WoW Forever: the GDKP ban covers Europe, not everywhere

The ban on GDKP runs in WoW Forever is not worldwide. In an interview given to a site in Taiwan, Clay Stone, associate production director on the game, said the ban applies to North America and Europe and will not affect other regions. That matches how the same rule was drawn in Season of Discovery and on the Anniversary realms, where it also stopped at those 2 regions.

The reasoning has not changed since Blizzard first ruled the format out. A GDKP raid auctions its own drops and splits the takings, so a player without a deep purse is priced out of the loot while sitting in the same raid; Blizzard has said it pushes people towards buying gold and gives anyone laundering it a clean place to spend. For a European reader the practical part is simple: the rule covers you.

Stone also answered on the economy, and his answers point the other way from the usual beta grumbling. Buying from the auction house, he said, is a core part of the game. Players on the beta do not yet have the efficient ways of earning that the original Classic eventually produced, and he said they will be earning significantly more than players did back then. He gave one concrete example of what the team has learned about managing an economy: merchants will sell Black Lotus, with the price capped at 50 gold.

All of this comes from one write-up of an interview published in another language, and Blizzard has not put the same statements out in English or in its own notes. The beta runs until 21 October, and WoW Forever opens at 23:00 UK time on 4 November, which is midnight on 5 November in Central Europe.