For years, World of Warcraft players interested in skipping nasty grinds or boring resource farming turned to the billion-dollar black market that is digital currency sales. For just a few of your hard-earned real life dollars, you could buy a nice pile of gold to use for item upgrades, rare recipes and, most commonly, your epic flying skill.

What many gold buyers didn’t realize is that the gold they purchased didn’t necessarily come from farmers, but game from the hacked accounts of their fellow gamers. Gold buying is the leading cause of account theft in WoW, as gold sellers strip as many accounts as they can to keep up with demand. Now, Blizzard seems to have made it easier and safer for you to use your actual money to buy fake money, via the in-game Guardian Cub pet.

Here’s how it works – you, the player, want to earn some extra gold. You purchase a couple of these Guardian Cubs for $10, then you put them up on the auction house. While you can’t sell the pet immediately, it is bind-on-equip and once the initial cooldown expires you are free to trade it however you see fit. A player with gold to burn then purchases the pet, giving you in-game money for your real-life purchase.

Blizzard even confirmed this as a possible use:

“While our goal is to offer players alternative ways to add a Pet Store pet to their collection, we’re ok with it if some players choose to use the Guardian Cub as a safe and secure way to try to acquire a little extra in-game gold without turning to third-party gold-selling services.”

It’s an interesting strategy, and one that has worked well in EVE (where players sell game time for currency). However, it’s worth noting that the auction house is a buyer’s market – if a large number of players are trying to make gold by selling Guardian Cubs, the eventual price drop may still make Chinese gold farming operations a more lucrative investment for your character.

We’lll just have to wait and see how this impacts the economy and gold buying market. What do you think of this new method for earning World of Warcraft gold?

Via PC Gamer

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