As hype surrounding the WoW: Forever Beta continues to grow, Blizzard reiterated their stance on real-money transactions (RMT) in a recent Blue Post. Botting and RMT have been a consistent issue in every version of World of Warcraft, and Blizzard appears to be taking aggressive action against these practices in Forever.
As players on the beta prepare for the upcoming $100,000 Dueling Tournament, some have been suspected of purchasing gold to help pay for gear and profession reagents. One content creator, Ziqo, was recently suspected of receiving RMT gold when he was traded over 500g on stream.
While there is no way to confirm whether this gold was earned legitimately or not, it is highly suspicious that anyone would have this amount of gold to trade away on a beta version of the game that has only been available for less than two weeks. As part of Blizzardβs recent post on the subject, they state that they will remove gold from the suspected recipient and possibly take further action against their account.
The $50k Duel Tournament
Itβs important to know that while we have actioned RMT sellerβs accounts as quickly as possible, we will increasingly take action against buyersβ accounts.
That means that we will remove the illicit gold from the recipient, and/or take further actions, which can include closing accounts.
Again, there is no way to know for certain whether the gold that was received by Ziqo was purchased through RMT, but as a precaution, Blizzard did take action against his account, removing all of the gold that was traded to his character.
Itβs possible that, while the gold given to Ziqo was not legitimately earned, he may not have been involved in the actual purchasing process. For example, if a viewer purchased the gold and gave it to Ziqo as a donation, Ziqo would be free from consequences taken against his account because he did not actually purchase the gold himself. Regardless of this personal involvement in the RMT process, players are calling for more action to be taken against his account for accepting this gold to begin with.
