Auction Deposits Decide What Is Worth Listing
Every listing is charged for before it earns anything. The deposit goes out when the stack is posted, the house takes a cut when it sells, and nothing comes back when it expires. On cheap materials that arithmetic quietly points at the vendor instead.
What a listing costs before it sells
Posting is not free. The auction house takes a deposit the moment the stack goes up and holds it for as long as the auction runs. If the item sells, the deposit comes back and the house takes its cut out of the sale price. If nobody buys, the deposit is gone and the stack comes back by mail, where posting it again costs the same deposit a second time. An item that takes 3 attempts to clear has been paid for 3 times before a single coin arrives.
Two things move the size of that charge: how long the listing runs and how much is in it. A longer duration costs more up front, and a stack split into separate listings is charged per listing rather than per item. The retail auction window handles some goods as commodities and some as individual items, and that split decides whether a seller is posting 1 thing or 20 of them.
On an item worth a mount payment none of this is interesting. The deposit is noise next to the sale. The question only becomes real at the other end of the shelf, where the deposit is a visible share of what the stack is worth and what a vendor pays for the same item is paid out immediately with nothing held back.
The floor is what hurts cheap stacks
Deposits are not purely proportional. Beta sellers report a minimum charge of 1 silver on a listing, which means the cheapest goods on the realm are charged at a floor rather than at a fraction. A stack of starter-zone herbs and a stack of mid-level ore can carry the same deposit while being worth very different amounts, and the cheaper stack gives up a much larger share of its value just to be visible. We have not seen that floor written down in a published note, so treat it as a beta observation to check on your own realm.
The floor is only half the problem. The other half is the chance of expiry, which is highest exactly where margins are thinnest: low-level materials have a thin buyer list, long gaps between buyers and competition from everybody levelling a gathering skill at the same time. A failed listing does not return to neutral, it returns one deposit poorer, and low-level stock on the auction fails more often than anything else.
The vendor has none of that structure. The price is fixed, the sale is immediate, there is no deposit and no queue. For a bag of grey drops, cheap hides and surplus ore the useful comparison is not what the auction might pay at its best, but what the auction pays on average once failed listings are counted against it.
Profession levelling is where this bites hardest
Crafting skill-ups produces the exact goods this affects: low-value items made in quantity, most of which nobody wants. A tailor working through early patterns, a blacksmith grinding the same bracers or an alchemist making the first tier of potions ends an hour with bags of output worth a few coppers each. Listing that output means paying a deposit per listing on items that are near the floor, and the cost of levelling a profession gets worse rather than better when half the stock expires unsold.
The same logic runs on the buying side. Picking up materials bought for skill-ups from the auction house means paying somebody who already paid a deposit to put them there, which sets a practical floor under what cheap reagents can be listed for at all. Below that floor the gatherer stops posting and sells to the vendor, which is why the bottom of the market thins out instead of getting cheaper.
Our reading: sort the bag before the town trip, not after. Anything whose vendor price is close to its likely auction price goes to the vendor without a second thought, and the auction is kept for stacks where the gap is wide enough to survive one failed listing. That rule costs nothing to apply and removes most of the deposits a levelling character would otherwise lose.
What has not been confirmed
Blizzard has not published a breakdown of deposit maths for Forever. We do not know the formula, whether the floor behaves the same for commodities as for single items, which listing durations are offered, or whether the cut taken on a completed sale matches earlier versions. Everything above describes how the mechanic has worked in the versions Forever is built from, plus what sellers report from the beta client.
Two behaviours in particular are worth testing yourself rather than taking from any guide, ours included: whether cancelling a live listing forfeits the deposit, and whether a stack returned from an expired auction can be re-posted at a reduced charge. Both decide how expensive an aggressive re-listing habit is, and neither is documented. How the auction house works in Forever is still being mapped by players, so the honest answer on exact figures is that we do not have them.
Questions
Does the deposit come back when the item sells?
In the versions Forever is built from, yes: a completed sale returns the deposit and the house takes its cut out of the sale price instead. An expired auction returns the item but not the deposit. Nothing has been published confirming that Forever keeps both halves of that rule, so verify it on a cheap listing before relying on it.
Is it ever right to list cheap materials?
Yes, when the stack is large enough that the deposit is a small share of it and the buyer list is real. Materials that feed active crafting have steady demand and clear quickly, which keeps the expiry risk low. The listing to avoid is the small one posted at the floor, where a single failure wipes out the margin you were hoping for.
Does cancelling a listing cost anything?
Historically a cancelled auction forfeits the deposit, which makes repeatedly undercutting yourself an expensive habit on low-value goods. We have not seen this confirmed for Forever specifically. Until it is, assume a cancel is paid for and post at a price you are willing to leave standing for the full duration.
Do vendor prices move the way auction prices do?
No. A vendor pays a fixed amount set by the item, so it is the one number in the economy that does not react to supply, time of day or what the rest of the realm is posting. That stability is the whole reason it works as a baseline: if the auction cannot beat it by a clear margin, the listing is not worth the deposit.
Sources
- Official World of Warcraft site, where any published change to auction house mechanics for Forever would appear — World of Warcraft official site.
- Blizzard customer support, which documents auction house behaviour across live versions of the game — Blizzard support.