buy-wow-gold
Latest
Breakfast Topic: Do you buy gold?
Once upon a time, the only way you could purchase in-game gold for real money was to go through a guaranteed unscrupulous vendor. These vendors hire (or enslave) farmers to earn as much gold as possible in a short amount of time. Over time, they have discovered that hacking accounts is much quicker and more lucrative. Account thieves get your information from scams, phishing emails, keyloggers, and selling you gold (oops). So Blizzard came up with a way to satisfy the desire to buy gold in WoW by introducing the Guardian Cub. In case you didn't know, you can purchase this tradeable pet for $10 or €10 at the Blizzard Store and then sell it on the AH. So buying gold safely is now possible with Blizzard's approval (and to Blizzard's profit).
Guardian Cub taking a bite out of third-party gold sales
The new Guardian Cub, the pet you can buy with real-world currency and exchange for in-game gold, has been available for sale on most realms' Auction Houses for a good 24 hours now. And early reports are looking very favorable for Blizzard; it is now significantly cheaper to buy gold through Blizzard than through one of the less-reputable, third-party Chinese gold sellers. The price of the Guardian Cub varies wildly by server -- a function of supply and demand. An impromptu Twitter survey suggests that the pet is currently selling for between 6,000 gold and 40,000 gold in game, depending on server size, competition, and a number of other factors. Most realms are currently seeing prices just north of 10,000 gold. Certainly, the final page of the Guardian Cub saga has yet to be written, and prices will be extraordinarily volatile in the next few days, weeks, and months. Still, even at a conservative exchange rate of $10 for a 10,000-gold pet, players can get a far better (and safer!) deal buying gold through Blizzard via the Guardian Cub than dealing with a gold seller. The difference is stark -- the same amount of gold may cost you $20 or $30 through a third-party site. And even then, you have no guarantee of getting your gold, no guarantee that your account won't be compromised, and no guarantee that your purchase isn't supporting forced labor and account theft. Will the Guardian Cub kill off third-party gold sales? Probably not, at least on its own. Interest in this new pet simply cannot be sustained long term. But if the last 24 hours of trading on the in-game Auction House are any indication, Blizzard just fired a shot into a multi-billion-dollar gray market.
