WoW: Forever could finally fix Blizzard's 20-year gold-buying problem

For years, Blizzard's fight against gold buying in World of Warcraft has focused on bots, sellers and removing illicit gold. The problem keeps coming back because there is always someone willing to pay for a shortcut, while buyer punishments have rarely been severe enough to stop them.

But WoW streamer Payo gave Blizzard a very public test during the World of Warcraft: Forever beta. He openly encouraged viewers to buy gold for him, and Blizzard reportedly responded by banning one of his accounts. Payo later apologized and denied buying the gold himself.

His case shows why Blizzard needs to go after demand as well as supply. The ban is a promising start, but Payo's quick return on another account also shows why those consequences need to be harder to shrug off.

Payo denied buying gold himself, but he acknowledged asking viewers to buy it for him. He later apologized for promoting the purchase, accepted the punishment and said he would stop encouraging people to do it again.

Someone in his position never has to deal with a gold seller directly. A viewer can make the purchase, send the gold across as a gift and leave the recipient completely outside the payment itself. The seller still gets a customer, while the person who wanted the gold receives exactly what they asked for.

Punishing only the person who paid would leave an obvious workaround. A streamer, guild leader or friend could simply ask somebody else to handle the purchase and keep the gold once it arrives.

Payo was also preparing for a $100,000 dueling tournament during the beta. Extra gold could help with equipment and preparation, which puts purchased currency in a very different category from viewers farming materials or donating gold they earned themselves.

Blizzard cannot stop popular streamers from receiving help from their audiences. It can draw the line when that help involves paying a third-party seller. Banning Payo suggests asking somebody else to buy illicit gold can carry consequences for the person who ultimately benefits from it too.

Ziqo's case sits in a much greyer area. He received large amounts of gold from strangers and later had gold removed from his account, but he denied wrongdoing and there was no reported suspension or ban.

Unlike Payo, there was no public request telling viewers to go out and buy gold for him. Simply receiving a large transfer is not enough on its own to show where the money came from or what the recipient knew about it.

Blizzard's September 28 policy puts some responsibility on the person receiving the gold when they knew, or reasonably should have known, that it came from an illegitimate source. That gives the company room to act against obvious attempts to route purchased gold through another player without treating every unusual trade as proof of RMT.

WoW's economy depends on players trading with each other. You can buy crafted gear, pay for services and send gold between friends or guildmates all the time. Nobody should need to investigate the history of every coin before accepting a normal trade.

Kaivax said on October 1 that Blizzard was already acting against botters, buyers and people knowingly receiving illicit gold. A planned warning for trades with strangers should make the risk clearer, but the harder job will be separating suspicious transfers from the thousands of legitimate ones happening every day.

Josh Greenfield admitted during September's developer Q&A that Blizzard had probably been too lenient with gold buyers. Previous penalties were sometimes so easy to work around that players actively chose to take the hit and carry on.

Gold sellers operate with banned accounts in mind. Bots disappear, farming accounts get closed and replacements take their place as long as enough customers keep paying. A regular WoW player has far more invested in a single account.

Characters can carry years of playtime, raid gear, mounts, achievements, professions and everything else collected along the way. Losing access to all of it over a gold purchase is far harder to shrug off than having part of your balance wiped or spending a few days unable to log in.

Blizzard also has to look beyond whatever gold is still sitting in the player's bags when the account gets flagged. Someone may have already spent most of it on gear, enchants, consumables or materials. Removing the remaining currency does little if the expensive part of the purchase has already done its job.

Payo's return on another account exposes another weakness. Losing the first account still cost him something, but a streamer with a large audience can rebuild faster than most players, especially when viewers are willing to help with gold, gear or levelling.

For repeat offenders, each return therefore needs to carry a heavier cost. Otherwise a ban risks becoming another setback to work around instead of a reason to stop buying gold in the first place.

World of Warcraft: Forever will launch without a WoW Token. In versions of WoW that support it, players can spend real money on a Token and sell it for gold through an official system. Associate production director Clay Stone has said Blizzard has no plans to add one to Forever.

GDKP raids are gone as well. Those runs let players bid gold on raid drops before the pot is split between the group, so anyone chasing the best items can burn through huge amounts of gold very quickly. They have also been one of the easiest places for purchased gold to enter the wider economy, something Josh Greenfield has pointed to himself.

Blizzard already banned GDKP in Season of Discovery in 2024, so Forever is building on an existing experiment rather than trying something completely new.

Removing both systems changes where the biggest piles of gold are useful. There is no official cash-to-gold route, and raid loot can no longer be bought through GDKP.

Players will still spend plenty elsewhere. Crafted gear, enchants, consumables, materials and other expensive purchases can drain a wallet quickly, especially for anyone trying to keep several characters ready for endgame content.

Someone who would rather spend money than farm can still find a third-party seller. Forever simply gives those players fewer reasons to need enormous amounts of gold at once, while Blizzard's tougher penalties are supposed to make the remaining shortcut much riskier.

Payo made Blizzard's job unusually easy by talking about gold buying in front of an audience. Most buyers will not be nearly as visible.

They will pay through a third-party site, receive the gold quietly and hope the transfer blends into the thousands of normal trades happening every day. Sellers can also move gold through multiple characters or accounts before it reaches the buyer.

Blizzard can threaten permanent bans all it wants, but that threat means little if buyers expect their gold to arrive unnoticed. The company has to be able to trace suspicious transfers back to the account that paid for them, even when sellers move the gold through several characters first.

Payo was an easy case because he talked about it publicly. An ordinary player buying gold through a third-party site will not give Blizzard that advantage. If those private purchases start ending in wiped gold, suspensions and closed accounts, buying gold becomes a much harder risk to justify.