The pros have a whopping €85,000 in World of Warcraft spent – and then lost. Is that Pay2Win?
The “World First Race” in World of Warcraft was one of the longer ones with patch 9.2. The Jailer and the other bosses of the Mausoleum of the First proved to be particularly persistent. After many long nights could Echo win the victory, while other guilds looked down the drain; including the professional guild Team Liquid. They threw in the towel and paused after it became clear they couldn’t win. The cost point was pretty steep.
The professional guild spent well over half a billion gold on the race.
How Much Did Team Liquid Spend? Overall, Team Liquid’s cost is a whopping 723 million gold pieces, according to member Veyloris.
245 million was spent on trading and bartering equipment.
215 million went for the direct purchase of “Bind on Equip” items.
A total of 723 million gold was issued – and Liquid now has a mountain of debt of almost 535 million gold.
What about the missing amount of gold? Veyloris only lists a few cost items, so you don’t know all the items on this long bill.
The remaining 263 million gold pieces are likely to have been invested in various things. On the one hand, all raiders need a lot of flasks and buffood – with over 1,000 attempts with 20 people each, that’s a lot of gold. The repair costs should also be somewhere between 25 million and 35 million gold.
Another part may have gone for “PvP Boosts”. It’s common for pro guilds to be boosted by more experienced PvP players at the start of a season to give them more chances of getting powerful gear from the reward vault in Oribos in the first few weeks. That should also have been a three-digit million amount.
How much is all that gold worth? In World of Warcraft, gold has a real value, since you can buy gold with real money with the “WoW token”. Even if Team Liquid doesn’t seem to rely on WoW Tokens, at the current US price of the mark at 93,000 gold, an amount of 723 million gold coins equates to about 4,600 WoW Tokens.
Those 4,600 WoW Tokens would in turn be worth $93,000 (€84,900)!
Despite these gold expenses, it wasn’t enough for the “World First” title in the end, even though the race was extremely exciting for long stretches.
Veyloris emphasizes that this value is not necessarily final, since Liquid is still trying to defeat the jailer – but not as the first guild in the world.
How do they get the gold back in? While such a sum may seem astronomical for regular WoW players, Team Liquid should have little trouble recouping the borrowed gold in the coming months. Professional guilds are in the relatively comfortable position of offering a variety of services for gold. For example, later they pull other players through the mythical raid or particularly hard “M+” dungeons in order to bring in the gold again. After all, buyers get mounts and achievements as a reward – in addition to quite strong armor.
Such amounts of gold always cause discussions as to whether World of Warcraft is not “Pay2Win”. It’s important to remember that gold has always played a bigger role in races – and in the case of the World First Race, it’s worth nothing even without player skill.
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