WoW Forever gold buying: Blizzard targets buyers too

About 520 gold pieces received in a handful of trades by one streamer, a week after the beta opened: that was enough to reignite the debate around WoW Forever gold buying, until Blizzard had to spell out its rules. Skye, from The Comeback Kids channel, builds his latest news video around it, alongside a $100,000 duel tournament, an interview where Blizzard recommends Forever to newcomers, a debate over the art direction, and a possible shaman class quest. Here’s what to take away, sources checked.

Blizzard recommends Forever to those who’ve never played

In an exclusive interview with Warcraft Tavern at BlizzCon 2026, Holly Longdale, World of Warcraft’s vice president and executive producer, openly recommends WoW Forever to players who’ve never touched the game. Her words: “If you’ve never played, please try Forever because you’ll get in on the ground floor with other people just like you.”

Ion Hazzikostas, the game director, backs that positioning. For him, Forever’s pace and its return to Warcraft’s narrative roots make it an ideal entry point. Skye sees it as a rare opportunity: introducing a world part of the community has known for twenty years to a brand-new audience, picturing a first playthrough that crosses Elwynn Forest, meets other players, and heads into the Deadmines as a group.

According to Holly, everyone starts Forever together. Experienced players will progress a bit faster, an effect already visible in beta where some players stacked up hundreds of gold pieces, well before WoW Forever gold buying turned into a scandal. But the launch mainly creates a window where everyone builds a character, forms a guild, and asks questions at the same time as everyone else. Keeping these newcomers around will mean taking time to explain how to play, inviting them into a group, and sparing them, at least early on, the pressure of the Mythic+ timer.

Ion also touches on how hard it was to define what Forever should be. Asked what the community expected from a Classic Plus, he answers: “You would get a thousand different answers.” Pet abilities, dungeon experience, racial abilities, dungeon progression: everyone defends their own version. He describes Season of Discovery as “a valuable experiment in that regard, where we consciously pushed those boundaries to find out how far was too far”, which explains why some ideas tested in Season of Discovery ended up scrapped.

Dungeons come up again at PC Gamer. Paul Kubit, the game’s associate director, admits that by calibrating dungeons around the Mythic+ timer, with three or four bosses instead of the roughly twenty Blackrock or Maraudon used to have, “maybe we lost something along the way.” The upcoming Labyrinths in WoW Midnight are meant to bring back that feeling of a dungeon you can actually get lost in.

Skye ties this straight back to how Forever welcomes new players. Accepting longer, less timer-driven dungeons also means accepting the time it takes to explain, invite, and guide someone discovering the Deadmines for the first time, instead of leaving them to chase a score.

Skye offered a simple test to settle this kind of debate. If a Forever set or model would slot into modern WoW without friction, think the current expansion, Midnight, it probably doesn’t belong in Forever. The same logic applies to the paladin set’s pauldrons: a simple mockup that shrinks them down, he says, is enough to bring the silhouette closer to the classic spirit.

This ties directly into the leaked tier sets for the Hyjal raid, where all nine classes already show this tension between heavily detailed designs and the game’s original inspiration.

The comparison also circles back to the night elf druid’s Bear Form. Placed side by side, the original form and the new one barely have anything in common anymore. A concept shared on Reddit draws on owlbeasts to suggest an alternative: a more aggressive stance, a harsher expression, and the glowing purple markings kept intact.

The debate goes beyond these two examples and feeds into a wider discussion about the classic game’s visual identity. Skye compares it to old-school fantasy art, the kind found on Dungeons & Dragons covers or sword-and-sorcery novels: chainmail, patterned cloth, engraved weapons, and above all bold colors like red, blue, green, or gold, rather than a dull, grey palette.

For him, recapturing that mood doesn’t mean darkening everything. Classic adventurers’ mismatched gear, picked up piece by piece on their travels, already carries that mix of clashing colors and pieces that end up, almost by accident, working well together. Skye wrapped up by asking his viewers directly whether they’d prefer this richer, more colorful style, or whether Forever’s current art direction already works for them.

$100,000 tournament and bought gold: Blizzard targets buyers too

The Forever Open, a $100,000 duel

The Forever Open, the dueling tournament stirring up the community this week, saw its prize pool double thanks to TimTheTatman. The streamer is funding half of that $100,000 total pool, according to Icy Veins. The event is run by Tips Out, hosted by EsfandTV and Xaryu, with Raider.io and Starforge Systems as partners.

The format uses level 30 Horde characters, the cap the beta is set to reach by then (it’s still at 20 for now), under strict PvP rules. Qualifiers run on October 17 and the final on the 18th, with sign-ups open on Raider.io until October 4. The champion walks away with $50,000, and the top performer for each class earns $5,555.

WoW Forever gold buying: the Ziqo affair

While the tournament’s prize pool kept climbing, WoW Forever gold buying took over the conversation, with content creators at the center of it. Clips broadcast live show streamer Ziqo receiving roughly 520 gold pieces from his viewers, across several separate trades, barely a week after the beta opened. Those clips only show the gold being received: they prove neither that he bought it, nor where exactly those gifts came from.

The story quickly outgrew a single streamer and turned into a broader debate over WoW Forever gold buying. On the forums and on Reddit, several players accused some content creators of getting softer treatment, and asked whether everyone would be judged by the same rules for this kind of behavior.

According to Kotaku (Rebekah Valentine, September 30, 2026), Ziqo wasn’t banned. The character who’d received the gold simply got knocked back down to a few silver pieces. Streamer Payo, for his part, described his own take on WoW Forever gold buying live on stream: “I never buy gold. Ever. I told my chat to do it for me.”

Blizzard’s community manager, Kaivax, weighed in on the official forum on September 28, 2026. He reiterates that WoW Forever gold buying for real money remains banned, beta included, and that Blizzard was already punishing sellers. The publisher now promises to crack down harder on buyer accounts too: stripping illicit gold and, potentially, closing the account. A recipient who knew, or should have known, that the gold came from an illegitimate source can also be punished, Kaivax warns, advising caution around gifts from strangers and one-way trades. His message doesn’t name Ziqo and announces no penalty against him.

For Skye, the real issue is fairness: streamers should be judged by the same rules as everyone else, and calling it a gift doesn’t change anything. If WoW Forever gold buying becomes normal, anyone will pay $5 on G2G to skip six or seven hours of farming, and the time everyone else spends in-game loses its value. Gold’s value climbs fast in a beta this young, as shown in our article on Riverglades’ black market, where a Black Lotus already sells for 50 gold. Skye wants Blizzard to mass-ban everyone caught in WoW Forever gold buying, regardless of status: “I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you’re a streamer. I don’t care if you’re my mother.”

A player wants the beta wiped when level 30 hits

On r/classicwow, a player going by DepthChorge posted a message in late September titled “Blizzard, you’ve got a chance to birth a legend”, tagged “Forever Beta Feedback”. Their request comes down to one line: wipe the test servers entirely the moment the level cap climbs to 30.

DepthChorge mainly wants clean data on leveling speed and experience distribution, both from quests and from dungeons. They cite Aggrend, a Blizzard developer who explained in an interview with Xaryu that the time needed to reach level 20 in Forever stayed comparable to the Anniversary servers, even though nobody was running an optimized route yet during the beta’s first week. For the post’s author, the beta carries no promise of permanence, and watching those who bet on WoW Forever gold buying panic will be, in their words, gold.

Skye shares that view, while admitting it’s an unpopular opinion. He argues Blizzard should wipe characters, gold, and progress to start over from a clean slate, the only way to measure the real pace after class updates, new quests, the reworked dungeon experience, and the new low-level gear. A reset would also separate what came from simply discovering new content from what came from experience already banked on familiar routes. The same reset would erase everything WoW Forever’s gold buyers have already gained from exploiting the beta. Skye sums up his stance bluntly: “I’ll happily create another character if it improves the game by even 10%.”

Some players have already pushed their professions to 225, stacked up hundreds of gold pieces, and unlocked the best enchants available in beta. For Skye, that level of progress skews exactly what Blizzard is trying to observe ahead of the November 4 launch.

Shaman: three weapons spotted, a class quest still unconfirmed

Before going further, a heads-up from Skye himself: this part contains spoilers about a new class quest, and he suggests anyone who wants to discover everything in-game skip straight to the next section. He says he got spoiled by five people on Discord before the news spread everywhere. Word going around: with level 30 tests approaching in beta, the shaman would get a class quest with a weapon choice based on spec, Enhancement, Elemental, or Restoration, a bit like the famous Classic warrior quest that, around level 30, offers a choice of axe, sword, or hammer, “Whirlwind”, named after its spell, Whirlwind.

What’s confirmed so far stays more modest. Wowhead’s Forever database lists three shaman weapons, all item level 40:

• Rage of the Storm, a two-handed mace that boosts Stormstrike, for Enhancement
• Lightning’s Grasp, a main-hand fist weapon that boosts Lightning Bolt, for Elemental
• Tidebringer’s Claw, a main-hand fist weapon that boosts Healing Wave, for Restoration

Nothing, though, ties these three items to a specific quest chain, or confirms they drop at level 30. The link to the Whirlwind quest comes from the community, notably a Reddit thread picked up in the video, and that’s exactly what ForeverWisp points out: item level 40 says nothing about the character level required to loot the weapon.

Skye finds the idea exciting. Shamans already have the totem quests, Call of Earth, Call of Fire, and Call of Water, but Call of Air has never made it into the game, a gap he’s regretted for a long time. He also likes that there’s a weapon per spec, with a two-handed mace for Enhancement against one-handed weapons for Elemental and Restoration.

He wonders whether the warrior will get the same treatment. The Whirlwind quest rewards are all two-handed weapons, and he hopes the developers open up a choice for that class too. Our article on the warrior, shaman, and rogue class changes in Forever covers exactly what Blizzard is changing for these three classes. He notes we’ll need to see the full shaman quest before comparing it seriously to the warrior’s.

Skye points out that other classes already have their own standout quests: the paladin with Verigan’s Fist, undead with a level 20 quest, and later the mage with their wand. The shaman would get theirs around level 30, same as the warrior. His wish would be for every class to get a big questline like this during leveling.

Addons and UI: three tools worth knowing

Skye also spends part of his video on practical tools for the beta. Three of them are worth a closer look: an addon that flags new quests, a built-in click-casting healing feature, and a cooldown manager still being fine-tuned.

Forever Quest Tint: spotting new quests at a glance

The first tool is an addon, a player-made mod, called Forever Quest Tint, built by Alex Diakovsky, aka alexdia25. It tints the bottom of the quest window teal, the Forever logo’s color, whenever the quest didn’t exist in original Classic. Vanilla quests keep their usual parchment look. A small infinity symbol gets added after the quest name, both in the log and in the objective tracker, and options are available through the /fqt command. According to Icy Veins, which covered the addon in an article by Emma published September 24, 2026, Forever adds over 1,000 new quests. The source code is available on GitHub.

Built-in click-casting, a helping hand for healers

Second on the list, and built right into the game: click casting. The idea is to bind a spell to a mouse button or key combo, then click an ally’s portrait to cast that spell on them directly. Blizzard has built its own mouseover macros into the game. You can, say, set Shift + left-click to heal, and another combo to dispel an effect, all while keeping your enemy targeted throughout. For healers and hybrid classes, like Retribution paladins, this removes the two target swaps every heal used to require.

The Cooldown Manager, WeakAuras for beginners

The third tool, toggled on in the game options, is the Cooldown Manager. It gathers cooldowns and important effects to track in one spot on the screen: damage over time, procs, trinkets, racial abilities. Skye compares it to WeakAuras built for beginners and calls the tool “a 10 out of 10 feature.” It’s still being polished, but it launched with the September 24 beta patch, which we covered in our article on that patch.

A profession unique to each class

Truth Be Told suggests adding a profession unique to each class, on top of the two primary and three secondary professions already planned. The idea already exists in part in Forever: rogues craft their own poisons, and mages already have a kind of scroll-deciphering profession, something we covered in our article on the battle mage, one scroll, twelve resets, and a sword.

Skye is genuinely into the idea. A class profession would push every player to dig deeper into their character instead of settling for a generic role, to really invest in their own corner of the world. He does admit the challenge: designing a distinct, coherent mechanic for every class in the game takes serious design work.

Three pets, a choice that matters

Angelo wishes hunters had more than three active pet slots, and points out that leveling each one individually takes a lot of time. Skye sees that limitation the other way around: it’s exactly what makes every hunter different from the next. The choice costs something, and that’s what gives it its value.

He gives two concrete examples. A crocodile-type pet, able to reduce healing received by its target, becomes a fearsome tool for taking down enemy healers in PvP. A wolf, on the other hand, brings useful buffs to an entire group. This kind of specialization shapes a character’s identity instead of watering it down.

Eight hours in Blackrock Depths

Ryan remembers clearing Blackrock Depths in vanilla in over eight hours. For Skye, that length isn’t a flaw at all: it’s exactly the time invested that made those dungeons memorable, the sheer scale of the effort it took to go from start to finish.

He ranks Blackrock Depths among the best dungeons in MMO history, for its size, its boss count, and its secrets to uncover. He hopes Forever’s new endgame dungeon recaptures that same feeling.