You’re leaving half of the variables out here. Some one still has to farm up all that gold on Classic and we’re talking about fellow players, not gold farming bots. You’re talking about legitimate account activity. Some one on Classic having enough gold to trade for gold on Retail is going to be so few and far between it’s a non-factor unless they’re getting cheap gold from a 3rd party on Classic and can turn that into more gold on Retail than they could buy directly on retail. That’s literally the only situation where it could potentially have any real impact on the economy and THAT situation IS against the EULA and should be stopped.
Player to player between retail and classic is just not going to be a factor in the economy because of how rare the scenario will even pan out.
Um… Yea. People will. Paid / sponsored teams have big companies backing them for advertising. Red Bull gaming? They will pay for their teams to get every advantage. Is the player dropping $2000 on wow tokens? Not likely, but is a sponsor (5 sponsors splitting the cost)? Much more likely.
I know people that have traded gold on NA realms for a raid carry on EU realms. And I traded an in game loot card code on one realm for gold on another realm (to be fair, this was like a decade ago, so maybe things changed).
Both times, the people involved (myself and friends) asked on the CS forums if it would be allowed and were told by Blizzard that it was.
I don’t know why Classic-Retail trading would be different.
You’re assuming the demand is constant though. Just because a handful of players are trading between Classic and Retail egregiously doesn’t mean the entire server is. Eventually, those that are trading for gold won’t need Righteous Orbs and they won’t be buying them, the people that aren’t trading for gold won’t have enough to buy them or won’t think it’s worth that much gold, they’ll stop selling and the price will come down to normal levels.
This. It’s not against Blizzard’s ToS to give gold to someone. Essentially, that’s all you’re doing. You’re giving gold to someone on a BfA server, and they are giving you gold on a classic server.
With that said, why would anyone do this? This kind of defeats the purpose of classic and ruins the experience.
Precisely why it will likely incur bans still, as there is a risk of a player being defrauded.
If they did want to allow it and intended it to be, you would be able to open a trade window between the to two games, so the trade can be undertaken simultaneously without the risk.
Also look at the statement they made about it people - one of the primary problems they mentioned is the ability of gold trading to massively disrupt the game economy.
I think the answer is clear. They did not denounce it they said all trades are subject to their terms of service. The current terms of service don’t forbid trading within other games within the Blizzard eco system.
ie; People have been trading WoW gold for tokens to get Blizz $ for OW and Destiny 2 loot boxes and not been banned.
I would make the assumption that as it’s a joined sub and as the real money is converted into blizz $ and they’re within the same eco system it will not be banned.
I’d prefer this be prohibited, but more importantly i just want an answer.
When D3 launched I made a ton of WoW gold selling items/gold across games. The WoW realm forums were flooded w/ people looking for transactions both ways. Never heard of it being discouraged in any way.
In an interview within the last year, Ion said that we can’t sell, for actual money, in-game items, but trading raid carries / reserve items for in-game gold is an unsupported transaction----blizz won’t back you up if you get screwed, but they won’t ban you either.
Both of these point to these ‘handshake deals’ of “I’ll give you my BFA gold for your classic gold” to be unsupported, but legal.
I don’t care that much either way but I do want to know the rules, and with how much this has been asked over the last year its frustrating that we can’t get a clear answer on what is allowed: people are taking the time to ask BEFORE doing it.
Because there are people in the world who want any advantage they can get. Hell we probably have a few entitled types who even firmly believe that it’s their right to use any advantage, and a few more who think they have to do it just to “keep up” with others.
This makes sense to me. What would be nice, with an official response from Blizz, is players doing what they can to minimize scammers on their own terms.
Setup a discord and post all transactions, from both parties there publicly; let it act as a blockchain for these ‘unsupported’ transactions for the community to root out scammers on their own w/o any Blizz intervention requested or required.
They’re right, trading directly would be highly disruptive because the inflation in retail means it’s easier to get thousands of gold and pumping that into Classic would be destructive. But that isn’t what people are talking about here.
There’s obviously no direct trade window to trade between Classic and Retail. There’s also no way to directly trade gold between different servers and even regions yet that’s allowed.
Some players have loads of gold on Retail, they want to tourist mode and want a leg up on Classic without actually wasting time farming there. They will happily trade Retail for Classic gold.
Some players have zero gold on Retail, because they havent played in years, but could pay their subscription for Classic if they could somehow get Retail gold. They will happily farm on Classic, the game they do play, so they can sell it for Retail to pay their sub.
This is doubtful, because we all know the answer already. “We cannot stop you from doing this, but we encourage you not to.” It might be safer for them not to answer at all, because when they give it, people may start to take advantage of the loop hole.
In Vanilla I could have said that I’ll give you SoJs in D2 in exchange for WoW gold—try to think of this on a broader level than “BFA didn’t exist during vanilla”
Giving a half answer in the AMA sure is bringing a lot of light and discussion on this just the same—they’d have been better off to ignore the question completely in that case.