WoW Forever has no realms. Here is what that changes

What a realm used to be

A realm was a population boundary. Two or three thousand active players shared one auction house, and nobody outside it could list on it or buy from it. That boundary is what made the familiar patterns possible. A thin realm meant a handful of listings, so one determined seller could hold a price up for weeks. A busy realm meant deep supply and thin margins. The same item could be worth three times as much one server over, and the only way to act on that was a paid character transfer.

Every bit of that rests on the boundary. Remove it and the strategies built on top do not get harder; they stop having anything to act on.

Six markets, and what defines one

In Forever the only things that separate one auction house from another are the ruleset you play, the faction you picked, and the region you are in. Nothing else. In the US region that gives six markets: Normal, PvP and RP, each with an Alliance side and a Horde side.

• Normal is where most players are, so it is the deepest of the three and the one whose prices move on broad demand rather than on any one group.
• PvP flags everyone in contested zones, which makes gathering riskier and tends to lift the price of anything that comes from contested land, along with consumables that win fights.
• RP is usually the smallest population, so its supply is thinner: fewer listings on most items, a wider gap between the cheapest listing and the middle of the book, and more room for a patient seller.

Each of those six has its own page here, with the most listed items and how recently anybody scanned it. See the six markets.

Depth changes what a seller should do

A realm auction house might have held a dozen stacks of a common reagent. A Forever market holds whatever everybody on that ruleset and faction has listed, which is a much larger number. Depth is the word for that, and it has a direct consequence: with enough units listed, no single seller is a meaningful fraction of supply.

That kills the two most common seller behaviours carried over from realm play.

• Undercutting by a copper, repeatedly. On a thin realm this worked because you were competing with four other listings and could see all of them. Against several hundred units you are not setting the price, you are donating margin to whoever buys next.
• Buying out a market to reset it. Cornering something requires the supply to be small enough to buy. In a pooled market it usually is not, and if it is, the people who farm it will simply list more tomorrow.

The practical version: in a deep market, patience is worth more than speed. List at a price the market has actually paid over the last few days and let it sell, rather than racing to the bottom of a book you cannot see the end of.

The only gap left is between factions

Alliance and Horde do not share an auction house, in Forever as in every other version. That leaves exactly one durable price gap in the game: the same item can be worth noticeably more on one faction than the other, and it can stay that way for days, because the only way across is the neutral auctioneers and they take a larger cut than the faction houses do.

That cut is the whole trade. A gap has to be wider than the extra fee plus your time before it is worth anything, which means small percentage differences on cheap items are noise and large differences on expensive ones are the opportunity. The cross-market comparison on every item page is there to show you which is which: market structure puts the same numbers side by side per market.

Which Classic instincts stop working

Worth naming plainly, because they are all reasonable advice somewhere else.

• Server-first farming. Being early to a farm on a realm mattered because you were early relative to two thousand people. Here you are early relative to everybody, which is a much harder race and a much shorter lead.
• Transfer flipping. Buying cheap on one realm to sell dear on another has no equivalent. There is no second realm.
• Watching one competitor. On a realm you learned the names of the three people who mattered in your market. You will not learn the names here, and you do not need to.
• Pricing off the cheapest listing. The minimum buyout is one seller, often one who wanted a quick sale. In a deep market it is a poor description of what the item is worth.

What to watch instead

The things that still work are the ones that do not depend on a boundary: supplying what gets consumed, knowing what a thing is actually worth over time rather than right now, and being willing to wait.

• The median over 7 and 30 days rather than the cheapest listing, because it describes the market instead of one person in it.
• How many units are listed, which tells you whether a price is a real level or a thin book about to move.
• The gap between factions on items expensive enough to be worth the neutral cut.
• What each ruleset does differently, since PvP and RP are not just smaller copies of Normal.

For the mechanics of how those numbers are built, read how auction house prices work. For what to do with them in the opening days, read the first week of a fresh economy.