In a surprising move that’s upsetting some, Blizzard has announced a massive change to the World of Warcraft: Classic experience – but only for a specific region. Blizzard has decided to add the World of Warcraft Token to WoW: Classic for the Chinese servers.

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For those unfamiliar, the WoW Token can be purchased as a microtransaction by players and sold on the in-game auction house for gold, the in-game currency. The purchasers of these Tokens are other WoW players, who can spend a considerable amount of gold to purchase them and then redeem them for $15 USD on their Battle.net account, or a month’s subscription.

There are a handful of reasons for these items. Obviously, the first reason anyone would think of is that it adds a microtransaction to WoW, which generates a good amount of income for Blizzard. It also cuts down on illegal gold-farming bots which are used to generate gold, often by less-than-legal sites that sell the gold as a third party for an out-of-game purchase, which is a bannable offense in WoW. Third, players wanted it – it’s great when you’re in the endgame with more gold than you know what to do with and can put it towards making your subscription free.

The issue there is that it radically changes the in-game economy, rapidly leading to inflation, as players now have a way to turn buy gold instead of having to earn it through their in-game quests, farming, professions, etc. One only has to look at the economy of WoW: Classic and compare it to the current Battle for Azeroth servers to see how drastically different the two are, and while there are plenty of reasons for this – gear scaling, quest rewards, dynamic leveling – the Tokens are considered a massive reason.

So why is it an issue that Blizzard is adding Tokens to Classic? The first problem is the insistence from both the players and Blizzard that WoW: Classic should have virtually no changes and be as faithful to Vanilla as possible, which Tokens are not. Adding in Tokens is a massive change, and could easily destabilize and inflate the economy of the game.

Second, some players are annoyed that it’s only being added to the Chinese servers and not all around (though others are thankful for this). Blizzard’s reason here is that the game in China is incredibly different from in other regions. This is definitely true, as China has several items not available in other regions, such as XP potions.

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Regardless of what reasons Blizzard may have, it seems that the addition of Tokens is bound to come. Whatever their reasoning, the majority of the player base is just desperately hoping that the Tokens stay specific to China and never join the rest of the servers.