Things pile up in an long-running game, especially the items you hand over for goods.
World of Warcraft’s latest patch brought with it many returning activities and mechanics—and yet another type of currency to throw on top of the mountain of currencies it already contains.
Virtually every game has some kind of gold or coins or points that you can exchange for goods or services. But none has quite so many as WoW, amassed over 20 years of updates. Wowhead, the database of Warcraft items, lists 1,203 types of currency in the game. To be fair, some of those have been retired, and others are currency for a single item or purpose—but in comparison, the entire world (not of Warcraft) only has 180.
Old types of coins are hardly one of the most important problems facing the game. For most, it’s just a matter of endlessly scrolling to the bottom of their Currency tab if they need to buy something antique or obscure. Some items have been converted to gold purchases. But the (tens of? hundreds of?) thousands that remain are a sign of Warcraft’s slowness to prune, to remove items and systems that bloat the game and now serve no purpose except to frustrate, irritate or confuse the player.
“I literally have to have Wowhead constantly open on my second monitor so I can search for what all these things do!” wrote one player recently. “Less currency in War Within please! It gets way too messy over time through the patches.”
Warcraft’s stocks of currencies are on the rise
The War Within, the latest expansion, added a dozen currencies, including denominations specific to its various zones (Kej in Azj-Kahet for example, or Odd Globs of Wax in Ringing Deeps—which are traded for Firelight Ruby, yet another currency).
More than a half-dozen additional types of overall currency were added that could be exchanged for items or services (Valor Stones, four entirely separate types of Crests for upgrading gear, Resonance Crystals—which can be used to buy another currency, Radiant Remnants). In addition, a seemingly bottomless supply of things act like currency but are objects that take up space in your bags (omni-tokens for raid set items, Earth-Encrusted Gems for transmog sets in Dornogal, and the like).
December’s 11.0.7 patch added yet another, in the form of Flame-Blessed Iron, the currency in the new Siren Isle zone for buying civilian transmog appearances and other goodies. That zone also offers plenty of items that clog up your inventory: Runekeys to summon the elusive Thrayir mount, a dozen different citrine gems to slot into your new Cyrce’s Circlet ring, and the Raw Singing Citrines—technically another currency—that you use to upgrade your ring and, eventually, to earn flying.
Currencies are the worst—except for physical alternatives
In a way, having a super-stuffed currency tab is a blessing; items like those that take up space in your inventory are anathema to players who delve deep into expansions and quickly run out of storage space (even with the generous new allotments awarded in The War Within in the form of the Warband Bank shared between alts). The Shadowlands expansion pushed this to the limit, with dozens of items that did nothing but add Anima to the tank held by the covenant you aligned yourself with, clogging up your bags until you could return to home base and deposit them.
At the time, Warcraft developers explained to me that they were attempting to create a Diablo-style loot explosion, where every creature killed would hold a fun variety of items to loot. In practice, it was infuriating, either requiring frequent trips to inconveniently placed bases or requiring players who loved collecting to throw out items of value to make room for items of marginally more value.
That “loot explosion” aesthetic is still present in the game, but often turns many of the items you loot instantly into currencies. In the current Nerub-ar Palace raid, for example, killing a single boss recently might drop actual, you know, currency in the form of gold, silver and copper. Then there are valor stones, four types of crests depending on difficulty, Nerub-ar Finery (for upgrading your power in the raid), and Bronze Celebration Tokens during the Warcraft Anniversary Event. Other currencies might quietly accrue as a result of the kill, even if they aren’t instantly awarded (Trader’s Tender, for example, if the raid boss completed a task).
As each patch, season and expansion comes to an end, a very few currencies are retired (Honor and Conquest points in PvP, for example, or Emblems of Heroism, Valor or Conquest in Wrath of the Lich King), but most persist. That’s why my characters still have Warlords of Draenor’s Garrison Resources in their currency tabs and Burning Crusade’s Apexis Shards in their banks.
Blizzard has tried to help players handle the currency bloat, revamping the tab to categorize by expansion and designating some currencies as freely tradeable between alts (so you could, in theory, consolidate them all on a single character instead of having them scattered amongst many). But this is like offering hoarders with mounds of paper a better filing system: The ultimate solution should be to haul in a dumpster and toss all of it.
One solution: a gold standard
There is no reason for the stockpiling. Every item purchasable by niche currencies in the past should, after a suitable mourning period of an expansion or two, be converted to gold. An argument might be made that as players level through those expansions, they’re “missing out” on the farming of currency X for item Y, but in reality, the leveling process is so fast these days that farming rarely takes place.
If you wanted players to grind currency as part of a special event (Mists of Pandaria Remix is a recent example), then you could create a new special currency for the duration of the event, as MoP Remix did with its Bronze, then retire it at the end of the event.
There’s no reason for Mists’ Ironpaw Tokens or Lesser Charms of Good Fortune to be in the game in 2025, so Bronze was the perfect solution. If you really want people to have to farm for those items 12 years later, then lock them behind reputations.
No one should have to farm time-delayed cooking tokens for a rolling pin or frying pan that was new a dozen years ago or fish up Drowned Mana to make their fishing bobber a squeaky yellow duck that debuted in 2016. In a game with 10 expansions and 20 years of history, there isn’t a need to zealously protect this old content; we have plenty in quests, achievements, and rare creatures. Vendor items were never rare. They’re just obnoxious to buy years later, using the equivalent of Greek drachmas and English ha’pennies.
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