A small hotfix in World of Warcraft has suddenly made some players millionaires – at least if they were online in time.
Those who want to earn large sums of gold in World of Warcraft usually need to invest a lot of time or have a good understanding of the market. However, last night there was a small hotfix that allowed many players in Blizzard’s MMORPG to acquire millions of gold if they were attentive at the right moment.
Blizzard’s hotfix suddenly makes worthless items much more valuable
This is how players became rich in WoW in just a few seconds: In The War Within, there is the resource “Desecrated Tinder Box,” which is needed for many recipes. This is a rare resource that can sometimes be found in treasures or depths. The price of this tinder box was mostly between 6,000 and 9,000 gold pieces in recent days, and the demand was high. Anyone who listed a tinder box in the auction house could sell it almost instantly.
Blizzard believed that this resource was too rare and introduced a new method of acquiring it through a hotfix last night. Two blacksmithing supply vendors in Dornogal now exchange the tinder box for different items:
- 3x Bars of Resonating Depths
- or 3x Vials of Kaheti Oils
- or 3x Viridian Adornment Hats
- or 3x Gloom Depths Skins
The catch: The materials mentioned above had a much lower value in the auction house. For example, then one could buy Kaheti oils for the ridiculous price of 3 gold – so 1,000 Kaheti oils for 3,000 gold.
For these 1,000 Kaheti oils, one could then buy over 300 Desecrated Tinder Boxes from the vendor and list them in the auction house.
Those who were quick enough could exploit the market and achieve huge profits
What happened then? Those who were sharp and immediately noticed the hotfix announcement could buy the cheap materials, immediately exchange them for tinder boxes, and relist them in the auction house before the market collapsed.
Thus, sticking with the example of 1,000 Kaheti oils, one could turn 3,000 gold into 1,500,000 gold, as a friend documented in screenshots:
Of course, this could be scaled, and some big investors likely capped their gold at 9,999,999 gold within minutes last night – easier than it has been for a long time.
Is this still possible? No. Within minutes, the market adjusted, and prices normalized. Now, Kaheti oils and all the other materials cost significantly more, so 3 of the “cheap” materials now roughly equal the price of a tinder box. Those who did not react within a few minutes can no longer benefit from this.
In this sense, I sincerely apologize to everyone who bought my tinder boxes for 5,000 gold last night before the price fell to 1,700 gold a few seconds later. My repair costs for this expansion should be covered by that.
Those who missed the moment yesterday will now have to farm gold the old-fashioned way. But that’s also quite easy in The War Within.
