GDKP Is Banned in Forever

Source: live Q&A, September 17, 2026Our reading is labelled as oursRates from our daily market read

What was said

During the World of Warcraft live Q&A, Blizzard confirmed that GDKP raids will not be allowed in WoW Forever. For anyone who missed the format: loot that drops is auctioned to the raid for gold, and the pot is split between everyone at the end. It turned raiding into a market, and it turned gold into the thing you needed in order to compete.

Their stated reasoning had 3 parts. GDKP is bound up with real-money trading in players' minds. It grows until it displaces the guild as the organising unit of the game. And it prices out players without a balance, because the route to gear becomes money rather than showing up.

How the demand actually forms inside a run. On Era realms the link between a loot auction and gold buying is not an abstraction, it sits in the recruitment step. Pugs advertise a minimum balance before an invite is handed out, organisers post the spread of winning bids from previous weeks so applicants can work out what they need to turn up with, and the Discord used to assemble the raid often carries a channel where gold changes hands next to the one where the roster is built. Someone who wants a spot and does not have the balance is being told, in the same message that invites them, roughly how much they are short.

That is the loop Blizzard pointed at when it said GDKP is bound up with real-money trading in players' minds. The format does not have to encourage anything for the pressure to exist, because a bid you cannot make is a piece of loot you do not get, and the cut paid out at the end softens that for the farmers in the raid while sharpening it for everyone bidding against them. Removing the auction on the NA and EU realms removes that standing reason to carry a large balance into a raid night. It does not remove the ordinary sinks, which keep running whether or not anyone is bidding on loot.

Alongside that: they intend to watch the economy actively and to claw back laundered gold when they find it.

One qualifier that was missing from the Q&A itself: in an interview with 4Gamers, Clay Stone said the restriction covers the NA and EU realms only, following the same regional model used for Season of Discovery and the anniversary realms. That is the whole of what we have on scope. We have not seen a realm-by-realm list, a statement on whether other regions get the rule later, or any detail on how the 2 halves of the announcement — the GDKP rule and the harder line on gold buying — are split between regions.

Our reading: it narrows the conclusion rather than reversing it. If the rule stops at the NA and EU realms, then the demand GDKP generated does not vanish from the game, it vanishes from the 2 regions most of the English-language coverage is written about — which is also where most of our orders come from. For a buyer on an NA or EU realm the arithmetic above stands unchanged. For anyone elsewhere, the honest answer is that we do not know yet what applies, and we would rather say so than guess.

The most common objection in the threads following the Q&A is a consistency one, and it deserves to be written down rather than ignored: if real-money trading is already the thing being enforced against, and enforcement is going to be stricter than it was in Classic, what is the separate GDKP rule adding? The argument runs that a loot auction is a transaction in in-game currency between players who are already on the realm, and that the players who funded their bids by farming are being treated the same as the ones who did not. Blizzard's own answer, as given in the session, is that the 2 are bound together in practice and that GDKP displaces the guild even when nobody buys anything — which is a claim about structure rather than about payment. We do not think either side of that has been settled by the announcement, and we have no inside view of which argument carried the decision.

The regional split sharpens the same question. Most of the discussion about loot auctions over the years has pointed at realms outside NA and EU, and the Chinese realms in particular; if the rule follows the Season of Discovery model and stops at the NA and EU boundary, the format continues where a large part of the argument was aimed. We have not seen a statement covering the Chinese realms either way, no schedule for extending the rule, and nothing on whether the stricter line on gold buying travels with it or applies more broadly. Until one of those exists, anyone outside NA and EU is reading a rule that may not describe their realm, and we are not going to fill the gap with a guess.

The sharper version of the objection, as it is phrased in the threads. If the people moving real money could be identified from the records of what happened on the realm, you would act on those people and leave the raid format alone. Writing a rule against the format instead reads, to that side of the argument, as an admission that the underlying trade is hard to see once the gold has passed through 2 or 3 hands and come back out as a bid in a loot auction. The format is visible in a way the payment is not, so the format is what gets the rule. Nothing in the September 17 session addressed that directly, and we have no view at all into how detection actually works, so we are reporting the argument rather than endorsing it.

The answer that gets made back does not dispute the detection point, it says the format matters on its own terms. A loot auction changes what gold is for: farming stops being a way to cover riding training and consumables and becomes bidding capital, item values start tracking what raiders can spend rather than what the material costs, and recruitment drifts toward who can fund a bid instead of who turns up on the night. On that reading the rule is not standing in for an enforcement tool at all — it is aimed at the way the raid organises itself, which is the same ground Blizzard stood on in the session. Both arguments are internally consistent, and the announcement did not settle which one carried the decision. For a buyer, what remains is the ordinary list of sinks, including riding training and mount costs, with the auction removed from it on the NA and EU realms.

What guilds use instead. Where loot auctions are off the table, the common replacement is a priority system rather than a bidding one. Points are earned for attendance and for showing up prepared, and items are charged against a flat table that is published before the raid: a weapon costs more than a trinket, the table does not move with how badly someone wants the drop, and nobody can outspend the roster because the currency is not gold. The variations are mostly in how points decay and whether a miss is forgiven, and those are guild rules rather than anything the game enforces.

The side loot tends to be handled separately. BoE drops and recipes usually go to the guild bank, to be sold or crafted for the roster rather than handed to whoever rolled highest, which keeps the repair and consumable budget funded without asking members for gold. Legendaries and their components are commonly placed under a reserve, so they are assigned by the officers to an agreed holder instead of being competed for. Mounts and other cosmetic drops are the usual exception and get rolled, because no priority table makes them fairer and a roll costs nobody their points. None of this removes the ordinary reasons to hold a balance — the gear is simply no longer one of them.

Where the demand went instead. Guilds assembling rosters for 4 November are already naming their loot system in the recruitment post itself, and the line most of them use is Loot Council. That is the visible consequence of the rule: the question an applicant used to answer was how much gold they could bring to a raid night, and the question now is who decides where an item goes. With a council, that decision sits with the officers — attendance, how long someone has been in the guild, which character the item does the most work on — and none of those are things a balance can settle. A few postings name other systems instead, but the ones we have read lead with the council rather than treating it as a detail further down.

For anyone trying to work out what this does to gold, the useful part is what it removes rather than what it adds. A loot council does not create a reason to hold a large balance before a raid, because there is no bid to make and no pot to split at the end. What stays is the ordinary spending every character does regardless of how loot is handed out, and that is the list worth reasoning from now — not the one that assumed an auction at the end of the night.

What guilds are actually doing about it. The recruitment posts written since the announcement are not arguing about the rule, they are naming a replacement in the first line. The 3 systems showing up most often are Loot Council, where officers hand out items against attendance and performance notes; Soft Reserve, where every raider calls 1 item before the run and wins it on a roll if it drops; and DKP in its various forms, where points are earned by showing up and spent on loot. Guilds that ran auctions on Era are the ones being most explicit, because their applicants need to know the old balance requirement is gone and something else has replaced it.

The practical effect for a buyer is that the entry requirement has changed shape rather than disappeared. Under Soft Reserve and Loot Council nothing in your balance improves your odds on a drop, so the reason to carry a large sum into raid night is gone; under DKP the currency is attendance, which cannot be bought from anyone. What stays is everything outside the loot system — consumables for the week, repairs, enchanting materials, profession levelling — and those are the costs the guild expects you to cover yourself before an invite goes out. We have no way to say which of the 3 systems ends up dominant once raids are actually running, and we would rather wait and see than guess at it now.

What the raids are using instead. The formats that filled the gap at the start of previous Classic launches are the ones guilds already know. Loot council puts the decision with a small group of officers who weigh attendance, upgrade size and how long someone has waited; it is the slowest to explain to a new roster and the one that depends most on the council being trusted. MS/OS +1 runs on rolls instead: main spec rolls beat off spec rolls, and anyone who wins carries a +1 that pushes them behind the rest of the raid on the next comparable item. Pugs tend to prefer it because the rule fits in one line of the invite message and nobody has to argue about priority mid-raid. Some rosters add soft reserves on top, where each player names an item before the run and only competes against others who named the same one.

Distribution itself is usually handled by Gargul, which tracks rolls, soft reserves and the +1 counters, records who received what, and posts the result to raid chat so the log is visible to everyone in the group. It was written with loot auctions in mind as well, so guilds moving off that format are not changing addon, only changing which of its modes they run. None of this is a gold sink, which is the point for anyone reading this page for the economic side: under a council or a roll system the item moves without a balance changing hands, so the raid night stops being a reason to hold gold and the ordinary sinks are left to carry demand on their own.

Where players are drawing the line, in the absence of a written one. The question in the threads now is not whether loot auctions are gone, it is which of the surrounding habits go with them. The reading that has settled is that selling a hard reserve — gold paid before the raid for the right to lock an item to yourself — is the same arrangement with the auction moved into the recruitment step, and that it will be read as GDKP by another name. A soft reserve roll won on the night is read differently, even when the winner trades the item on for gold afterwards: the roster was not sorted by balance, and the payment happens after the loot has already been decided by a roll.

That split is worth knowing because it is what pug leaders are organising around when they write their adverts, but it should be labelled for what it is — a consensus players have reached among themselves in the threads. Blizzard said GDKP raids will not be allowed in the September 17 session and did not publish a definition that resolves hard reserve slots, side payments to an organiser, or the other cases at the edge. We have not seen that boundary written down officially anywhere, so treat the distinction above as a description of how raids are currently being advertised rather than as a quotation of any rule.

The demand did not go away, it changed what it is asking for. A large part of the discussion after the announcement is not a defence of loot auctions at all — it is a request for an official way to buy loot inside a run. The argument from that side is that people liked the pot, not the gold: a system where the raid bids on an item with a currency the game hands out, and the pot is divided at the end, keeps the part that made pugs worth joining and drops the part that made a balance a condition of the invite. What people are asking for is a sanctioned version of the same mechanic, which is a different thing from asking for the ban to be reversed.

The version of that idea which comes up most often is an emblem or token earned by raiding, non-tradable and tied to the account, spent only on loot in the run that produced it. If something like that were ever built, the effect on gold would be straightforward: the bidding demand that GDKP created would not come back under a new name, because an account-bound currency cannot be farmed by one character and spent by another, and it cannot be bought. Gold would keep the sinks it already has and lose the one reason to hold a balance far above them. We want to be clear about the status of this: Blizzard said nothing about a replacement system in the September 17 session, we have not seen any statement that one is being considered, and the emblem idea is a player proposal rather than an announced plan. We are describing what would follow if it happened, not telling you that it will.

The rule has already moved into guild charters. The most visible effect so far is not on any realm, because none of them are open yet — it is in recruitment posts. Guilds forming ahead of launch are writing their loot policy into the advert itself, and No GDKP now appears as a line in those posts next to loot council, soft reserve or straight rolls. A second line turns up almost as often: tanks and healers gear first, usually with a short justification about the raid clearing faster if the 2 roles that take damage and heal it are equipped before the damage dealers are. Neither of those is a Blizzard rule. They are guilds deciding in advance what replaces the auction, and publishing the decision so applicants can self-select before an invite is handed out.

What the rule does not remove is the wish to pay for a clear. A loot auction is one way to turn gold into progress; a paid carry is another, and it sits outside the format the rule names. Guild adverts that open with No GDKP still carry a second line further down offering runs for gold, and the 2 lines are not in conflict as written. We expect that demand to stay where it is on the NA and EU realms, because the thing driving it — a player with gold and limited evenings — was not addressed by the September 17 session at all.

The part Blizzard did speak to separately is the gold itself. Alongside the stricter line on buyers, the session said the economy would be watched and laundered gold reversed when it is found — and a reversal lands on whoever is holding the gold, which in a carry means the guild that was paid rather than the player who paid. That is the risk a run organiser takes on when the origin of the payment is unclear to them, and it is why some of the recruitment posts now say runs are arranged in-guild only. We have not seen a published standard for what counts as unclear, no description of how far back a reversal reaches, and nothing on how a guild is meant to tell one payment from another, so we are not going to invent the detail.

Paid dungeon runs are the other thing the threads keep returning to. The demand that sat behind loot auctions was never only about loot — a share of it was people paying to skip the part of the game they did not want to play, and that part of the demand has no rule written against it. Carry and levelling services are discussed openly in the same forum threads as the ban, with the same 2 forms of payment named: gold on the realm, or real money arranged outside it. Nothing in the September 17 session addressed boosting as a separate category, and we have not seen a statement on whether it is treated as its own problem or folded into the line on real-money trading.

We cannot tell you how large that market is, because nobody has published anything resembling a figure for it and we are not going to invent one. What we can say is that the demand it represents does not disappear when a loot format is removed — it moves to whatever is still available, and a service that is arranged in whispers between 2 players is harder to describe in a rule than a raid that advertises its own auction in a chat channel.

That matters for anyone working out what gold is actually for in December. Under a charter that distributes loot by role priority and attendance, the amount you hold does not change what you are handed on the night, so the sinks that remain are the ordinary ones — riding training, consumables, repairs, profession materials. We have no way to measure how many guilds are writing these rules, how long they survive contact with a real raid week, or whether the role priority holds once the first tier is cleared. What we can say is that the loot policy is being settled in the recruitment post now rather than argued about after the first drop.

What it does to demand — our reading

2 things happen at once, and they push the same way.

The biggest reason to hold gold disappears. In Classic, “how much gold do I need?” had a simple answer for anyone raiding seriously: enough to win the item you came for. That demand is now gone by decree. What is left is the ordinary list — riding training at 100 and 1,000 gold, consumables for the December raids, professions, repairs. Real demand, but a fraction of what an auction-based raid economy generated.

The personal risk goes up. A harder enforcement policy does not change whether gold is available; it changes what it costs you when it goes wrong. That is not a line from us, it is the plain reading of what they said.

Together, the honest forecast is a smaller and riskier gold market than Classic had — not the boom most sites covering this launch are implying. We would rather write that down now and be measured against it than discover it with you in December.

The loot auction is not the only market being pulled away from raiding. World buffs have gone the same way: players report that Warchief's Blessing and Rallying Cry do not apply inside instances, while both still function while levelling. We have not seen that written out in a patch note, so treat it as player testing rather than a confirmed rule — but it is consistent across the reports we have read, and it points at the same intention as the GDKP decision.

Our reading: in Classic, the buff layer had an economy bolted onto it — timing a raid around when a buff dropped, paying someone to hold a slot, trading favours for a spot in the queue. Remove the buffs from the instance and that whole side market has nothing to sell. For a buyer it means one less thing gold was quietly needed for, on top of the loot auction itself. For raiders it means the gap between a well-funded roster and an ordinary one narrows in December, which is presumably the point.

Where the demand goes instead. Removing the loot auction does not remove the players who were willing to pay for gear, it moves them to the next arrangement that is still allowed. The one being discussed most in the pre-launch threads is paid services: a tank or healer who joins a run for a fee and passes on everything that drops, a reserved item agreed before the first pull, a carry through content the buyer has already outgrown. None of that is a pot split at the end of the night, so none of it is a GDKP raid, and the gold still changes hands between 2 players on the same realm.

What guilds are putting in its place. The other half of the pre-launch discussion is not about paid services at all, it is about rulesets. The arrangement coming up most often in the threads where guilds pick a loot system is an open raid with a signup sheet, filled from the roster and from whoever applies, with items handed out on main-spec and off-spec rolls rather than sold. Gargul is the addon most of those posts name for running it — it tracks who rolled, what was awarded and what is still owed, which is the part that used to be handled by the auction log. We have not seen numbers on how many guilds end up using it, only that it is the default suggestion when someone asks what replaces selling slots.

Our reading: this is the quiet consequence of the decision, and it matters more to a buyer than the headline does. If loot is distributed by roll, gold stops being the thing that decides who gets an item and goes back to being the thing that pays for consumables, repairs, enchants and training. A larger balance still helps in December, but it helps around the raid rather than inside it. Anyone budgeting on the assumption that gold converts into gear the way it did in Classic should assume that conversion is gone on the NA and EU realms, and plan for the ordinary list instead.

The common forum reading is that paid carries are unlikely to be ruled out the way loot auctions were, because nothing in the announcement describes them, and that the market for them will still be a narrow one. The reasoning given is about the content rather than the rule: an endgame that asks less of a roster leaves fewer players who cannot clear it on their own, and a carry only sells while there is something the buyer genuinely cannot do. That is an argument made by players before launch, not a statement from Blizzard, and we have seen nothing official on paid services either way.

The separate worry raised in the same threads is PvP. If ranks arrive attached to a rating rather than to raw participation, the thing being sold stops being time and starts being a placement, and selling a rank is closer to the problem Blizzard described than selling a dungeon run is. We do not know how the PvP system will be structured in Forever, whether rating is part of it, or whether the GDKP rule has anything to say about it. Our reading: it is the one area where a second restriction would not surprise us, and we will write about it when there is something to write about rather than guess now.

The 2 arrangements that come up most often are worth separating, because they behave differently. A hard reserve is agreed before the raid forms: a named item is set aside for whoever is paying, and the rest of the loot is handled normally by whatever rules the group uses. The price is for one item, it is paid once, and the raid is otherwise an ordinary run. Paying for a role is the other shape — a tank or a healer is paid to show up because those slots fill slowest, and the fee buys attendance rather than a specific drop. In practice the same group may use both in the same night, which is why the pre-launch threads keep running them together.

Our reading: neither one rebuilds the demand the loot auction created. A pot split across 40 players recycled gold through every raid night and gave people without a balance a reason to want one; a reserve is a single payment between 2 players, and a role fee is small next to what a contested item used to sell for. So the demand does not disappear, it gets thinner and more occasional. We have not seen Blizzard address either arrangement directly, so we do not know how they are treated under the rule as written, and we are not going to put words in their mouth on it.

Players are asking for the rule to be extended. A recurring request in the same threads is that the advertising and selling of boosts be treated the way GDKP was treated — an explicit rule rather than a case-by-case matter — with the chat channels and the group listings named as the places it would have to be applied. The argument used is consistency: if a loot auction displaces the guild as the organising unit, a paid carry does the same thing with fewer participants, and the gold involved comes from the same pool. We have not seen Blizzard respond to that request, and the announcement we are writing about covers the raid format rather than services sold around it.

The same argument is the main one being made in the discussion of reduced dungeon experience while levelling. The reasoning runs that dungeon levelling and boosting are the same activity seen from 2 sides, that slowing it down penalises the group that queues normally more than the group that pays, and that the demand simply moves to whoever is still selling runs. We have no statement on whether the experience change was aimed at boosting at all, so that reading belongs to the players making it and not to us. Our reading: whatever the intention, it is a reminder that the appetite for paying gold to skip content did not leave with the loot auction, and that where the line sits for everything short of a GDKP raid has not been written down yet.

What players want put in its place. The other half of the discussion is not about workarounds but about replacements, and the same design keeps coming back in the threads: a points currency earned by showing up. You get points for attending a raid night, you spend them bidding on the items that drop, and the points you spend are redistributed to everyone else in the raid the way a pot used to be. Some versions add a vendor that takes the same points for repairs, reagents and consumables, so that a player who never wins an auction still gets something back for the night. The appeal is obvious: it keeps the auction as a way of settling who gets the item, without any of it being denominated in something you can buy from outside the game.

Our reading: these proposals are worth reading because of what they admit. A loot auction was doing 2 jobs at once — deciding who takes the item when 3 people want it, and compensating the other 19 for being there. Removing GDKP removes both, and loot council or a roll does not put the second one back. That is the part of the demand nobody has a replacement for yet, and it is also the part that kept gold flowing between raiders rather than out of them. We have seen nothing from Blizzard about a points system, an attendance currency or a raid vendor of this kind, so treat all of it as what players are asking for rather than anything that has been said about Forever. Until something like it exists, the gold a raider needs in December is the ordinary kind — repairs, consumables, reagents — and it is bought from the auction house like everyone else buys it.

Players have also been arguing for a separate /4 Trade (services) channel, so that recruitment and carry advertising sits apart from item listings rather than drowning them. We have not seen anything from Blizzard on whether such a channel will exist in Forever, and we are not going to assume it does. Our reading: service demand is thinner than auction demand was — a fee for one run is a smaller number than a winning bid on a weapon — but it is the obvious place for the leftover to settle, and it is worth watching in December rather than treating the ban as the end of the question.

Does that make gold cheaper? Probably not

It is tempting to finish the paragraph with “so prices fall”, and it would be wrong. Fewer buyers shrink the volume of this market, not necessarily the price of a coin in it.

The price per gold is anchored to what producing gold costs, not to how many people want it. Supply here is elastic: when demand drops, farmers farm less rather than sell cheaper, and the rate barely moves. That is the ordinary behaviour of any market where the seller can simply stop working for a week.

And the enforcement half pushes the other way entirely. Harder bans are a cost to the seller — lost accounts, slower delivery, more care per order — and costs end up in the price. On its own, a crackdown makes gold dearer, not cheaper.

So: fewer trades, a riskier trade, and a rate that moves for other reasons. What actually pushes the rate down is cheaper production, and that is the story on the supply side: free gathering from level 3, camping that removes the trips back to town, Legacy perks that add a fifth to a route's yield.

What raids are arguing about instead

Banning a payment system does not remove the problem it was solving: a raid drops 1 item and 5 people want it. With gold off the table the argument has moved to loot rules, and it is live on the official forum right now.

3 systems are being discussed, and each distributes something different. Master Loot hands the decision to one person, which is efficient and requires trust. DKP turns attendance into a currency of its own, which is the closest thing to GDKP that survives the ban, because it pays people for showing up without anybody paying gold. And there is a standing request for Personal Loot as an option, which removes the argument entirely by removing the choice.

Our reading: watch which one guilds settle on, because it decides whether raiding pays anything at all. Master Loot and Personal Loot pay you in items you might not get; DKP pays you in a claim on future items, which is a wage in everything but name. The demand that GDKP used to satisfy has not gone anywhere — it is looking for a legal shape.

2 later additions to that argument are worth noting. The first is a standing request to carve out an exception for PvP-ruleset realms — the case being made is that people who pick those realms accept a harsher set of rules on everything else, so they should be allowed to run loot auctions among themselves. We have not seen any response to that from Blizzard, and nothing in the September 17 session suggested a split by ruleset, so treat it as what players are asking for rather than anything that is going to happen.

The second is more concrete, because it is already being used in recruitment: guilds advertising a 3Roll system, run through an addon written for it, where an item is decided by rolls split into tiers — main spec, off spec, and everything after that — instead of by a bid. No gold changes hands at any point. Our reading: that is the most telling response so far. With the auction gone, the market did not invent a quieter currency, it went back to mechanics — and the effort that used to go into funding a bid now goes into writing the rules and the tooling that enforce them.

Below those 3 named systems there is a messier layer that pugs are already defaulting to. Free-for-all rolls on everything is the common one: every drop goes to a /roll, including off-spec and crafting materials, because it needs no record-keeping and no trust between 25 strangers. The complaint against it is the obvious one — a player who has attended every night rolls on equal terms with somebody who joined 10 minutes ago, and nothing carries over to the following week. The counter-argument is that it cannot be gamed by whoever holds the loot window.

The second pattern is reserving items instead of paying for them. A raid leader names 1 or 2 drops as spoken for before the run starts, and everyone else joins knowing what is off the table. It does the same job GDKP did — it tells you in advance what you are signing up for — without gold changing hands, which is why it is being floated as the practical replacement rather than as a loot rule proper. Alongside it sit the Personal Loot requests, which ask Blizzard to settle the question by code so no organiser has to. We have not seen any statement on whether Personal Loot is being considered for Forever, so treat it as a player request and nothing more.

Our reading: all 3 of these shift the cost of raiding from gold to time. Under a reserve system or a roll system, the way to get the item you want is to be in the right roster often enough, which is a price paid in evenings rather than in a balance. That is a real change for anyone who planned to fund a character instead of scheduling one.

The part nobody on the forum can draw cleanly is the border between DKP and the format that was banned. A DKP system where raiders bid points for a drop is structurally an auction — the highest bid wins, the losers keep their points for the next run — and the only difference from GDKP is that the currency is attendance rather than coins. Points cannot be bought, traded or carried to another guild, which is the usual argument for why they sit on the legal side of the line. The mechanic, though, is the same mechanic, and raid leaders who ran GDKP for years are the ones now writing the point rules.

There is a second place that argument is being settled, and it is not a forum thread. Players who say they are staying on Classic Era describe it, in their own words, as a market first and a game second: gold sold openly, boost runs advertised in chat, and GDKP as the default way a pick-up raid distributes loot. They are not complaining when they write that — for most of them it is the reason to stay. The format they want still exists there, with the currency and the buyers attached to it.

Our reading: that is where the demand GDKP generated goes when a fresh ruleset removes it. Forever starts without the auction raid and with a stated intention to watch the economy, so the players whose gameplay loop depends on buying progress have an obvious alternative and are already naming it. For us that means the 2 populations split by appetite rather than by server list: the realms that keep the auction keep the buyers, and Forever keeps the ones who wanted the version of the game where the item is won rather than paid for. It also means the comparisons people draw between Classic Era gold volumes and Forever gold volumes are comparing 2 different markets, not the same market at 2 dates.

It is worth stating the case the format's defenders make, because it names the demand that actually collapsed. GDKP did not mainly sell loot — it bought labour. A player who already has the drops they came for has no reason to sign up for the same raid a tenth time, and under any of the 3 loot rules above the run pays them nothing. Under GDKP it paid in gold, so geared players kept queueing, and pug raids stayed staffed with people who knew the fights. On that reading the thing the rule removes is not a way to buy gear but the only wage a finished character was being offered for carrying everyone else.

The same argument is behind a request now circulating on the forum for a separate group finder mode for paid runs, kept apart from the ordinary listings so that guilds and unpaid pugs are not competing with it for bodies. Nothing has been said by Blizzard about such a mode, and we would treat it as a player proposal rather than a plan. Our reading: whether or not it ever exists, the pressure it responds to is real, and it is the clearest description of what the ban takes out of a raid night — the incentive for people who are done to keep showing up.

The other argument running through the beta threads is about consistency. Players point out that wagering gold on a drop is now forbidden inside the game, while a competitive event with a real-money prize is being run around it. The complaint is not that one of those should be cancelled; it is that the stated reason for the GDKP rule — that paying for an outcome corrupts the raid — reads differently once a cash prize sits on top of the same raid content. We have not seen Blizzard respond to that comparison, and we are not going to invent a response for them.

Our reading: the argument matters here for one reason only, which is what it does to demand. A competitive event rewards preparation, and preparation in this game is consumables, enchants, respecs and repairs — all of which are bought with gold rather than won with it. So the same players making the consistency argument are also describing the one demand channel the GDKP rule leaves untouched: gold spent before the raid instead of during it. That is a smaller pile than an auction pot, it is spread across a whole roster rather than concentrated in a few bidders, and it refills every week. If the ban moves demand anywhere, it moves it there.

There is one argument from the people who defended GDKP that is worth writing down, because it is about gold rather than about loot. Under MS/OS or Soft Reserve, a raid night is a pure expense: flasks, potions, food, reagents and the repair bill all come out of the raider's own pocket, and nothing comes back except the item he may or may not win. GDKP returned a share of the pot to everyone in the room, so a raider who lost every roll still left with enough coin to cover the next week of consumables. Remove the pot and that subsidy goes with it. The spending stays exactly where it was.

Our reading: the argument is sound as far as it goes, and it points at a real effect on demand. Somebody has to fund a raid week, and with the auction gone there are 2 remaining routes — hours spent on gold from gathering professions outside raid nights, or a purchase. For a player with limited playtime the second looks like the cheaper of the 2, which is how a loot rule ends up driving demand it was never meant to touch. What we cannot tell you is the size of that effect: it depends on consumable prices at launch and on how strict guilds are about mandatory flasks, and neither is known yet.

In guild recruitment posts the two schemes doing most of the work are simpler than DKP, and neither of them involves a currency. Soft Reserve 2x lets every raider name 2 items before the run; if one of them drops, only the people who reserved it roll for it, and everything unreserved goes to an open roll. MS>OS +1 keeps the plain main-spec roll but tracks it: win an item for your main spec and you take a penalty on your next roll, so the same 2 or 3 players cannot clear a wing of loot in one night. Both are administered with a spreadsheet and a raid leader, which is the main reason they are spreading faster than point systems — a guild can run them on the first night without agreeing on anything in advance.

Our reading: the detail these posts leave out is roster size. Soft Reserve was written for raids where a named item has a realistic chance of dropping, and the odds of that are not the same in a small group as in a large one; the same is true of how long a +1 penalty actually costs you. We have seen the 2 formats advertised without any statement of which raid size they are meant for, and we have not seen a guild publish the maths behind their choice. Until the raids are open and people are posting loot logs rather than recruitment ads, treat the labels as a description of the rules, not of how well they distribute gear.

The second grey area is what a guild is allowed to hand back. Guilds have always sold the items nobody reserved, banked the proceeds and spent them on the roster: repair bills and raid reagents covered from the guild bank, flasks handed out before a pull, a share of the vendor and auction income paid to members who show up. None of that is an auction, and none of it was invented to replace one, but it does mean gold still moves between a raid and the people in it. Where that stops being a guild bank and starts being a pot is the question being asked repeatedly on the official forum, and the request attached to it is a plain one: say which of these is allowed before December, not after. Blizzard has not answered it, and we have seen nothing that reads as guidance either way.

The combination raid leaders keep returning to is Soft Reserve with a Loot Council. Each raider names 1 item before the run, reserved drops go to the people who called them, and everything else is handed out by a small council that weighs attendance, spec and what the roster needs next. It does the auction's job — deciding who leaves with the item — without any gold changing hands, which is why it survives the ban untouched.

The shorthand for all of this has already turned up in recruitment posts. Guilds advertising for Forever rosters put the loot system in the header line as SR MS+1 OS, which unpacks into 3 rules: 1 soft-reserved item per raider, main-spec rolls taken first, and a raider who has already won a main-spec drop that night rolling behind those who have not, with off-spec rolls last of all. Nothing in it is new — it is the pug wording carried over from Classic — but it is being written into adverts before the game is out, which says the replacement for the auction is settled in practice while the forum is still arguing about it.

For a raider reading those adverts, the useful part is that the loot line no longer tells you anything about what the night will cost. Under an auction the header told you to bring a balance; under reserve-and-roll it tells you the order people roll in and nothing else. What a raid night costs is set elsewhere and is the same under every one of these systems: flasks, enchants and repair bills, paid before the pull, with nothing paid back at the end.

The system named most often after that one is Suicide Kings, and it is the cheapest of the lot to run because it has no currency at all. The raid is put in an ordered list, whoever takes a drop goes to the bottom, and everyone under them moves up 1 place. Nothing is earned and nothing is spent, so there is no balance to bid, inflate or carry between guilds — a raider holds a position and that is the whole of it. Point systems sit next to it in the same threads: plain DKP, where attendance earns points and drops cost them, and the variants that weigh effort against items taken rather than counting nights. They differ in bookkeeping, not in principle. All of them answer the same question the auction used to answer, and all of them answer it without a coin moving between 2 players.

Two refinements keep turning up on top of those systems, and both are attempts to make the record behave the way a balance used to. The first is priority by contribution and withdrawal: a raider who deposits materials, reagents or gold into the guild bank moves up the order, and a raider who takes flasks and enchants out of it moves back down. It is bookkeeping rather than bidding, because the ledger stays inside the guild and cannot be sold, but it restores the thing GDKP did well — the person paying the most for the raid week gets first claim on what drops. The second is a published flat price table: a fixed point cost per slot or per tier, written down before the first run and the same for everyone, so nobody has to guess what an item will go for. A posted table removes the argument about who outbid whom, and it removes the incentive to hoard points, since a drop costs what the sheet says it costs and no more.

The common carve-out is what sits outside both. Legendaries and high-value BoE drops are pulled out of the general system and handled separately — assigned by officers, held for the roster, or sold by the guild with the proceeds going into the bank rather than to the raiders present. The reasoning given is that a single item worth more than a month of ordinary drops breaks any list or point table it is dropped into. The practical result is that gold from those sales stops at the guild bank, and it leaves again as consumables and repair costs for the roster. None of this is confirmed policy; it is what guilds are writing into their own rules, and the border between a bank run this way and a pot is exactly the question the forum is still asking.

That is the part worth holding on to when reading the loot argument. Under every rule now being discussed — council, reserve, list order, points — loot is distributed by a record the guild keeps, and the record is not money. A raider cannot buy into it, cannot sell out of it, and cannot bring it to a new roster. What that leaves is a raid night where gold only moves outward: raid consumables and repair costs are paid before the pull and nothing comes back at the end of it. So the practical answer to how much gold a raider needs no longer depends on which system the guild picked. It depends on the shopping list, and the shopping list is the same either way.

What it does not do is pay anyone. Under GDKP a night with no drops for you still returned a share of the pot; under Soft Reserve it returns a repair bill. And no personal loot has been confirmed for Forever, so there is no version of a raid where an item appears quietly in your bag and nobody argues about it — every drop stays a decision a person makes, in public, in front of the people who lose it. The gold that used to move inside the raid has moved outside it: consumables, enchants and the other confirmed gold sinks are what a raid night costs now, and none of them hand anything back at the end.

A third branch of the same thread drops loot rules entirely and asks for a token from every raid boss, handed to each raider and traded at a vendor for a fixed piece. The case for it is that it pays a wage the way GDKP did, without any gold moving: attendance turns into a count that rises on a bad night as well as a good one, and nobody has to argue about who deserves the drop. The case against it is that it makes raids feel like a currency grind and removes the moment the item drops, which is the part most people say they show up for. Nothing of the sort has been confirmed for Forever, and we have seen no sign Blizzard is considering it.

Underneath all 3 proposals sits one argument, and it is the honest version of what GDKP was doing. Geared players were being paid to run content they no longer needed. A raider with every drop from a tier still joined a pug because the pot paid out, and that is how strangers got raids at all. Take the payment away and the people who organise those runs have no reason left except goodwill, which is why the same posters predict pugs drying up first and the server thinning out a few weeks after a phase stops being current. Whether that happens is not something anyone can settle in advance — but it is the reason the loot argument is louder than it looks, and it is worth reading next to how gold enters the world at all, because a raid that pays nobody still costs everybody.

The retention half of that argument is worth separating from the loot half, because it is about people rather than rules. The claim is not that geared raiders quit when GDKP goes; it is that they stop doing the part of the week that was work. Carrying a pug through a tier you have already cleared paid a share of the pot whether or not anything useful dropped for you, and that payment is why a stranger's raid found a tank and 2 healers at all. Take it away and the same player still logs in for the guild night and nothing else. The roster survives; the public content around it is what thins.

If that is right, gold demand leaves with the pugs, not just with the auctions. Very little of the buying we see is someone hoarding coins. It is someone covering a raid week: flasks, enchants, repair bills, the reagent list that a guild bank does not fill. Those costs only exist while the content is being run, and pugs are where a large share of them is paid, because established raiders usually have gathering and crafting income covering theirs already. Fewer organised runs means fewer buyers rather than a cheaper coin. How large that effect is, we cannot tell you, and neither can the thread — it only becomes visible once a tier stops being current and someone has to decide whether to lead it again for nothing.

The other half of the same thread is about what is left for a player who still wants to pay for an item rather than wait for it. With an auction inside the raid off the table, the only route that survives is a private arrangement — terms agreed with the people who control the drop, outside the loot rules and outside anything the raid writes down. Posters describe it as a black market bid in everything but name. None of them are proposing it; the point being made is that it is what remains once the open version is removed.

The contradiction they keep returning to is the shape of the policy rather than its intent. A rule written to keep gold out of raiding removes the version that happened in front of 20 people, where the price was visible and the pot was split at the end, and leaves the version nobody can see from the outside. Our own reading is narrower: this does not add demand, it moves whatever is left of it somewhere unmeasurable. What stays countable is the ordinary raid week — flasks, enchants, repairs and every confirmed gold sink — and that is the only part of gold-for-gear demand anyone outside a guild chat will ever be able to check.

A separate thread keeps being offered as evidence that the ban is already working: auction house prices on the older TBC realms have been sliding, and posters read that slide as proof that removing bids from raids brings an economy back down. Those are 2 different causes wearing the same result. The TBC realms have been losing players to Forever for months, and a realm that loses raiders loses buyers and gatherers at the same time. Consumables, enchanting materials and BoE drops all get cheaper when the people who bid on them stop logging in, and none of that requires a loot rule to change.

The 2 causes can be told apart, at least in principle, by what moves. An outflow of population drags down the price of almost everything listed, including goods no raid ever needed, and it thins the supply side as well, so listings get shorter rather than just cheaper. A change on the bidding side would show up narrowly — raid consumables, gear that used to be worth reserving — while the rest of the board sits where it was. We have not seen anyone on the forum separate the 2, and we cannot do it for them: we track what sellers charge for gold, not auction listings on a different game's realms. Until someone does that work, the TBC slide says something about where the players went and nothing yet about what the ban does.

The loudest thread next to the loot argument is not about loot at all, it is about consistency. Posters line up 3 things and read them as a single policy: GDKP removed outright, the restrictions being discussed on what alt characters are allowed to do, and the recurring story about a streamer whose balance nobody can account for. The sentence that keeps being repeated is that real-money trading is tolerated and GDKP is not — the auction 20 people could watch is gone, while gold that never appears in a public trade is left to somebody else to explain.

We cannot check the streamer half of that. We list gold and we have no way of knowing where any individual balance came from, so we treat those posts as sentiment rather than evidence. What the sentiment does affect is behaviour: if players read the rule as applying to the version that happens in the open and not to the version that does not, they argue about the rule instead of following it, and the private arrangements described earlier in this thread look more normal to them than they otherwise would. The part we can still measure is the ordinary raid week and our daily read of seller rates; the rest of it is a forum mood, and we are labelling it as one.

The same posters turn that complaint into an argument for the format rather than against the enforcement. If buying is not actually stopped, they write, then GDKP was the one legal channel through which money spent by a large buyer reached ordinary raiders: the buyer bid, the pot was split, and everybody else in the room left with a share of it without ever spending anything outside the game. Remove the auction and the spending does not stop, it stops being shared — the gold sits in one balance and buys gear directly, and nobody in the raid takes a cut of it.

How much was moving that way is where the thread turns into opinion. The sums people quote for a share of a good night vary widely, they are given from memory rather than from logs, and we have no way to check any of them, so we are not repeating them as fact. The direction is the part that can be stated plainly: a pot split at the end of a raid was the one moment when gold moved from buyers to non-buyers, and none of the replacement loot systems does that job. After the ban, gold only leaves a raider's balance — consumables, enchants, repairs and the other confirmed gold sinks — which is why the argument is worth reading next to where gold enters the world at all.

On the forum the ban is now quoted as precedent rather than argued as a proposal. The threads asking for it to be reconsidered have collected thousands of replies, and none of them have produced anything that changes the rule. Posters bringing it up now do so to settle other arguments — what a guild bank may hand back, whether a point auction is still an auction — not to reopen the decision itself. That is why the loot discussion reads the way it does: nobody is designing a system that leaves room for a pot in case the policy softens later.

The part that matters to us is where the demand went, not whether it returns. A rule everyone treats as settled means the gold that used to be bid inside a raid is not sitting idle waiting for the format to come back. It is either being spent on the ordinary raid week — repair bills and raid consumables — or it is moving through the private arrangements described above, which nobody outside the deal can count. We can measure the first and not the second, and that is the honest limit of what we are able to say about demand after the ban.

Player discussion, not a Blizzard announcement. Nothing about loot rules in Forever has been changed or confirmed.

What this does not change

• Gold is still the only currency. No WoW Token in Forever and no paid boosts, so every coin still comes from a player.
• The sinks are still there. Riding, repairs, trainers and reagents take gold out of the world whether or not anyone is auctioning loot.
• Raiding still costs money. Consumables for 3 raids on December 9 do not buy themselves, and with no attunements more people reach them sooner.

Questions

Is GDKP really banned in WoW Forever?

Yes. Blizzard said it during the live Q&A on September 17, 2026: GDKP raids will not be allowed in Forever. Not discouraged, not limited — not allowed.

Why did Blizzard ban it?

3 reasons, in their words. It is bound up with real-money trading in players' minds. It grows until it displaces the guild as the way people organise. And it prices out anyone without a balance, because the route to good loot becomes money rather than turning up.

Does the ban make buying gold safer or riskier?

Riskier. In the same session Blizzard said it has been too lenient with gold buyers in the past, that it intends to watch the economy actively and claw back laundered gold, and that enforcement in Forever will be harder — permanent bans rather than the suspensions of previous years.

What replaces GDKP for getting gear?

The things it displaced: guild runs, loot council, plain rolls, and turning up often enough that people want you along. Slower, and free.