http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/18141101/introducing-the-wow-token-3-2-2015

Do you think it is a good system? It was in wildstar and worked okay there. Except for an exploit that gave people years of free time.

Isn't this basically what EVE does? Interesting to see Blizzard doing this. They did dabble with "legalized" gold selling a number of years ago, by making a $10 vanity pet tradeable in-game. It seemed like they had given up on the idea after that experiment, but it's interesting to see them come back to it now.

It's mostly there to give players a safe and secure away to buy and sell gold, something that many were already doing. It will clear chat of shady gold seller spam and likely unclog customer service, which has been plagued by people trying to recover their hacked and frozen accounts. I'm happy just because I'm sitting on around 2 million gold, I may never have to pay my subscription again.

I'm not sure why anyone would buy the token to put up on the auction house in the first place.

@kidavenger: for gold

Give people a legit way to buy gold? Why not? And the system is really smart, makes sure that this feature has the flexibility to shift with the economy.

the only thing i don't understand is- what the hell are people gonna do with all that gold??? is it just a status symbol?

Don't worry, Blizzard will make sure there are plenty of big gold sinks in the game to incentivize people to buy tokens and then sell them for gold.

It's a great way to do this. I'm curious to see how much the tokens will cost and then sell for in game.

Yep, I think it is a good idea. Hopefully it will cut down on the goldsellers spamming everywhere and stealing accounts. Though I do have a feeling they will undercut the market cost for these tokens and still be around, but I think this will hurt their business.

So if I don't have any time, but I want to use gold to buy a token, I'm guessing I'm screwed unless I pay for the 2 months or w/e?

@itwastuesday: From a mount/pet collector standpoint: if you don't got em all, you got something to buy :D

This is something they could have done a really long time ago and it would have worked out alright, now gold is super inflated so I can't imagine it'll go much better than D3 did.

Some people also use gold to buy carries through raids/challenge modes/pvp for titles, reward mounts, chances at loot. Once high end guilds have cleared the top raid difficulty and have gotten what they want out of it, many will then sell carries until the next content patch comes out. Other than that, or buying a rare minipet off the auctionhouse instead of farming it, gold really isn't all that useful in WoW after a certain point.

According to the Polygon article, Blizzard plans on implementing a way for people with lapsed accounts but enough gold to buy a token to be able to do so without having to resubscribe again first.

Haven't played for six months but I think Bliz has done away with most of the gear/item tokens and replaced the costs with gold. Gold has more worth now. The Black Market Auction House is another great money sink since it offers random items, old unobtainable legacy items, and current tier raid items at very steep prices. And then there are the super duper rare collector items that cost absurd amounts of gold. Dats million bucks.

i log into wow once every couple of years, and spend a month or so bringing my characters up to speed, i never bother with gearing up or end game, so it's good to know i can save my gold for the ability to play without paying.

but the question I have is, if i'm sitting on a bunch of these, and haven't played in a while, do i need to re-sub once to be able to log in and use them? because considering i never play for longer than a month, that would really undermine their usefulness.

@hh: My understanding is that they're going to open all lapsed accounts, but under the same restrictions of trial accounts. This means you should be able to log in and use the tokens even if your sub has expired. One potential implication is that if the tokens are inventory items (which sounds like the case), you won't be able to access them if they're on a character over level 20 (the level limit of trial accounts).