How does this huge sum come about? In WoW Classic, it is not legally possible to simply buy gold for real money. The WoW tokens, as you usually know them from WoW, do not exist in Classic.

However, gold is traded on the “black market” and is often bought and sold without permission. Depending on the server, the prices fluctuate – here we are talking about the US server Whitemane. There you would pay €9,570 for 600,000 gold.

If you farmed the gold and played 14 hours a day, it would take you about 155 days to have the gold, as a fan on reddit calculated. A huge amount, but what do you spend the gold on?

What kind of mount is that? With Burning Crusade Classic, the MMORPG WoW Classic is entering the next era. The Burning Crusade, the latest addon in WoW Classic, also added the Nether Storm instance of Outland.

In this instance, you can get the phoenix-like mount Al’ars Ashes. This is still one of the most sought-after items in World of Warcraft. It drops with a tiny 2% chance on the boss Kael’tha’s Sun Walker.

So for many players, the phoenix is kind of the holy grail of mounts. Even in normal World of Warcraft, only 31% of players have been able to get the bird in the last 14 years, and significantly less in WoW Classic (via wowhead.com).

Famous WoW streamer Asmongold farmed for the mount for 2 years and showed genuine joy when he finally got it. In this video you can see the mount in-game:

How did the player get the mount? The buyer of the mount participated in a so-called GDKP raid and offered the incredible sum of 600,000 gold on the winged mount, thus taking it into his possession.

So the other participants of the raid can look forward to a tidy sum of gold, so the raid was worthwhile for everyone.

GDKP – How does it work?

What is GDKP? In World of Warcraft, there are many ways to distribute loot in instances fairly or less fairly. The principle of DKP, or “Dragon Kill Points”, has become popular with some guilds because it requires little organization.

For each boss kill where teammates are present, they receive a certain amount of points (DKP). They can then bid the points on an item that drops in the raid. This is done either in group chat or via whisper messages to the raid leader. The one who makes the highest bid gets the item.

In GDKP it works the same way, except that bidding is done with gold, not “Dragon Kill Points”.

What’s in it for the team? The collected gold from the sold items will be divided among all teammates in the end, though it is common for raid leaders and tanks to bag a bit more gold. In some cases, there may even be a fee for the guild treasury.

So in the specific case of Al’ars Ashes, each teammate should have taken home about 25,000 gold, which is equivalent to a Euro value of €398.75 on the “black market”.

So it’s safe to say that everyone involved got something out of the much-anticipated drop, and even if they couldn’t grab the bird, they came out of the Fortress of Storms with a grin.

What do you guys think about this? Do you see a problem in the enormous sums involved? Or is it justified to spend so much gold on a single mount? Do you think the player has earned all the gold or rather bought it? Feel free to write us in the comments here at MeinMMO.

By the way, it’s not the first time that WoW Classic has had strange stories about rare mounts: WoW Classic starts a new event, but forgets one of the rarest mounts.