Dollar’s buying power plummets in first day of “official” WoW gold trading

Just over a day after Blizzard introduced the first official method for converting dollars into World of Warcraft gold, the amount of in-game currency you can get for real-world cash has already plummeted 27 percent from the initial position set by Blizzard.

For most of World of Warcraft's history, the only way to buy in-game gold with real currency was to go through one of many gray market third-party services (which technically goes against Blizzard's terms of service for the game). That was true until yesterday, when Blizzard introduced a $20 game time token that can be sold for gold at the in-game auction house on North American servers (European servers will get the feature at a later date). While the real-world price of those tokens is fixed at $20, the gold price is "determined dynamically based on supply and demand," as Blizzard puts it.

To start the market off, Blizzard set the price of a $20 token at 30,000 gold. That gold price increased incrementally for a few hours before plummeting precipitously starting yesterday evening in the US. As of this writing, just over 24 hours after the markets opened, that initial gold price of a token has fallen over 27 percent to 21,739 gold, according to an API-based tracking site.

This isn't that surprising when you look at the going rates for WoW gold from third-party sellers. According to wowgoldrates.com, $20 can get you anywhere from 10,000 to roughly 15,000 gold on the gray market, depending on which reseller you use (you can get slightly better rates if you buy in bulk).

Blizzard's initial 30,000 gold price for a $20 token was two to three times more generous than those prevailing rates, from the gold buying perspective, and had the added benefit of operating under Blizzard's official approval. This led gold buyers to predictably flood the in-game auction house with available tokens, driving the price steadily downward. Players that realized the market skew early reaped a much greater windfall than those that got into the market even a few hours later (Don't worry about resellers trying to game the market by buying low and selling high, though—once a token is purchased from the auction house with gold, it can't be resold).

By selling monthly game subscriptions for in-game gold, the WoW token also has the interesting side effect of setting an indirect value on subscriptions in terms of in-game time spent grinding for gold. Some dedicated high-level gold farmers report making 2,000 to 4,000 gold per hour with focused money-making techniques, meaning a month's worth of WoW time can currently be sustained with about 6 to 11 hours of grinding.

With direct purchases of subscriptions running just $15 a month, that kind of grinding isn't really a great monetary return on the time investment (unless you're working from a very economically depressed area of the world). Still, it's not an awful trade for players low on spending cash but heavy on time to waste playing WoW. And that's not even considering the more outrageous farming tutorials that promise rates of return up to 10,000 gold per hour.

The drop in auction house token prices seems to be slowing down somewhat today, after last night's more severe drop. Still, it seems likely that the "official" gold value of a dollar will continue to decline until it at least approaches the rates already available outside the game. So if you have a hankering to convert some of your excess hoard of gold into some extra play time, we recommend waiting at least a little bit. If you're looking to turn your money into in-game gear, though, you'd best jump in while the market still seems to be a bit artificially inflated.