WoW Won't Sell Trading Post Currency On Its Own, Game Director Confirms

World of Warcraft won't sell Trader's Tender as a standalone product, WoW game director Ion Hazzikostas has confirmed.

In mid-June, fansite Wowhead datamined an assortment of icons representing various amounts of Trader's Tender, a special currency used to purchase rotating cosmetics via the game's recently introduced Trading Post. With so many different icons of varying amounts made public as part of the datamine, many fans feared developer Blizzard might be looking to turn the Trading Post into another microtransaction store and Trader's Tender into a premium currency that could be purchased with real money. Trader's Tender is currently primarily earned in-game by logging in once a month and completing various monthly activities, something players worried would be upended by the ability to buy the currency outright.

Speaking with GameSpot, Hazzikostas cleared up some of the confusion surrounding the datamine. He said definitively that there are no plans to sell Trader's Tender as a standalone product. However, the team does think it makes sense to offer various amounts of Trader's Tender as parts of various bundles, such as expansion deluxe editions. As Hazzikostas pointed out, players who purchased WoW's latest Dragonflight expansion received a one-time reward of 500 Trader's Tender. Blizzard will likely look at doing something similar in the future.

"In the past, we might have offered as part of a deluxe edition or some big bundle, a specific pet of our devising," Hazzikostas said. "Well, many players would look at that [pet] and say 'I don't like the look of that, that aesthetic seems lame to me.' But we have a new tool now in the form of Tender that gives players potentially more choice, more agency in picking something they like. It shouldn't be too far-fetched to imagine we might have some significant bundles coming up later this year that may include some Tender as a part of them."

As for why the icons discovered via the datamine included so many specific amounts of Trader's Tender, Hazzikostas said it wasn't so that players could buy certain amounts. Instead, he said it was routine for the team to build a variety of assets just in case they get used down the line as part of a bundle or some other promotion. The assets were meant to be encrypted, but due to an error on Blizzard's part, become visible in a build of the game via WoW's public test realm.

"We'll typically make a whole bunch of these things, many of which, most of which, in fact, never get used," Hazzikostas said. "That's why they're encrypted. There's no need to have them be visible until there's some plan to do something with them."

Hazzikostas said the team is not looking to change how the Trading Post works, and noted that the negative community reaction to the very idea of players being able to buy Trader's Tender has been heard "loud and clear."

"Primarily, this is an in-game system," Hazzikostas said. "The overwhelming majority of Tender every month is earned logging in, claiming it, and doing any of a wide array of activities to claim the rest, and that's not something we're looking to change or subvert or upend."

WoW's next big update, Fractures in Time, arrives July 11. It will introduce a brand-new support-style DPS specialization to the nearly two-decade-old MMORPG, alongside new story content and a mega-dungeon that will see players come face-to-face with the biggest dragon in WoW lore, Galakrond.