European hits World of Warcraft gold limit

By Robert Purchese Published 18 January, 2008

Worth roughly USD 6450 in real life.

A mysterious gamer from Germany has hit the World of Warcraft gold limit.

The incredible figure is now known to stand at 217, 748 gold, 36 silver and 48 copper. According to programming boffins he is awfully lucky, too, because had Blizzard not included a cap or limit, then he could have ploughed over and dramatically reversed his fortune into negative numbers. Something to do with a database and multicoloured giraffes.

For those unfamiliar with World of Warcraft riches, consider that buying 1000 gold from a third-party source might possibly (covering bases) cost around USD 30. Then, simply pop the sums into a calculator and his mountain of gold is worth roughly USD 6450. Goodness.

Apparently this is not the first time the limit has been hit, either. According to MMO Champion a US character reached it a few months ago, verifying the numerical cap. Shots of the various bank balances can be found there too.

In both cases Game Masters (in-game helpers) were flummoxed and could only suggest spreading the wealth to the banks of other characters as a solution.

As to how the number got so high. Well, official World of Warcraft forum members point this character out as leader of the largest guild on the server and top ten in the world.

The benefits of being so powerful mean you can literally run others through difficult dungeons for a cost and sell all the benefits from your fast raiding to the highest bidders, apparently netting this bank character an absolute fortune.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds. @Clert on Twitter.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (29) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • lambtron #1 4 years ago

    This guy must have been the inspiration for the South Park episode.

  • TheWretched #2 4 years ago

    The one, which has no live?

  • optimusprym8 #3 4 years ago

    so worth about 5GBP then :p

  • pyroxian #4 4 years ago

    Not impossible - I managed to get the money for my epic flyer in a week by playing the AH :)

  • Inspirius #5 4 years ago

    For those who might be interested, the reason for this limit is that Blizzard decided to use a signed 32bit number for your bank balance.

  • Benno #6 4 years ago

    as i posted in the world of warcraft thread, this study http://www.gamerprice.com/wow-gold-study... show that third party gold services offer the gold to european players at 12% of the price of those in the USA

    So in theory, if this guy was a US player his gold stash would be worth about USD 51,600 or about £25,000

  • redneon Verified Programmer, SUMO Digital #7 4 years ago

    @Inspirius: It certainly looks like they did. Considering the game doesn't support an overdraft it makes me wonder why they didn't use unsigned and effectively double the available balance.

  • rhinoxious #8 4 years ago

    @Benno

    Good link, very interesting stuff.

    Is it possible that american players are just a bunch of cheating scumbage who buy farmed gold, thus increasing its value through demand, and paying 'professional' prices to the farmers.

    While european players rarely buy gold, and so there's a huge surplus of the stuff generated from normal player activities.

  • asharkman #9 4 years ago

    That episode of south park was so funny. Cartman takin a shiv at his computer desk and telling his mam to wipe his ass made it.

  • RM2KMaster #10 4 years ago

    Wow.
    Either a super-geek, or a rich kid.

  • chrisjm #11 4 years ago

    so did he pay this or earn it?
    can he cash it out as hard worthless US$?

  • kangarootoo #12 4 years ago

    "According to programming boffins he is awfully lucky, too, because had Blizzard not included a cap or limit, then he could have ploughed over and dramatically reversed his fortune into negative numbers"

    What, lucky that Blizzard wrote robust code? I suppose you might call that luck.

  • kangarootoo #13 4 years ago

    I don't think Blizzard exchange game money for real. I guess he could flog it on ebay or something.

  • NewYork #14 4 years ago

    Over what time period?

    Would love to work it out as how much he made per hour, to get things in perspective.

  • Benno #15 4 years ago

    Most high end raiding guilds admit they purchase gold from third party gold farmers

    If your from the EU it would be stupid not to, £14 for 1000g.

    Even working at my supplimentry Uni weekend job, thats like 2 hours work.

    Getting 1000g legit in game would involve, well, many hours of farming or AH bottom feeding

    I buy mine from itemrate.com and had already noticed some time ago the massive difference between US and EU gold prices

    It must be due to excess demand, thats the US all over isn't it. They want it? They go out and get it.

    Thats just got me thinking, with a simple realmlist fix you can log onto US servers with your EU client. In theory, then, you could exploit this massive market difference by leaking some of your cheap money into the US economies!

    /plans US wow domination

  • élbéróss #16 4 years ago

    If its worth so much than why doesnt Blizzard allow him to use it to pay the monthly fee?..

  • Benno #17 4 years ago

    Hmmm it seems that you can log onto the US servers with a EU client. BUT you cant play on the US servers with an EU account

    So it turns out, you cant achieve market leakage

    /back to drawing board

  • SUPANORM #18 4 years ago

    Doesn't matter how much gold hes got its still never going to be enough to buy a life.

  • Der_tolle_Emil #19 4 years ago

    What, no 64bit server? And why a signed datatype? It's not like you can spend more money than you have and go into the red.

  • max #20 4 years ago

    You got the amount wrong; it should be 214, 748 gold, 36 silver and 48 copper, or 2^31 copper.

    Max

  • BootLace #21 4 years ago

    "If your from the EU it would be stupid not to, £14 for 1000g."

    How stupid of me to abide by the rules of the game...

  • Benno #22 4 years ago

    Yeah, your stupid.

  • Kami #23 4 years ago

    Sadly, as much as Blizzard may not want to honk this particular horn, gold buying in WoW is easily done and, contrary to popular belief, very hard to detect in a game whose economy thrives on Player on Player trade, meaning for every one account suspended there are about 10 getting away with it. Repeat ad nauseum. And with spammers using an infinite number of trial accounts and at times false information, it's just generally a pain in the ass to combat.

    I remember grinding my gold only to see asshats who only just hit 70 get their epic flyers first. I could have bought gold too. I got shitloads of rep and exalted with a half dozen decent factions in the meantime, and maxed all the tradeskills I had, and yes at the end of the day an epic flapper woulda made my existance a hell of a lot easier in the game (and probably got that gold back in less time too!). However, making gold in WoW had to be the easiest part of the whole damn thing!

    WoW economies are really much too easy to pin down, and it doesn't take much effort. Your server lacking serious food? Go fishing and cooking - boring but it'll sell. No armor kits? Leatherwork and Skin and fill a gap. Lack of ore? Mining for you. It's really not rocket science. Oh boo-hoo, you have to go out in the game for an hour or so to find stuff to sell. Seriously, the people who don't have money are the ones who can't be arsed to go out and make it. Especially lvl 70's, I mean, there're more daily quests these days I note than when I left! How can you NOT make gold? Even if you only do Skyguard ones you'd still end up 60 gold a day richer!

    So, nutshell - making gold in WoW is easy. You just have to find a place in the market you are comfortable with and stick to it. Nothing else. You'll get wise in the end to what is missing on the AH. And no "buy low sell high" shit. Serioussly, new players actually do genuinely exist out there and fucking them over is not the right thing to do even if the twink market is big. YES, I LOOK AT YOU ASSHATS CHARGING 100 GOLD FOR LVL 15-20 OF THE BEAR/BANDIT GREENS! Tossers.

    Some free advice for WoW players. It's really easy to do. Just don't piss people off in the process and it'll zip by...

  • kangarootoo #24 4 years ago

    "Oh boo-hoo, you have to go out in the game for an hour or so to find stuff to sell. Seriously, the people who don't have money are the ones who can't be arsed to go out and make it. Especially lvl 70's"

    I've never played WoW, so my point of reference may be way off. But to me, having to go and "find stuff to sell" as you describe it doesn't sound that much like fun (you seem to suggest as much yourself). You say that some players can't be arsed to go out and find commodities, like that is some kind of insult. As I see it, they simply can't be arsed because its not a very fun or interesting pursuit.

    In real life you take the rough with the smooth, you have to go out and work so that you have money to spend on fun stuff (and generally staying alive). Games shouldn't have be that way though. I expect a game to be fun all the time, because the artificial world of the game allows that to be the case. Even a game that requires me to work hard to progress should still make that work fun, surely? Otherwise what is the point?

    I accept the whole "you get out what you put in" aspect of real life and that in some cases what you put in isn't always entertaining, but in a game... why can't it just be fun all the time and then players don't need to decide whether they "can be arsed" or not?

  • Wyrm #25 4 years ago

    Easy or not, seen guildmates accounts getting banned for gold buying, no way would I want to risk that with my character.

  • Kami #26 4 years ago

    Actually Kanga, it CAN be a lot of fun. When I left anyway, there were dailies that involved playing games of Simon, bombing runs and dragon racing. I appreciate grinding isn't the most fun thing in the known universe (It can depend where you do it) but if you think WoW is the only game to suffer from this then you need to play more RPG's in general, because WoW is timid and basic in comparison.

    People want to have all the gold they want and they want it yesterday. Grinding gold is easy and depending the route you take, isn't hard and can be quite good fun. WoW has done a more than decent job of catering to differing play styles.

    But if grinding anything scares people and makes them worry they're being suckered in, they might want to stay away from RPG's in general because there's less and simpler grinding in WoW than there is in FFXII...

  • THEGREATMADMAN #27 4 years ago

    Thats sad, he's good i'll give him that, but its still sad

  • deelta #28 4 years ago

    "We cant trust the Sword of a Thousand Truths to a noob!!!!"

  • Fwing #29 4 years ago

    "Easy or not, seen guildmates accounts getting banned for gold buying, no way would I want to risk that with my character.
    "

    I've never heard of anyone getting banned for buying. Selling, however, is an automatic ban 100% of the time.
    I heard the deal the gold-sellers struck with Blizzard insisted on sellers being turned in.