[WoW] Making Gold From Nothing - Theorycrafting the WoW Token

One of the things that Blizzard did to try and prevent speculation of the WoW Token market was make the Token non-transferable. You can only use it, or sell it on the AH. That way you can't buy a bunch of them with gold at a low point, and re-sell them at a high point. But if you're planning on being subscribed regardless, you can basically treat your subscription time as a sort of holding tank for game time.

NA Region #WoWToken: 21,198g, sells in less than 30 minutes. pic.twitter.com/dHs55Z5jQe
— WoW Tokens (@WoWTokens) April 9, 2015

The WoW Token nailed a low of 20.3k, and I said to myself, "Screw it, close enough to 20k, let's buy me some time." I dropped 121.8k gold and boom, now have 6 months of game time applied to my account. Not too shabby. And totally lucked out. A friend of mine tried to get some when I told him the cost was rising again, and they were sold out. Makes me wonder if a lot of people said the same thing as I did and cleared the AH.

However, I started thinking about it. Subscription time is ~$15 a month. What if I bought $90 worth of tokens and sold them at a higher gold value? If the gold value was high enough, I'd actually make gold that way. I mean, if I'm going to be subscribed for sure regardless, I'm not losing any money. If the price doesn't go up, I nabbed time for gold, and I win. If the price does go up, I can buy that subscription time worth of Tokens and get that gold back and more.

Basically, using my subscription time as the purchase value for stock in gold. Granted, I probably don't want to do this too much. Doesn't make me a thing if I decide I don't want to play anymore and I'm stuck with Tokens. But that's the trick, right? Purchasing Tokens with gold when they're low, I can just sit them in my inventory and not use them, and they've significantly increased the number of tokens you can purchase with gold. When I'm ready to play again, I can use them! As far as I can tell, they don't have an expiry. And I don't pay out actual cash money until I'm ready to convert it back to gold. Win-win to me.

So for the 6 months I bought at 20.3k a piece, how much does it need to be to break even? I spent 121.8k gold, and 4.5 Tokens is worth $90 (more on that in a moment), so to break even the value needs to be 27.07k. Granted, I can't buy half a token, so really I'd just buy 4 and save myself $10, or buy 5, spend $10, and get more gold.

But if I wait for the Token to be say, 40k? 5 Tokens would net me 200k, so I'd have gained 80k gold. If I wait and the price goes up to 60k per Token, I'll have netted a profit of 180k gold. All for the low, low price of $10 (and I'll be locked in on my subscription time for that 6 months, basically). Hell, I can use this as a server transfer for cash just by purchasing the WoW Token for cash money on a different server/faction and selling it there.

It's not a quick strategy for gold, for sure. This is a waiting game. It may never even pay out if the Token sits around 25k - 30k. It really has to jump to make it worthwhile. And because Blizzard's algorithm seems to prevent the cost from rising more than 1%ish every few hours, there's no real way to flip this in short order. We're talking the order of days, maybe weeks. It's hard to tell. But I do say I got really lucky with nabbing 6 Tokens for the lowest possible price. And hey, like I said earlier, at worst I have 6 months of game time for 120k gold. That's just fine by me. #WoW, #WoWToken