World of Warcraft player accidentally sells extremely rare pet for 1/10th of its value: 'That's like my entire game savings over the last 17 years, gone'

A World of Warcraft player is feeling the pain, and considering giving up the game entirely, after accidentally selling a very rare, very expensive WoW trading card game pet for just one-tenth of its actual value.

The subject of the Reddit thread, posted by The_Tiddy_Fiend, says it all: «Sold my Ethereal Trader for 174k instead of 1.7M. That's like my entire game savings over the last 17 years, gone.»

According to Tiddy, they relied on a feature in the World of Warcraft auction house that automatically sets the price of an item listed for sale to match the prices of other listings for the same item—essentially a failsafe to ensure sloppy typists don't mistakenly undercut themselves. 

But in this case, instead of pegging the Ethereal Soul Trader at the 1.7 million gold price that other such pets were going for, it was posted for just 174,000 gold—and someone bought it immediately.

Blizzard news site Icy Veins says there are a few potential explanations for the mishap. It's possible Tiddy missed some lowball listings on the WoW auction house that submarined his own offering, and there's always a chance the auction house bugged out momentarily and moved the decimal a couple points in the wrong direction. It also could have been a scam: Redditor Fvzzyyy said unscrupulous players will sometimes list an item at a very low price but then quickly cancel their auction, in hopes of luring someone else to list their own similar item at the reduced price.

But that seems unlikely: Others in the thread point out that listing a valuable item that cheaply, even very briefly, risks an outcome the same as the one suffered by Tiddy_Fiend. And Tiddy insists there were no other auctions listing the Ethereal Soul Trader at lowball prices: «All were 1.7M. I'm literally saying the feature meant to prevent this didn't work and I lost all my gold as a result.»

The Ethereal Soul Trader is so expensive because it's so rare. As noted by Warcraftpets.com, it was available as an «extremely rare»