The Great Readjustment

I'm playing WoW again.

I hope you didn't forget me

I struggled with deciding to reup my subscription or not for a few days. I planned on getting Legion from the beginning, that plan didn't change, but I had been piecing together a long term plan.

First, I would prepurchase Legion, which I still have to do and am planning on asking for it for my birthday. Secondly, I would, as money allowed, transfer a few of my characters over to Chromaggus.

Why the transfer? First, some backstory to catch you up:

Warlords Subscription Prescription Description

If you already read forums or read trade chat (why would you do that, though?), you don't need to read anything else about the state of World of Warcraft's active subscription numbers, I'm sure - but I don't usually talk about the active subscription counts, so hear me out for a moment.

This is the (cropped - view full, interactive chart here) chart of WoW's active subscriptions. At Warlords release, subscriptions skyrocketed to be as high as they were at Mist's release, clearing the leap upwards from the dismal sub count that Mists had earned after overstaying its welcome with over a year of SoO. With this latest report, we're seeing that in record time of only six months, subs dropped back down dramatically to almost as low as they were at Mists' lowest point,

However, in case you forgot, Mists' release came with that Annual Pass deal - free beta access, a mount, and Diablo III for free - if you had already paid for Diablo III, you had game time credited for the worth of the game - if you agreed to subscribe to the game for a full year. Cancelling before your year was up revoked your mount and Diablo III access. Of course, after the Annual Pass ran its full year course, the subscription count was 7.6M.

The WoW Token - The Cure?

We first heard about the WoW Token awhile back as a potential addition to the game. It was recently confirmed. In summary:

The tokens are purchased for actual money (The price isn't set yet, but it won't be less than the regular subscription price.) and are only able to be sold in a dedicated game time token section of the auction house.

They are set to an exact amount, determined by the game rather than the seller, and unable to be bid on, only bought out. Once purchased, the item becomes bound and can only be used to give yourself 30 days of game time. It does not expire nor can it be destroyed.

Basically, it's a way to buy game time with real money and sell it for gold, allowing players to "buy" gold from other players by selling them these tokens - hopefully cutting down on the gold selling problem in WoW.