World of Warcraft Gold Prices Skyrocket

GameRates has a (tongue-in-cheek) editorial looking at the skyrocketing gold price in WoW, comparing it to the rising oil price.

Tongue-in-cheek aside market insiders attribute the drastic rise in prices to a supply shortage caused by a covert massive banning operation secretly carried out by Blizzard within the past week.

As one worker for a major Chinese farming operation who agreed to speak on condition that he remained anonymous for fear of losing his job said, “We got hit hard. It always a game of the cat and mouse with us farmers and blizzard. Today they got us good. Where I work we lose hundreds of accounts and hundreds of thousands of gold. I never see banning wave this big. Some of the smaller shops may no survive or be able to pay workers.”

As thousands of accounts were banned, fortunes virtually disappeared overnight. The true total cost of the bannings has yet to be determined.

For each account banned not only was gold on the account (and the cost of labor to acquire it) lost, but also the time it took to level up the farming characters along with the cost of purchasing a new account key. This drastic drop in supply levels along with a temporary setback in the maximum potential output of the gold farming suppliers have created a short term supply shortage triggering the price of gold to double in five days. This effect was further heightened by the previous historic low in gold prices due to a recent series of price wars (see IGE letter below).

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