Blizzard follows up on their thoughts of the indirect gold selling by dragon cub proxy

Following up on their earlier announcement of the "Guardian Cub" pet for World of Warcraft and its potential opening of the Pandora's box of a Blizzard sanctioned cash-for-gold program (Which was discussed in this previous post), Blizzard now further elaborates on its views about the Guardian Cub.

The Guardian Cub controversy continues!

In this post on the official WoW blog Blizzard states that 3rd party gold sales are a problem for WoW, because the money that is being sold is, for the most part, made up of gold that has been taken from hacked accounts.
Therefore you are helping to fuel the industry of hacking other peoples accounts whenever you buy gold from 3rd party sites, you naughty naughty boy.

Obviously the same problem is not present when good guys Blizzard are acting as the gold providing intermediary, so that makes the concept of paying real cash for in-game gold all honky dory, as long as Blizzard are the ones that receive said cash.

Irony aside, Blizzard goes on to state that the Guardian Cub will not necessarily be a great way of converting your physical greens into virtual yellows, as prices on the pets will naturally be subject to the basic economic principles of supply and demand.

So if there are a lot of people out there with more money than common sense, you may see the auction houses flooded with Guardian Cubs, which will bring prices down and make for a poor dollar-to-gold conversion rate.

Blizzard also goes on to confirm my suspicion that they are using this pet as a test case for seeing, how allowing players to pay money for gold affects the game, and if this is a path that they should continue down on.



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