What the Licence Says About RMT in Forever
Most coverage of real-money trading in Forever argues about prices. The document underneath it argues about property. This is what the agreement actually says, which measures Blizzard has described, and where the player on the receiving end of the trade sits in all of it.
What the agreement actually covers
An account is created under a licence rather than bought outright. What the player is granted is the right to use the game and the account attached to it; the characters, the items in their bags and the coins in their purse remain Blizzard's property. Every clause about real-money trading follows from that one line. If the gold in a bag is not owned by the person carrying it, then selling it for money is selling something that belongs to somebody else, and that is the ground the prohibition stands on rather than any argument about fairness or market damage.
The wording runs in both directions. Selling in-game property for real currency is named, and so is acquiring it that way, which is the half most summaries drop because the attention usually sits on the seller. Nothing in the text distinguishes a professional operation from a player clearing out a bank, and nothing in it turns on how much changed hands. It is a prohibition on the kind of transaction, not a scale that starts at some quantity.
Forever adds statements of its own on top of that global document rather than replacing it, and those are shorter and more recent. We keep the exact phrasing apart from our reading of it in Blizzard's stated RMT policy, because the summaries circulating on forums tend to be longer and firmer than the original sentences they came from.
The measures that have been described
Three things were said on record in the September 17 Q&A, and they are worth separating from the licence text because they describe intent rather than rules. GDKP is not allowed in Forever. The economy is to be watched, with the stated aim of reclaiming laundered gold. And the stance on people buying gold is described as harder than it has been in previous years. None of the three came with a method, a threshold or a published measurement.
The licence side names the measures themselves in general terms: an account can be suspended or closed, and in-game property can be removed. Those are the categories, and the detail that would make them predictable is absent. Nobody has published a ladder of first and second occurrences, a duration for a suspension, an appeal route specific to Forever, or any figure at which the economy monitoring is said to act. Anybody quoting one of those is filling a blank rather than citing a source.
That gap is the whole reason the two halves get written about separately on this site. The policy wording is one subject and the reach of an individual measure is another, which is why the published enforcement wording and what a penalty reaches are kept on their own instead of merged into one confident account of how it works.
The player receiving the gold
The transaction has two sides in the text and only one in most conversations about it. Gold moves between players by trade window or by mail, both of them same-faction, and both of them require somebody to accept the delivery. In the client that acceptance looks identical whether the coins were farmed, given by a guildmate, or paid for in money: the same counters move, the same letter arrives, and nothing in the interface records why. The receiving player is a party to the arrangement rather than a bystander to it, and the agreement does not describe them as anything else.
That matters practically because the mechanics of delivery are the only part anyone can plan around in advance. Region, playstyle and faction all have to match on both ends before a single coin can change hands, which is set out in full with moving coins between players. Those limits are the same for a payment and for a gift, so they tell you nothing about which is which, and neither does anything inside the game.
The other half of the decision is who is on the far side of the trade in the first place. We list sellers and earn a commission when someone buys, so we are the wrong people to tell you whether to, but the comparison worth making is between operations, not between prices, and that is the subject of choosing who you buy from.
The trade window notice, and what we do not know
Clients in earlier versions of the game have displayed a short caution during a trade, reminding both players that exchanging in-game property for real money is against the agreement. It is a reminder rather than a check: it does not inspect the trade, it does not know what either side intends, and it appears the same way for a guild transfer as for anything else. Whether Forever shows the same notice, in the same place, with the same wording, is not something we have seen published, so treat the behaviour as carried over from older clients until you have read it on your own screen.
Several other parts of this subject are simply blank, and it is better to list them than to round them off. Nobody has published how the economy monitoring works or what it looks at. Nothing states how reclaimed gold is handled once it is taken back, or whether the player who received it is told. No duration, count or threshold has been attached to any measure for Forever specifically. And nothing has been said about how any of this applies on the test client as opposed to the live one.
What has been described there is narrower and comes from players rather than from Blizzard, which is why the reports are collected separately as outcomes reported during the beta. They are accounts of individual cases, not a published rule, and we would not build an expectation on them.
Questions
Does the licence treat buying differently from selling?
Not in the text. Both acquiring and disposing of in-game property for real currency are named, and nothing in the wording scales with the size of the transaction or distinguishes a one-off from a business. The difference people have in mind is usually about enforcement attention rather than about what the document says, and Blizzard has not published how that attention is allocated.
Is a gift from a guildmate distinguishable from a purchase?
Not by anything the client shows you. A trade window and a letter in the mail look the same whatever the reason behind them, and the statistics panel records the coins arriving without recording why. That is a statement about the interface rather than about what Blizzard can see on its own side, and nothing has been published about what the economy monitoring described in September actually examines.
What is actually confirmed about Forever specifically?
Three statements from the September 17 Q&A: GDKP is not allowed, the economy is to be watched with the stated aim of reclaiming laundered gold, and the stance on gold buyers is described as harder than in previous years. Around them sit the design decisions that remove an official channel entirely, since there is no Token and no paid boost. No rates, thresholds or methods accompany any of it.
Does the warning shown during a trade mean anything is being checked?
It is a notice, not an inspection. In earlier clients the same caution appeared on ordinary trades between guildmates, because it is attached to the window rather than to the contents. Whether Forever displays it at all, and in what wording, is not something we have seen published, so read it on your own screen rather than taking a description of an older client as current.
Sources
- The licence the account is created under, including the clauses on ownership of in-game property and on exchanging it for real currency — Blizzard End User License Agreement.
- The September 17, 2026 live Q&A: GDKP not allowed, economy monitoring with the stated aim of reclaiming laundered gold, and a harder stance on buyers — Wowhead's report of the Q&A.
What changed on this page
- 8 Oct 2026First version: the licence clauses, the measures described in September, the receiving player's position, and the blanks around the trade notice.