Launch day gold in WoW Forever: the first 24 hours on a fresh market

The clock: what opens and when

Forever has no realms. A region has six houses, one per ruleset and faction: Normal, PvP and RP, each with a Horde side and an Alliance side. All six US houses and all six EU houses open together, so there is no quiet server to start on and no late server to carry goods to. The rules are the Classic Era rules: a faction house keeps 5 percent of a sale, the neutral auctioneers in Gadgetzan, Booty Bay and Everlook keep 15, a listing runs 12, 24 or 48 hours and charges a deposit set from the item's vendor sell price, and the gold arrives by mail about an hour after the sale.

Two of those rules shape the whole first day. The deposit means listing is not free, so the first hours punish anyone who posts stacks of things nobody can yet pay for. The mail delay means gold from a sale at hour four is spendable at hour five, which is the earliest anyone on the market can buy anything at all. The release date page has the launch moment in your own time zone, and the auction house page has the rules in full.

Hours 0 to 2: before anyone has gold

Nobody can buy. That is the only fact about the first two hours that matters, and it decides everything else. Every character starts with one bag and a handful of free slots, no gold, and a quest log that pays in copper. An auction listed at hour one is a deposit spent on a shelf nobody is browsing.

So the first two hours are for picking up, not for selling. Take two gathering professions at the first trainer you pass, or one gathering profession and the crafting profession you mean to keep. Skinning and Mining pay from the first zone; Herbalism pays from the first zone and feeds Alchemy, which is the profession that sells the most consumed goods for the longest. Loot everything, including the grey items, and do not vendor cloth. Linen Cloth is the first commodity of the game, because it drops for every class from the humanoids every zone starts with, and tailors need it in stacks before any other profession needs anything.

• Open the auction house once, so the AHledger addon records that the market exists.
• Pick up every drop. Bag space is the real constraint, so vendor the grey gear and the grey weapons, and keep the cloth, the leather, the ore and the herbs.
• Do not buy anything from a vendor that a drop will give you in the next hour.

Hours 2 to 8: the first listings

The first gold in the economy comes from quest rewards and vendor sales, not from the auction house, and it arrives in copper and silver. The first buyers are the people who spend that on the one thing a leveler cannot make and cannot wait for: bag space. Then, a little behind them, come the crafters who have reached the skill where a recipe needs a material they do not gather themselves.

That gives the order of the first listings. Linen Cloth first, because tailors are the first crafters with something everyone wants, and the cloth price in these hours is set by the tailor who is racing to the first bag recipe rather than by the player who needs a shirt. Light Leather and Copper Ore next, as leatherworkers and blacksmiths reach the skill where the trainer recipes stop being free. Peacebloom for the alchemists, because the first elixir recipes take it, and the next herbs as the recipes above skill 1 come onto the trainer list. The trade goods class on the catalog is the shelf to watch; the economy page shows each house filling up as players scan.

List in stacks the buyer can afford. A stack of twenty cloth at a price nobody holds yet does not sell; five stacks of four do. Use the 12 hour listing, since the price at hour twenty will be nothing like the price at hour eight and a 48 hour listing locks in the wrong one. Set the buyout, not just the bid: a first-day buyer is in a hurry and will not come back for an auction.

Resist the first stack of greens. Bind on equip gear drops everywhere on day one, almost all of it is worth the vendor price, and a leveler at level eight with 40 silver is spending it on a bag. The exception comes later, around the twenties, and the first week guide covers it.

Hours 8 to 24: the first crafters and the first bags

By the evening of day one the first tailors are making bags, the first alchemists are making the elixirs and potions on the skill 1 list, and the first engineers have reached the recipes that take Coarse Blasting Powder. This is the hour the auction house turns from a shelf into a market, because the people who gathered all afternoon now meet the people who need what they gathered, and the price of each material becomes the price the crafter will pay to skill up today rather than tomorrow.

Three things to list in this window, in this order:

• Bags. Every character on the market wants four of them and every alt will want four more. The first Linen Bag on a market sells for whatever a buyer has, and the price holds longer than any other early craft because the demand outlasts the leveling rush. Browse every container for what tailors can make at each skill.
• Materials at the skill-up price. A crafter reaching skill 50 wants the material that recipe takes, tonight. Post it in small stacks at a price that undercuts nothing, because there is nothing to undercut, and let the crafter set the ceiling.
• Consumables the first groups use. The first dungeon groups form late on day one and all of day two, and they consume potions, food and bandages every run. Alchemists and cooks who have stock listed when a group forms get the first sale and the first price. The Alchemy recipes and Cooking recipes show what is reachable by then.

Keep your own first gold for bags and trainer costs. Both return more than any flip on day one, and the launch week page keeps that at the top of its plan for the same reason.

Four launch day mistakes

• Pricing from memory. A Classic Era price is a price from a realm with gold in it. On day one nobody has the gold, and the number that sells is the one a level six character can pay. Forever also adds items with no Classic price at all; the new items page lists them.
• Paying deposits on a dead shelf. Every listing that expires loses its deposit. Until the mail brings the first gold to the first buyers, a listing is a bet that someone can pay, and for the first hours they cannot.
• Crossing factions on day one. The neutral house keeps 15 percent and both sides are equally empty. The faction gap that makes cross-faction trade pay opens later; the neutral auction house guide says when and by how much.
• Holding stock for day three. The materials that sell at hour twelve are the ones the first wave of crafters needs; the wave moves past low level materials in days, and so does the price. Sell into the wave and gather the next tier.

Using the site on day one

AHledger has no prices for a market until someone scans it, and on launch day that someone is probably you. The addon scans when you open the auction house and sync uploads the scan, so every market gets a price list within hours of opening, built from what players actually see. From the first scan the deal scanner ranks listings against their own median, the crafting desk puts reagent cost against result price for every recipe, and the economy page shows how deep each house has become.

Put the twenty items above that fit your professions on a watchlist before launch, with an alert on each for the first time it appears on your market. That first appearance is the signal that a buyer exists, and the alerts guide covers how to set the thresholds so they fire once rather than every scan.

What day two looks like

By the second morning the houses have gold in them, the first bags have sold, and the first medians exist on this site. From then on the question stops being what to list and becomes what the market pays, which is the subject of the first week guide. The gold guides by level price each level band from the latest scans, and the gold meta is rewritten every Tuesday from the week of data; the first launch edition lands on 10 November.