As GamesRadar discovered, the impact of WoW tokens (a way for players to buy game time and also sell it for gold in the auction house) has also reached Wrath of the Lich King: on the Classic server, one rare item has sold for over 3 million gold at the GDKP auction.

GDKP is an auction within a raid. Players bid on boss drops for gold, but once the bidding is over, the profits are split evenly within the raid. Deep pockets? You can get rare. If you're a big spender, skip the bidding and get rich quick. Everyone wins. Well, if we have a healthy economy.

In a reaction clip from Twitch streamer Guzu to streamer Prefoxfox, a ring called Band of Callous Aggression sold for 3 million gold. Incidentally, this is 15 times the amount a player can actually carry; Cold Weather Flying, a gold-saving spell when Wrath of the Lich King was first released, went for $1,000. Now it is just pennies for the richest man in Azeroth.

To earn 3 million, you need to farm unimaginable hours or have a galactic brain about the virtual economy. Or you could put up $13,000 (about £10,000) in WoW tokens. Either someone has figured out how to clone themselves, or we have some capitalist wunderkind, or some very rich gamer. My money is on the latter.

WoW tokens are intended to be a safe alternative to the swamps of gold selling sites, curbing the black market economy by providing an official means of converting cash into pixels. While this certainly has the advantage of significantly reducing the bargaining power of these sites, it is not necessarily good for inflation. These sites have been in the main game for some time, but their inclusion in the classic servers in May was a bitter pill to swallow for many.

Now we are seeing economic headwinds from this arms race between gold farmers and Blizzard. It's one thing to be rich sitting on a whale-sized hoard of gold, but consider the fact that 24 other players just completed a single raid that made them about 120,000 gold richer. That is a big rock dropped into a very small pond, the ripples of which quickly turn into tidal waves.

Gold farming operations are certainly more advanced than they used to be. And yet, WoW tokens have also tainted the experience of nostalgia-chasing gamers. This inflation is a painful reminder that players can never go back to the good old days, and World of Warcraft Classic is designed to provide that feeling.