14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard Entertainment is apparently toying with the notion of making gold trading a legit activity in its massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft.
The ten-year-old video game is still considered the top dog in its genre, with millions of players still maintaining an active monthly subscription, even in the face of formidable competition from free-to-play titles.
Gold farming and selling have always been a part of the game, in spite of Blizzard's continued efforts to cull the practice, to the point where the company routinely bans accounts related to trading in-game currency for real-world money.
Nonetheless, they keep coming in, so Blizzard decided to get with the times and do something with more chances of success in the battle against farming, by following the old adage, if you can't beat them, join them.
A brand new post on the Battle.net forums delivers a short review of the year that passed, revealing the company's future plans.
"We're exploring the possibility of giving players a way to buy tradable game-time tokens for the purpose of exchanging them in-game with other players for gold."
"Our current thought on this is that it would give players a way to use their surplus gold to cover some of their subscription cost, while giving players who might have less play time an option for acquiring gold from other players through a legit and secure system," the blue post reads.
The Times They Are A Changin'
Warlords of Draenor, World of Warcraft's fifth major expansion, just came out a month ago, introducing a significant paradigm shift, overhauling many of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game's systems.
The game's first raid opened up earlier this month, and several top-ranking guilds in the world already managed to take its final boss down.
This year's BlizzCon, the company's annual convention, celebrated ten years of World of Warcraft and twenty years of WarCraft, with the release of a new documentary, titled World of Warcraft: Looking for Group, available below for those who wish to take a behind-the-scenes look at how the game came to be and what its influence on modern culture was.
Blizzard also outlined some of its plans for the future, starting with more Legendary quests, the introduction of the first Legendary follower, and the introduction of a system to trade in-game gold for game time, in a manner similar to how Eve Online does it.
In addition to this, the team is also working on adding the ability to send Tweets and screenshots directly from the game client, making it easier than ever to share your achievements and discoveries online.
The Heirloom system is also going to get a little work done, with the company planning to bring the whole thing into a single account-wide collection UI, providing a clear path for the purchase and upgrade of each item.
