MMO fans lament reintroduction of World of Warcraft's most hated item as raid ring goes for $13,000 in gold

A WoW Classic player has paid the equivalent of around $13,000 to win a ring bidding war against a raid buddy, leading plenty to lament the impact of real-money trading and wonder what the recent reintroduction of WoW Tokens are doing to the in-game economy on Wrath of the Lich King Classic servers.

As you’ll see from the clip below, two World of Warcraft players duke it out in text chat to earn a piece of raid loot that’s dropped from the Trial of the Grand Crusader. After a fair bit of back and forth, one goes as high as bidding three million gold before the other finally passes. The ring itself is solid, though not something anyone would shell out around $13,000 for if you’re looking at how much gold that WoW Tokens converts to at the time of writing.

It's a fairly innocent idea in theory, as you can earn gold for just helping out or guarantee getting an item you fancy if it drops. The issue arises when you consider how gold can be obtained. You can grind all the best farm spots for gold until sunrise, though doing that alone will seldom lead to you having three million gold spare. Rather, you're likely looking at real-money trading or WoW Tokens to get that kind of change.

RMT is nothing new to Azeroth, though WoW Tokens have sparked plenty of chatter among Classic fans since they were introduced earlier this year. If you've been out of the loop, a WoW Token can be officially purchased for real money and used to acquire game time, or be sold in the Auction House. People don't like it and were happy to see it excluded from WoW Classic until Blizzard introduced it earlier this year.

"The best way to start is to simply say that this wasn't something we arrived at lightly," Blizzard wrote in a blog post, addressing a tidal wave of negative community sentiment. "For the entirety of Classic so far, the WoW Classic team has been very resistant to the idea of adding WoW Token to any form of Classic in the Western regions (NA and EU). 

"When WoW Classic started in 2019, adding something like a token felt unimaginable to us, and that continued to be true for us – even late into Burning Crusade Classic – for a few reasons."

Blizzard went on to share that gold scarcity is key to the Vanilla WoW experience, and was something it wanted to maintain until it could no longer, as the team could not "cause the demand for gold to be lower" in the Wrath era. RMT is "an arms race" that "never, ever ends," and WoW Tokens is but one of the ways Blizzard believes it can mitigate the impact. 

The move to include the controversial item has since opened WoW Classic up further to the volatile nature of the Auction House. While the real-money cost of a WoW Token is fairly static, how much gold you'll get for one at the in-game marketplace is constantly in flux. As Wowhead reported earlier this year, the WoW Token hit a two-year high regarding gold value, despite the IRL cash cost staying the same.

While you can happily play WoW Classic without engaging in GDKP runs, the bidding flex-off has fans debating what’s to blame. Some point to the controversial reintroduction of WoW Tokens that happened only months ago, whereas others counter that with the belief that having three million to burn on a fairly unspectacular ring can only mean RMT.

Whether or not we should even be allowing GDKP runs is another debate. One group of fans argue that it remains the fairest way of dividing loot and rewarding effort, with the presence of RMT and WoW Tokens being an unfortunate reality we’re all dealing with anyway. The counter to that is other players who are uneasy with how GDKP runs are inspiring a flex culture that further pushes others towards RMT and WoW Tokens, rather than what can simply be accomplished through playing the MMO.

If there is one thing that players seem to agree upon, though, is that the WoW Classic community has royally screwed the economy of the Wrath of the Lich King Classic servers.

Meanwhile, the World of Warcraft community is creating fake characters to fool AI websites farming them for content.