A common early World of Warcraft experience was to stumble into a series of corpses lying on the ground that, when looked at from the right angle, spelled out a URL for a site where you can pay real money for in-game gold.

Gold was scarce back then, which spawned an entire market for buying it instead of grinding for it. Even if you never touched one of those sites, it was impossible to not see ads online or splayed out in front of you in a popular city.

Blizzard has taken a light touch in the past when it comes to punishing people who willingly violate the MMO's EULA with real-money trading (RMT), but promises that won't be the case for World of Warcraft: Forever.

In a recent Q&A, senior game designer Josh Greenfield addressed concerns about guilds letting players bid on items with gold (known as "gold dragon kill points" or GDKP) and the risks of RMT in WoW: Forever. He emphasized that Blizzard will "very aggressively punish gold buyers," to prevent the in-game trading economy from getting out of hand.

"Being frank, we've been probably too lenient on gold buyers and it's been a little bit easy to get around some of our actions before and we are taking it very seriously," Greenfield added. "As someone who's got a 22-year-old World of Warcraft account I can tell you it's not worth losing it permanently, it's not worth losing any of your accounts permanently, so I would very strongly recommend [you] don't do it, it's not worth it."

Greenfield doesn't say it outright, but is implying that anyone who breaks the rules with RMT will have their account banned rather than temporarily suspended. Whenever I see discussions about RMT, people will always say that it would help if Blizzard didn't slap offenders on the wrist and actually took away their access completely. Whether or not that will be how it's handled in the full release remains to be seen—nobody cares about becoming rich in the beta—but it's at least promising to hear that it's a high priority for the studio.

In an MMO where the level cap will never be raised and updates will introduce new things to characters of all levels, the last thing you want is for severe inflation to kill the value of trading with other players and therefore the value of learning a tradeskill altogether. Greenfield stressed that the sanctity of the economy is an important part of the experience and that Blizzard has tuning knobs for controlling supply and demand to balance things out.

The more I've gotten into Path of Exile 2, an action RPG built around player trading for rare drops, the more I've witnessed how quickly things can go haywire. An exploit that lasts two hours can have devastating effects on the price of items, so I hope Blizzard is also prepared to handle whatever crops up organically, too.

Diablo 5 takes place in a world where the titular Lord of Terror has already won, taking over Sanctuary and reshaping the world in his own image. For Blizzard, telling this dark chapter of the story means telling multiple stories in parallel: the past, the present, and the future.

That's according to game director Joe Shely, who tells our friends at TechRadar Gaming that there are "three stories that we're telling" within the world of Diablo 5. The past story is the tale of how Diablo took over Sanctuary in the first place. The present, of course, seems to consist of the main action of the game, where the familiar world has been taken over by the minions of Hell.

Diablo's top minions in this desolate world are called Dread Commanders, and they take an active role in reshaping Sanctuary in Hell's image – hence the future part of the story. "We call it terror forming because these Dread Commanders will actually transform the environment, transform the biome into a version of hell that relates to personal powers and powers at station," Shely says.

"The procedural world gives us a lot of levers to pull for that," narrative director Jennifer Hepler adds. "You can go to a place, and it is under the control of the Dread Commander of Undeath, and it's going to be full of zombies and things like that. And then later in the game, you could return there, and it's either been reclaimed by humanity or taken over by a different Dread Commander, and the environment will be totally different as a result of that."

Blizzard's publicly stated goal for Diablo 5 is to make sure it's got "the best campaign ever," and the studio is taking a big swing with the setting to make sure that's true. The devs are also insistent that a full sequel is necessary because the return of the titular big bad is too big for a mere Diablo 4 expansion. We'll have plenty of time to speculate on how these choices will pan out, since the game isn't scheduled to launch until 2029.

Diablo 5 is Blizzard's darkest ARPG yet, and that's the best way to honor the game that changed my life 30 years ago.