WoW Forever: gold sent to a streamer wiped on the beta

A streamer playing the WoW Forever beta was handed 380 gold by a character of level 1, and then another 175 by a second low-level character. He said on stream that he could not see how anyone could have come by that much honestly at this stage of the beta, and accepted both trades anyway. Blizzard removed the gold afterwards, including part of what he had earned himself, and the character was left holding 9 silver. His account was not suspended, which is what most of the argument since has been about: players have asked why an ordinary account would have been handled more harshly.

A second streamer ended up in it differently. He had told viewers on air to spend their own money on gold and send it to him. Blizzard acted on one of the accounts he was using on the beta, and he said afterwards that the punishment was fair and that he was sorry for promoting the buying of gold, while maintaining that he had never bought any himself.

Both cases widen the question past the people who sell gold and the people who buy it. They are about players who take gold from a stranger while having a fair idea of where it came from — and Blizzard has already said this month that it is acting on accounts behind this kind of trade, and that the game will soon warn you when you trade with someone you do not know.

The timing matters because of a tournament. The Forever Open is an open-registration duelling event for level 30 characters, running on the beta on 17 and 18 October, and its prize pool was doubled from 50,000 to 100,000 dollars after a creator outside the game put in the second half. Gold is worth having before an event like that: it pays for professions, consumables and equipment in the days of preparation. The tournament's own rules let the organisers take back prize money, disqualify a competitor and bar them from future events for cheating.

The accounts of what happened to the two streamers come from a single report, and Blizzard has published nothing about these particular accounts. 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.