This is somewhat of a follow up to another article I wrote “The Death of World of Warcraft“. If you haven’t read it yet it’s a wonderful rant full of shit talking and hard truths. It’s a rather stark contrast to the following article which is about my experience in playing Warcraft for free. If this article is to informative and not as full of entertaining and irksome commentary I apologize. I promise you a nice rant soon enough.

WoW Tokens and Me

So I’m into my third month of playing Warcraft without paying a monthly fee thanks to the introduction of the WoW Tokens. If somehow you never heard of WoW Tokens, firstly, I’m surprised you found my site, (thanks for reading btw) and secondly and more seriously, they are items that you can buy with gold and redeem for 30 days of play.

The system was designed to help reduce “illegal” gold farmers and the chance for players to be scammed. This is how it works, if you want to buy gold you pay blizzard real money to buy a WoW Token which is then sold on the Auction House. Blizzard sets the gold price of the Tokens based on demand across each server region. The tokens are bind on pick up so you can’t buy a bunch of tokens, horde them and then sell them for money. I think it’s a fairly good system and oddly thought out for Blizzard considering past attempts at injecting real world money into auction houses. *cough*Diablo *cough*¹⁾Wiki entroy about the Diablo 3 Auction House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_III#Auction_house

My Warcraft Pedigree

I just want to throw this out there, I’m no expert on Warcraft, I’ll freely admit I’m more of a casual player, I don’t raid and in general I don’t like MMORPGs, mainly because I hate people. That being said I’ve been playing WoW on and off since it first launched. Pre-Burning Crusades I was a weekly raider in a wonderful guild that was one of the top raiding guilds on that server at the time. The next expansion I was a casual player again and then in Wraith of the Litch King I was again raiding. From then on I was a casual player and I just flat-out skipped Mists of Pandaria.

My point is I’ve been involved in this game a long time and while I’m not a hardcore player I know things and people should listen to me.

My Experience

So, I’m into my third month of playing Warcraft without paying real money for it.  I have to say that I’ve been enjoying it. I really like the fact I don’t have to pay for it; it takes the pressure off deciding if the game is really worth paying money for. Those monthly fees can really add up.  As of right now I’ve spent approximately 60,000 gold. I freely admit I had my doubts with this system; my biggest fear was turning the game into a chore.

At this point I had two level 100 characters with established Garrisons. I didn’t have to change them too much to turn them into auto gold making machines. I made sure both Garrisons had at least 3 followers with the Treasure Hunter trait. I also made sure each of them had a level 3 Salvage Yard and a level 3 Inn. The Salvage yard was important to getting extra money not calculated into the missions and the Inn gave you more missions with a gold payout.  It took a few hours to set up the buildings and about two weeks to get the additional followers I wanted including the time it took to level them and max out their gear. (I still made a lot of money during those 2 weeks though)

I only logged into those those two characters once a day, heck, sometimes skipping a day or two here or there. I was spending my time on a completely different server leveling a Horde character with friends. Even when neglecting my money making characters I made more than enough money. I could have easily made a lot more gold by simply logging in twice a day to micro manage their missions, not to mention all the money I could have made by crafting bags and playing the Auction House, but my point was to make gold without having it feel like work so I didn’t.

Interesting Economics

One of the more interesting aspects was playing the supply and demand game; meaning knowing when to buy the token to maximize your gold. It really didn’t take any effort to figure it out due to a wonder website,²⁾ https://wowtoken.info/ . For the longest time the gold cost went up and down between 16 and 22k, but more recently it has finally leveled off and normalized. For North American servers the gold price has been staying approximately 25k give or take a few thousand gold. However with the new patch I suspect the gold market will once again fluctuate more dramatically until the market normalizes once again.

Final Thoughts

So, now that I’ve explained how I’ve been playing WoW for free you might as well just throw it all out the window thanks to patch 6.2. They dramatically changed how the Salvage Yard pays out and they reduced the frequency of high gold value missions. All of which I’ll talk about in another article which is full of complaints of the new patch.

With that being said I still think you’ll be able to get enough gold through casually running garrison missions but I can’t say for sure till the month is over.