Berdal wrote: Tue Aug 11, 2026 8:56 am
Geniune question. I gave a friend 10g on his character after he started out on OctoWoW. This was to welcome him, help him out, give him a head start and incentivize him to stay. Of course 10g is nothing in the eyes of flagging for RMT, but if I was loaded with gold from playing for a long time, I would not think twice about giving thousands of gold to friends to help them with mounts or whatever. How can you differentiate just giving people gold, versus gold trading? And if you can't you gotta blatantly state that giving away more than X amount of gold in a month is considered RMT and illegal.
Also, this is stated in the rules:
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Out of curiosity, why is this illegal? I remember wanting to achieve this because I was changing realms on TurtleWoW, and was looking for someone to receive 100g on Nordanaar, and in return give me whatever gold he though appropriate on Ambershire. Of course I didn't succeed with this, but what's the issue with this? No gold is actually moving between the realms.
EDIT: This is a ludicrous place to ask this question lol. If I don't get a response I'll bring it up in the Support section.
So as part of our research we would look into that and see exactly the context you stated. We have all chat logs, guild rosters, party histories, mail histories, friend list, combat logs ect, we are able to get a pretty clear picture of what happens (plus less obvious background behavioral and meta data that can be very very helpful).
In the specific example that you mentioned we would see tons of other activity that would support that situation like real player raiding/grouping on the character that gave out the gold (and their bank alt even if it was on a different account), normal chats between players (sometimes including the recipients of the gifts), a history of helping people out in a similar way.
Of course we are not perfect and false positives have happened in the past (although none from our most recent and largest ban wave) and will likely happen in the future. When we get a ban appeal we really dig into things with a microscope and ensure we are 100% positive that the incident was RMT. In cases where we are not positive and there is any room for doubt we do give leniency even when we think that it is likely RMT.
While it may feel from the outside like these ban appeals are a public flogging with little evidence gathered/reviewed, on the back end every single ban appeal spawn off tons of additional research, manual review, and a second manual review before a verdict is determined.
Unfortunately we are unable to reveal all of our methods as we don't want to encourage ways around them, but preventing false positives and improper bans is something that we value above stopping RMT even.
We don't feel the need to set a limit on what people are allowed to gift away because we know how great that is for the community and we would not want to stifle that in any way. Being able to decipher what is a generous real player vs what is a gold seller is our problem to deal with not yours!
I'm afraid I botched the semantics in that quote of mine, sorry about any confusion! It is not against the rules to trade gold cross realm, the situation that you outlined is perfectly OK and would be allowed and should not flag you for RMT in any way. What is not allowed is trading gold from other game servers entirely. As an example if you had a character on warmane and offered to trade XXXX amount of warmane gold for XXX amount of OctoWoW gold, that would be prohibited.
You are welcome to offer people XX gold on PvP realm in exchange for XX gold on the PvE realm if you would like!
Also this is a bit of an odd place for this, feel free to copy/paste/quote/screenshot this elsewhere if you feel it may help clarify to people our stance on RMT. Also we may be revealing some of our RMT detection methods and how we are able to be so certain of some of these cases SOONtm.
P.S. Sorry for the novel, I get passionate about RMT