World of Warcraft: Forever has been on many a fan’s mind since Blizzard’s big reveal during BlizzCon 2026, especially as it’s essentially a take on the long-requested Classic+. But how exactly will it differ from the other branches of WoW?
Well, according to senior game designer Josh Greenfield, there’s one glaring difference: GDKP will not be a part of Forever.
In case you’re out of the loop, GDKP stands for Gold Dragon Kill Points – an auction-based loot distribution system that sees a raid party’s treasure go to the highest bidder, only for all of the accumulated gold to then be split across the players. It’s controversial because lots of folks feel it encourages real-money trading.
So, what does Greenfield have to say about it? In a new Q&A session over on YouTube, the lead first explains that World of Warcraft: Forever won’t allow GDKP.
“The short answer is no, we are not going to allow GDKP,” he says. “I think the most important aspect of that to us is our first pillar – to nurture and protect social experiences. I think a lot of the concerns around GDKP start to get bundled up into that conversation, around things like that.”
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Is Blizzard making this choice because of real-money trades? Not entirely.
“The actual main reason that we are not going to allow it in WoW: Forever is that it has that sort of tendency we’ve noticed in the regions where [GDKP] has been popular for longer to reach a level of ubiquity,” Greenfield says. “That can kinda overtake the traditional guild structure, and that’s one of the really difficult decisions about being a game designer, managing this game at this scale.”
It’s not an easy decision, as Greenfield states. “Sometimes, you have to make difficult choices. We never really want to tell people how to play” – but systems like GDKP can get in the way of others’ experience with the MMO.
They can act as a “big barrier to entry for new players, or players that do not have that many resources,” he says. Longtime fans can quickly make some gold, while newcomers end up feeling forced to “buy gold.”
That’s no bueno, and “something we’re taking very seriously in WoW: Forever,” Greenfield explains. Plus, it feeds into the whole economy and real-money transaction debacle.
“GDKP is an excellent way for bad actors to launder large sums of gold,” as he says. This complicates everything for both players and the developers alike, as they struggle to target bots and such. In World of Warcraft: Forever, Blizzard will “be very, very actively monitoring the economy.”
Honestly, I’m happy to hear that Blizzard’s settled on no GDKP runs in Forever – here’s hoping the economy remains healthy, and the studio stays strong in its decision to restrict the auction-based raid loot system (and, it seems, combat add-ons, too).
