Blizzard Bans WoW Streamer Over Gold Buying Push

A well-known World of Warcraft: Forever streamer has been banned after telling his viewers on stream that they should buy gold for him. The beta, which is running ahead of the MMO's full release in November, is currently tangled up in a gold-buying and real-money trading controversy. Buying gold from third-party sites that use bots to farm the game's main currency has broken the terms of service for as long as WoW has existed. What is different now is that Blizzard has said it intends to punish buyers far more aggressively, after admitting that it was too lenient about the problem in the past.

The stricter approach was tested this week when streamer Ziqo was seen on stream accepting unusually large amounts of gold from strangers, shortly before a player-versus-player tournament with a $100,000 prize pool. Blizzard later removed that gold from his account but did not ban him. Fellow streamer Payo fared worse: after saying he wanted his chat to use their credit cards to fill his bags, his account was banned. He apologised, said he had never bought gold himself, and was allowed to keep streaming on another account. Blizzard also plans to add a trade warning about suspicious gold.

Tags

• world-of-warcraft
• esports
• business

Sources

• GameSpot

Where this story ran: one outlet on 2 October 2026. The summary above is written by GamersGuild; the links go to the original reports.

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