How to make gold in World of Warcraft: Forever

Why server advice does not transfer

Three of the most common gold strategies depend entirely on a realm boundary, and none of them has anything to work on here.

• Cornering a market. Buying out the supply of something and relisting higher needs the supply to be small enough to buy. Pooled across a whole ruleset, it usually is not, and the people who farm it list more tomorrow.
• Cross-realm arbitrage. Buying cheap on one server to sell dear on another. There is no other server.
• Winning an undercutting war. On a thin realm you could see every competing listing. Against a deep book you are not setting a price, you are giving away margin to whoever buys next.

The full reasoning is in what having no realms changes. The short version: depth removes the leverage that thin markets gave individuals.

Trade against the median, not the minimum

Before any strategy, one habit. The minimum buyout is the cheapest listing at this instant. It is one seller, frequently one who wanted a fast sale, and in a deep market it is a poor description of what an item is worth. The median is the middle price across all units listed, and it is the number to think in.

Better still is the median over time. Every item page here carries a 7 day and 30 day median, which is what lets you say whether today is cheap rather than merely what today costs. Buying twenty percent under the 30 day median is a statement about value. Buying twenty percent under the cheapest listing is a statement about one person.

If you take one thing from this guide: a price is only information when you know what it usually is.

One: gather, because the reagent cost is zero

Gathering has no input cost, so whatever the market pays is the entire margin. No recipe can turn out unprofitable and no reagent price can move against you. In the opening weeks it is also the strategy with the strongest tailwind: everybody levels professions at the same time, so demand for raw materials runs ahead of supply while people are still training the skills that produce them.

It does not compound and it does not reward knowing anything, which is exactly why it is the right place to start and the wrong place to stay. See trade goods and the gathering professions on the professions page.

Two: craft what gets used up

A crafted item that a player keeps is sold once to each customer. A crafted item that a player consumes is sold to the same customer again next week. Potions, food, bandages, ammunition, enchants and bags are where the repeat business is, and repeat business is what makes an income rather than a windfall.

The arithmetic is not complicated but it is easy to get wrong in your head: what the result sells for, minus what every reagent costs at current prices, minus the auction house cut. That is done for you on the crafting page, every recipe ranked by margin, and explained in how crafting profit is calculated.

One warning specific to a realmless market: profitability is visible to everyone, so an obviously good recipe attracts supply quickly. The margins that last belong to recipes that are tedious rather than secret. That is covered in professions in Forever.

Three: flip patiently, against the 30 day median

Flipping still works. What changes is the timescale. On a thin realm you could buy an underpriced listing and relist it an hour later. Here the right trade is slower: buy when something is genuinely below what it has been worth for a month, and be willing to hold it until it is not.

• Judge cheapness against the 30 day median, not against the current cheapest listing.
• Check how many units are listed. A low price on a thin book is about to move anyway; a low price on a deep book is a real discount.
• Prefer things that are consumed, because they will sell again. A flipped piece of gear waits for one specific buyer.
• Do not chase. In a deep market another one will be listed cheap tomorrow.

The deal scanner does the first two of those for you: every listing sitting under its own 30 day median, across every market, ranked by the gold you save. It is free and needs no account.

Four: the faction gap, and what it costs to cross

Alliance and Horde do not share an auction house. That leaves the one durable price gap in the game, and unlike a realm gap it cannot be closed by anybody moving, so it can persist for days.

Crossing it means the neutral auctioneers, who take a larger cut than the faction houses. That fee is what decides whether a gap is worth anything: a few percent on a cheap reagent is noise, while a large difference on something expensive pays for the trip. Look for wide gaps on high-value items rather than for many small ones.

The same item priced across every market is on each item page, and market structure shows the depth and spread on each side so you can tell a real gap from a thin book.

What week one looks like

On launch day nothing has a price, because nothing has been listed and nobody has scanned anything. That does not make the first week unpredictable. Demand is set by what a level one character needs, and supply is set by what professions can make yet, which is not much.

Bags first, because every character starts short of space. Then the raw materials of the gathering professions, whose supply lags demand for a few days while people level the skills. Then the first consumables, as enough crafters reach the skill to make them. The detailed version, with the catalog pages to watch, is in the first week of a fresh economy.

One last thing, and it is the least glamorous advice here: the prices only exist because players scan the auction house and upload what they see. If your market has no numbers, that is because nobody is scanning it yet. Running the addon takes about ten minutes and makes the market you trade in legible to you before it is legible to anybody else.