The truth is we’ve never been better and more effective at identifying and actioning malicious accounts, and our Game Security Operations (GSO) team that handle these actions are iterating and innovating on a nearly daily basis.

It’s not visible to you just how much we do, and that is absolutely another problem in itself we need to be better at surfacing these actions (more on this later). We hear folks say things like “just ban the bots” a lot. The concept of bots gets thrown around a lot, but it’s not just “bots” that fuel this, it’s compromised accounts, credit card fraud, scams, hacked clients, and the tools that illicit third parties use to fuel the engine that is the RMT trade. The impact of illicit RMT is beyond just buying gold it’s the entire black market that revolves around gold sales. When we really looked at the state of things in Wrath Classic, and how different players approach the game, we saw that we cannot cause the demand for gold to be lower. However, what we want to do from a design perspective and what we need to do for the good of the community aren’t always aligned, and this is one of the more difficult things about maintaining a large online game like Wrath Classic. It felt jarring, out of place, and was antithetical to what most of us wanted to relive about those early years of WoW. This was true all the way through Burning Crusade, where potions and flasks could represent a significant weekly expense and the resources required to make them were still quite difficult to obtain. Later on at level 60, some form of time investment is needed to “maintain” a character in an ecosystem where flasks, resistance potions, and elixirs are such a major part of the game, and resources are scarce and highly contested. From saving to get your first mount at 40, to picking and choosing which skills you wanted to learn while leveling so you could afford a new weapon or piece of armor. In Vanilla WoW, the scarcity of gold is a major factor in how you approach your journey in Azeroth.When WoW Classic started in 2019, adding something like token felt unimaginable to us, and that continued to be true for us–even late into Burning Crusade Classic–for a few reasons: 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). The best way to start is to simply say that this wasn’t something we arrived at lightly. We want to take a moment to talk about WoW Token in Wrath of the Lich King Classic.

Weekly expense tracker