Neutral auction house in WoW Forever: cross-faction trade

What the neutral auction house is

World of Warcraft: Forever has two kinds of auction house, and the difference between them is the whole subject of this guide. A faction house belongs to the Alliance or to the Horde: an Alliance player sees only Alliance listings, a Horde player only Horde ones, and the two populations never meet there. The neutral house is the exception. Its auctioneers are goblins, they take listings from both factions, and a Horde seller and an Alliance buyer can complete a sale through it without ever being able to speak to each other.

Forever keeps the Classic Era rules for all of this, so nothing here is new mechanics. What is new is the scale. Forever has no realms, which means one ruleset and faction in a region is a single market holding everybody who plays it, and the neutral house is the only bridge between two markets that are each far deeper than any Classic realm ever was. The no-realms guide explains why that leaves the faction gap as the one durable price difference in the game; this guide is about crossing it.

Three things decide whether a cross-faction trade is worth making: how far apart the two factions' prices are, how much the neutral house keeps, and how long the round trip takes. The sections below take them in order, with the current numbers from the scans.

Where the neutral auctioneers are

There are three neutral auction houses, and they are one house in the same way the three Alliance cities share a house: a listing made at one appears at the others. They stand in Gadgetzan in Tanaris, Booty Bay in Stranglethorn Vale, and Everlook in Winterspring. All three are goblin towns a long way from the capitals, which is part of the price of using them. The auction house page links each one to its zone map.

Booty Bay is the one most players reach first. It sits at the southern tip of Stranglethorn, a zone both factions level through in the 30s and 40s, and it has a boat to Ratchet on the Horde side of the Barrens, so a trader with characters on both factions can park one in Booty Bay and one in Ratchet with a short sail between them. Gadgetzan is the busier house for players in their 40s and 50s, and Everlook is for characters who are already in Winterspring and nobody else.

The neutral house shows listings from both factions, but each faction house shows only its own. A price you see in Orgrimmar tells you nothing about Stormwind. Every item page on this site shows the same item on every market side by side, which is the only way to see the gap without an alt on the other side.

What crossing costs

A faction auction house keeps 5 percent of the sale price. The neutral houses keep 15 percent. That is the Classic Era rule and Forever keeps it, so a 10 gold sale through Gadgetzan returns 8 gold 50 silver to the seller instead of 9 gold 50. On top of the cut there is the deposit, charged when you list and set from the item's vendor sell price and the listing length of 12, 24 or 48 hours; it comes back if the item sells and is lost if it does not.

The 15 percent is not the only cost. A sale pays out by mail about an hour after it completes, so gold crossing from one faction to the other spends at least an hour in transit, and the item itself has to be listed, bought, collected from a mailbox, carried to a faction city and relisted before it earns anything. Count the second listing's cut too. An item bought on the neutral house and sold on a faction house pays 15 percent on the way across and 5 percent at the end, so the gap between the two factions has to be wider than about a fifth of the price before the trade clears zero, and wider still before it pays for the time.

The cut calculator on the auction house page works this out for any price and either house. The rule of thumb that falls out of it: ignore any faction gap under 25 percent, and look hard at anything over 50.

How wide the faction gap really is

The gap is not a theory. On the US Normal markets, 874 items have at least five listings on both the Alliance and the Horde side in the last two days of scans. For the typical one of them the 7 day median on one faction is about 31 percent higher than on the other. Alliance is the dearer side for 41 percent of those items and Horde for 59 percent, so neither faction is simply richer; the gap runs item by item, driven by which faction has more of the crafters, the farmers or the buyers for that one thing.

The tail is where the trade lives. These are the widest gaps in the current scans, by ratio of the 7 day medians, with the dearer side named:

• Red Whelp Gloves, about 10 gold on Horde against under 1 gold on Alliance, a ratio above ten. A leather crafting pattern result that one faction clearly values and the other dumps.
• Blueprint: Anvil, six times dearer on Horde. The Forever building blueprints are a new item class and their prices have not converged across factions at all.
• Blueprint: Journeyman Campfire, the other way round: more than three times dearer on Alliance.
• Blueprint: Tanning Rack, twice the price on Alliance with 40 to 60 listed on each side, which is a deep enough shelf to trade in size.
• Bolt of Runecloth, two and a half times dearer on Alliance over the week, and Rosecap, a Forever herb, two thirds dearer on Alliance with 22 to 44 listed. Trade goods with steady demand on both sides are the safest version of this trade because the gap tends to persist.

Two cautions about that list. A ratio built on eight listings can be one seller's mistake, so prefer the items with dozens listed on each side. And the gaps move: the current median on several of these items has already crossed back toward the other faction since the 7 day figure was set. The market structure page shows the per-market numbers for any item you are weighing, and the item page carries the 7 and 30 day medians for both sides.

How to trade across the gap

Two characters, one on each faction. The neutral house is open to a single character, but a single character can only sell into it, not buy from the other side's faction house. The working setup is a seller on the cheap faction who lists on the neutral house, and a buyer on the dear faction who collects there and relists at home. Both characters need to reach a goblin town, which for a fresh character means Booty Bay by level 30 or so.

Pick the item from the gap, not from the price. A 50 percent gap on a 50 silver item is 25 silver before two cuts; a 50 percent gap on a 20 gold item is 10 gold. The ratio tells you whether a trade exists, the absolute gap tells you whether it is worth your hour. Sort by the gap in gold, then check the shelf depth on the dear side, because a shelf of eight listings will not absorb twenty of yours.

Mind the clock. List on the neutral house for 12 hours, buy within the first hour on the other character, and expect the gold an hour after that. A trade that needs both characters online at once is really a trade with a friend, and if you have a friend on the other faction you do not need the neutral house at all: list the item for a copper, have them buy it, and the 15 percent cut becomes the deposit.

Use the tools for the watching. A watchlist entry on an item shows its price on every market, so a gap that opens on Tuesday night is visible on Wednesday without a scan of your own. The prices guide explains why the median rather than the cheapest listing is the number to trade on, and the Tuesday Ledger tracks the widest faction gaps week to week.

What changes on 5 November

Everything above is measured on the beta economy, where a few thousand players have been trading since September. Launch on 5 November fills both factions at once, and the first effect is that the faction gaps close for cheap goods and open for anything a quest chain or a profession favours on one side. Horde and Alliance level through different zones for the first thirty levels, which means different gathering nodes, different vendor recipes and different drops arriving on each house in different quantities. Those are the gaps to watch in launch week, and they will be at their widest before anyone has a character in Booty Bay to close them.

That timing is the opportunity. Nobody can cross the gap until they can reach a goblin town, so the first traders to get a character of each faction to Booty Bay will have the widest gaps of the year to themselves for a few days. The EU markets will run the same curve from the same hour, with their own gaps, and the first week guide covers the rest of what a fresh economy does in its first seven days.