WoW Forever: Blizzard rules out GDKP, warns gold buyers

On 17 September Blizzard held a live Q&A on modern WoW and WoW Forever; the recording is on Blizzard's site. In the Forever part, Kaivax of the WoW community team put players' questions to the Forever developers Josh Greenfield, Nora Mills and Tim Jones. Kaivax said many players had asked whether GDKP will be allowed in Forever. In a GDKP raid, each item that drops is auctioned to the players for in-game gold, and the gold is shared out among the group at the end. Greenfield's short answer was no.

Greenfield said the main reason is not real-money trading but the social side of the game. The first of Blizzard's core principles for Forever, he said, is to nurture and protect social experiences, and in regions where GDKP has been popular for longer, it has tended to become so common that it can take over from the traditional guild. He also called it a big barrier for new players and for players with fewer resources: new players, he said, often have to buy gold to join such raids. He added that GDKP is an excellent way for bad actors to launder large sums of gold, and that it makes it harder for Blizzard to claw gold back when it takes action against the accounts of buyers, sellers or bots.

Greenfield said Blizzard will monitor the Forever economy very actively. To players who say they need GDKP to afford consumables for raiding, he pointed to Season of Discovery: it had no GDKP, and in his view its economy was excellent for a version of original WoW, partly because the team kept managing how resources came into and left the game, for example how easy it was to get Elemental Earth or Dreamfoil. The Tarnished Undermine Real system from Season of Discovery is coming to Forever too; he compared it to the Emblem of Justice currency from The Burning Crusade. In Season of Discovery it came with boxes of random resources, and when a resource became scarce, Blizzard could raise how often it dropped from them. He did not say whether Forever gets the same boxes.

The last part of his answer covered real-money trading in general. Blizzard is going to very aggressively punish gold buyers, Greenfield said. Being frank, he added, Blizzard has probably been too lenient on them, and some of its actions were a little easy to get around. He said he has a 22-year-old World of Warcraft account, that it is not worth losing any account permanently, and he strongly advised players not to buy gold. He did not say what the new penalties will be or when they start.

Other answers from the Q&A: every raid tier will have both a 10-player and a 20-player raid, Tim Jones said, and Forever will not start with flexible raid sizes. The first tier also has Onyxia's Lair for 40 players, though not every tier will have a 40-player raid; Blizzard's roadmap says new raids unlock on 9 December. Dungeons and raids have a single difficulty, with no heroic mode, and there is no cross-faction play. There is no rated PvP either. Instead, a new PvP track for earning honour, with its own rewards, resets every season or tier. Forever also uses the same addon system as the modern game, with the same combat limits as Midnight.