A Temporary Economy Hold can hit both sellers and recipients of gold Blizzard suspects is tied to real-money trading. Characters remain playable, but moving items or currency becomes much harder during the review.

The hold shuts down direct exchanges between players, inbox deliveries, shared guild storage, and auction listings. In the official forum post, Blizzard says the goal is to stop suspicious gold before it moves through the economy and buy time for a closer investigation.

If the activity is cleared, Blizzard will remove the hold automatically. The temporary restriction itself does not leave a permanent strike on the account. Confirmed RMT activity can still lead to account action.

Blizzard acknowledges that false positives may happen while the system is being tuned. It does not say how long reviews take or which transaction patterns trigger a hold. That missing detail matters because players can receive gold without knowing where it came from.

The system is currently active in World of Warcraft: Forever. Blizzard plans to deploy it across other versions of WoW if the test succeeds.

Our earlier PvP story covers another part of the game's economy.