"Some players have started to encounter our latest weapon in our efforts against the Real Money Trade (RMT) aka gold buying. If your account is suspected of being involved in RMT, either the selling or receiving of illicit gains, you may find your account subject to a Temporary Economy Hold. You will have restricted use of trade, mail, guild banks and the Auction House while this economic hold is in place.
"… This system is new. There may be false positives while things are fine tuned, but merely having a Temporary Economy Hold will leave no permanent strikes against your account unless also later proven to be RMT motivated," via the WoW forums.
This is a super interesting way to handle the deleterious effects RMT has on an MMO economy—and one of several things that Blizzard's been experimenting with in WoW: Forever to try to tamp down on inflation. Which is especially important given it's a game designed to be persistent and lasting with no expansion-launch resets to help.
MMO economies are particularly hard to control at a baseline, because every enemy that drops vendor trash, every mining node that spawns, technically introduces money into the ecosystem. That's why you have things like repair costs, flight path costs, and gold sinks like mounts—big expenditures take cash out of the system to keep it healthy.
But you can also fight it off with other means. For example, these new vendors that sell specific high-end reagents. These things ain't cheap—far more expensive than the actual effort required to get them would suggest—but the vendor's presence effectively puts a price cap on reagents in the game, which should, hopefully, keep things reasonable.
And there are major consequences to just letting MMO economies run away with this sort of thing. Take Star Wars: The Old Republic, which had major issues causing even low-level equipment to cost millions of credits. Millions!
It's especially prudent given WoW: Forever won't have a subscription time token on launch (effectively giving a "price cap" on RMT itself by letting Blizzard out-compete them), measures like this are all the more important to make sure bots don't go ahead and ruin the auction house for everyone.
This seems like a sensible middle ground. There are a lot of activities that are perfectly innocent which might register as RMT. For instance, the absolute shenanigans we were getting up to earlier this month, and if you just banned people, a lotta folks would get caught in the crossfire. This way, someone hit with a false positive will still be able to play most of the game while Blizzard investigates.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.