697 gold per token, while European users were selling tokens at 155,674 gold per token. With both markets starting to experience slight downturns from their spikes, though, users who want to take advantage of the higher sale prices should likely do so soon.
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