The Chinese beta of Forever opened on October 6. Three days later, on October 9, the operating team published a misconduct enforcement notice that names five behaviours and attaches a penalty to each — and, unusually for a beta, states that the scheme will continue after launch rather than lapsing with the wipe.

Original editorial illustration by RealmList, generated for this article. This is artwork, not game footage or official promotional material.

The five behaviours and their prices

The penalties are graduated rather than uniform, which is the part most worth reading closely.

The notice adds that more serious cases face heavier penalties, and that the reporting channel is open. It also states that the same enforcement will apply after launch — not just during the October 6 to October 26 test.

Why summoning is the headline

The first entry is the one the Chinese community expected. The "airline" business — a Warlock parked near a dungeon or a contested zone selling summons, sometimes with a whole network of characters covering the map — is a fixture of Chinese Classic-era realms, and it was always going to collide with a game whose pitch is that the world itself is the content.

The reasoning in Chinese coverage of the notice is that travel is not dead time in this design. First crossings, flight points, waiting at a dock and meeting someone, taking the long way and finding a quest — Forever has added quests to starting zones and camps and stops to travel routes specifically to make that middle part pay. A network of summoning taxis compresses every map into a list of destinations, and the design work disappears. The counter-argument, which the same write-ups acknowledge, is that retreading a route you have walked fifty times is not adventure.

How it compares to the global stance

The notable detail is the severity. Blizzard's public position on gold buying and GDKP in Forever has been described as permanent and irreversible — accounts involved in generating, selling, buying or knowingly receiving illicit gold facing gold removal, suspension or permanent closure, and the October 8 podcast putting the beta total at roughly 2,100 gold-buyer accounts plus nearly 1,600 seller or bot accounts. The Chinese notice, by contrast, hands out 7-day and 3-day suspensions.

That difference is a deliberate local calibration rather than a contradiction, and it fits the pattern the platform published on the same day: the ban on GDKP is itself scoped to North America and Europe, with Asian realms left alone. Two markets, two enforcement philosophies, on the same game.

One question the notice does not answer, and Chinese commentators flagged it immediately: whether the summoning and multiboxing rules target automation only or also manual play. "Abnormal summoning" reads as scripted or commercial service; a player with two clients on one desk is not obviously what the rule is aimed at. Until a public example exists, both readings survive.

What the notice leaves out

It does not mention gold buying, and it does not mention GDKP — not once, in any form. That absence is more interesting than any line in it, because the fiercest argument in the Chinese community for the past month has been whether Chinese realms would be allowed to keep auctioning loot for gold. An enforcement notice that catalogues five economic behaviours without naming the sixth does not settle the question; it declines to.

The most useful decomposition we have seen on that came from the Chinese community itself, which sorted the claims into official announcements, interview answers and community retellings and found that the word GDKP has never appeared in an official post in any region. We covered that scoping separately.

What to watch

The first documented case. A 7-day suspension for a summoning service is a testable claim the moment someone posts the notice. Whether the rule reaches solo multiboxers is decided by the first enforcement screenshot, not by the wording.

A second notice. The test is not whether this one exists but whether it is followed by another before the wipe on October 26. A single release is a statement of intent; a series is a policy.

Whether gold buying gets its own line. The global policy is permanent closure. If the Chinese side intends a different ladder — the way it has for summoning — that deserves to be written down, because right now the harshest announced penalty for the most damaging behaviour is documented only in interview answers.