WoW Forever: a streamer banned live over 7 gold

A Spanish streamer was kicked out of the WoW Forever beta during a night stream on 13 October, with the ban notice appearing on screen in front of his viewers. What triggered it was 7 gold handed to him by other players during play, part of which came from gold that had been bought for real money.

The account came back within hours. He said so himself later the same night on another streamer's broadcast: he had been unbanned. Blizzard has said nothing in public about this case, and nothing about why the ban was lifted.

It is, however, the exact case Blizzard described when it announced a warning for the trade window: be sure you know where your gold is coming from, because accepting it from an unknown source can cost you the account. The warning was aimed at buyers, and here it caught somebody on the receiving end of a gift.

That is what the argument around it has been about. Viewers pointed out that a stranger can buy gold, hand it to a streamer on camera and get the streamer banned for it, and that a system which cannot tell a gift from a purchase is a system that can be aimed at people. Others had less sympathy, on the grounds that the rule is the rule whoever is streaming. Blizzard has closed more than 2100 accounts for buying on the beta, so the enforcement is not new.

The timing was the sharp part. He is preparing for a duelling tournament on 17 October with 100000 dollars in prizes, and a ban that had held would have taken him out of it. All of this comes from a single report and from what was said on stream, so treat the detail of the ban itself as one account rather than a confirmed sequence.