Limited Indulgences for Off-realm Alts — With Caveats

For a fee, Blizzard will transfer your character to another realm.  This includes its identity, its gear and other items, and its gold.

Two interesting things resulted from this; addons which had been around and working most of the time for years abruptly broke [and remain significantly broken] and a new, inherently limited way to move gold from one realm to another appeared.   [In effect, at the expense of a new technological worm to deal with you get a new economic wormhole to use.]

You are limited in how much you can transfer a given character to a different realm by a limit imposed on how often a character can be transferred.  Essentially, there is a "cool down" on this action imposed by the service itself, which is a for-pay service.

Going back for an even longer time, you could volunteer to transfer a character of yours, and its Azerothian belongings, to another realm.  This service was and still is actually free.  It was a limited, one-way trip with a limited choice of destinations for a limited number of characters; specifically, those on overcrowded realms that were keen to the idea of moving to what are underpopulated realms.  Blizzard traditionally offered this service in realms a few brief periods a year; definitely not all the time.

With Battle Pets, Blizzard introduced a nice new feature for doing pet battles.  As a reasonable convenience they allow/make all characters in an account share the same Battle Pets.

Now, because duplicates exist by dint of substantial players efforts and expenses on their multiple characters prior to this "sharing" feature — and perhaps other reasons as well — Blizzard made most vendor bought and quest reward Battle Pets sellable.  One can use the Trade window, Mail window, or Auction window to give/sell/exchange pets in game.

At least in theory, you can.  In practice, huge numbers of players use addons.  Addons were written with a reasonable assumption that the way items were represented in the game API (application programming interface) would not change greatly.  There was one consistent way that all items were represented so this seemed like a natural assumption.

But the assumption stopped holding as true a couple of months ago when Battle Pets came out.

Battle Pets that are ejected from the Pet Journal, a new feature of the game, always come out as an identical-looking item; one named a "Pet Cage".  There is just one item type ID for it.  So in terms of the existent APIs, in theory, they could continue working even with the new pets.

In practice, they seem to have problems and throw exceptions during bulk processing (e.g. auction house "scans") and during simple UI event processing such has handling "mouse over" events.

That is not to say that some work has not been done all over a bunch of addons to handle this.  However, a surprising number of addons still are fundamentally broken in their primary purpose where ever they are forced to look at Battle Pet "Pet Cage" items.

What they need to do is look beyond the name of the item and even its over type ID and check out the extra details hidden in the item hyperlink that has a new format peculiar to Pet Cages.

Anyway, despite this hiccup in the extremely relevant domain of WoW addons becoming somewhat dysfunctional when Battle Pet items are involved in activities — particularly Auction House enhancement addons, you can now sell your pets across realms.  You can, that is, with one constraint.

Someone has to be willing to buy them.  You also have to be willing to sell the pet for a price that people are willing to pay in that faction on that realm.

If you or they are not, and you retain more of that particular type of pet in your Pet Journal, then you are pretty much stuck with that Pet Cage as an item which needs to sit in a bank or bag slot until a mutually-agreeable price can be hit upon "someday".

There just is not a lot of such storage space available in WoW except by creating additional characters to use as "banker" alts.  The problem there is that you need to earn or stumble upon the [possibly gold-fueled] cooperation of other players to found a guild with that character, or do without a guild bank's worth of slots at its disposal.

So the bright news for longtime players of WoW is that you now have this third way to transfer gold from one realm to another.  Taking a step back to regard this new feature objectively, one finds it still has limitations

What is my advice to players who have been playing WoW for a really long time, have a bevy of redundant Battle Pets which they would like to replace with a greater number of unique Battle Pets. and have alts on other realms which are in need of gold?

Study how markets work in the real world in terms of the well known law of "supply & demand"; something you probably already know about.  But more importantly, go read up on and think about "arbitrage".  It is a way of buying low and selling high, typically across geographic domains [in this case realms] as a way of taking advantage of different market prices on specific items or most items in general.

Ultimately, it would be nice if WoW addons made it possible to quickly look at lists of your WoW Battle Pets and find which pets you have duplicates of, particularly in most cases Level 1 ones, and see what the going successful auction sale prices are on other realms for that specific Battle Pet type.

In the meantime, however, it would just be really nice if all the Auction House addons simply got fully working with Battle Pets instead of generating errors when operating on them.

Once that happens, I see great opportunities despite some inherent and overall benign limitations on a new way to flow your own gold from one realm to another!

So, despite the devils in the details at the moment, there is an exciting new way to transfer some of your gold from one realm to another.