World of Warcraft is now (basically) free to play

[Reefa]

A few days before Thanksgiving in 2004, Blizzard unleashed World of Warcraft upon the unsuspecting gaming populace, changing the online gaming landscape forever. Azeroth wasn’t the first online world, but it was the first to prove those worlds could work on a massive scale and could reach an otherwise non-gaming audience. WoW has dominated the MMO market since its inception — and still rules the subscription-based roost to this day — but the payment model of all those games stretching the limit of your smartphone’s storage suggest that even though WoW was an original innovator, it’s now lagging behind the times. World of Warcraft hasn’t yet gone free-to-play because it hasn’t needed to, but Blizzard has officially begun testing the waters by introducing in-game real money trading.

With the introduction of WoW Tokens, players can use real money to purchase an in-game item that can be exchanged for 30 days of subscription time. However, players can sell the Token on the auction house for in-game gold, effectively using real money to buy virtual money. In an attempt to make sure even the most dimwitted of orcs could partake, Blizzard made a handy chart explaining the process:

Yeah, real money trading didn’t work in Diablo III, but the Tokens model Blizzard is using in WoW is exactly the same as the PLEX model CCP Games has already proven successful in Eve Online. The games have two different styles of play — Eve much more of an economy simulator than WoW — and thus different types of players, but the concept is so simple that Blizzard’s Tokens should be an instant success. Even Wildstar — which more or less aped WoW but added an action-oriented sci-fi twist — successfully implemented the same game time token model.

World of Warcraft is not fully free to play just yet, but if you’re determined, you can now sustain your subscription using in-game gold

rather than real-life currency. Many say playing WoW is like a full-time job, but now, at least, it’s a full-time job that pays for itself.

http://www.geek.com/games/world-of-warcraft-is-now-basically-free-to-play-1616945/