What a Tank Costs in a Forever Dungeon
A 5-player group needs 1 tank and 1 healer, and those 2 slots are the ones nobody has spare. When a group pays coin to fill one of them, the gold moves between players without ever touching a listing. This is how that rate is set, how the deal is settled, and which parts of it we cannot measure.
Why a role carries a price at all
A Classic-shaped dungeon group is 1 tank, 1 healer and 3 damage dealers. The 3 fill themselves within minutes of asking; the other 2 are the whole problem. There is no automated finder doing the matching, so every group is assembled by hand in a chat window, and the person holding that window eventually works out that the shortage has a price. Offering coin is the shortest way to turn a 40 minute wait into a start time.
This is a transfer, not a source. No gold enters the world when a tank is hired, which is what separates it from income earned clearing a dungeon, where the coin comes from vendor trash, drops and quest rewards. Role pay moves an existing pile from the player with less time to the player with less patience, and it leaves no auction record on either side.
It also sits apart from the raid-side argument. Our notes on the rule against raid gold auctions cover loot sold inside a raid to the highest bidder. Paying someone to show up and hold threat is a 2-party agreement about an evening, not a bid on an item, and we are not claiming the 2 are treated the same. What we can say is that the demand behaves differently: it repeats weekly and it is paid before the loot exists.
What moves the rate
The first input is the hour. A group forming at a quiet time of day is bidding against a much smaller pool of tanks than one forming at peak, and the same run costs more or less purely because of when the question was asked. The second is the dungeon itself: a short instance with 1 wanted boss is an easier sell than a long clear through a zone the tank has to cross on foot first.
The third input is opportunity cost, and it is the one that actually anchors everything else. A tank asked to spend an evening in a dungeon is giving up whatever that evening would otherwise have returned, which is why hours lost crossing the continent and the yield of a gathering route both feed into what sounds reasonable. A player who was going to farm anyway will quote near what farming pays; a player who was going to log off will quote whatever makes logging on worthwhile.
The fourth is specific to hybrids. A character who heals by default and is being asked to tank may need to pay the class trainer to change build, and the cost of resetting talent points gets folded into the quote or refused outright. The same applies to the healer who has spent the week in a damage spec. That charge is real, it is paid before the run, and it does not come back if the group falls apart in the first wing.
How the deal is settled
Most of these arrangements are agreed in a chat window and settled in a trade window, which is why they are hard to observe from the outside. Where services get advertised in Forever decides who ever reads the offer, and the same board carries requests from both directions: groups looking for a role, and tanks looking for groups willing to pay for one.
Payment lands in 1 of 3 shapes. Coin up front, which favours the seller and relies on the buyer trusting them to stay. Coin on completion, which favours the buyer and relies on the seller trusting them to pay. Or a split, half before the first pull and half after the last boss, which is what most regulars settle on because it spreads the risk across both sides of a run that may not finish.
The fourth shape is not coin at all. A tank can be paid with a reserved drop instead, which turns the arrangement into a loot agreement rather than a transfer, and need, greed and soft reserve become the terms of the deal. That version leaves no gold trail whatsoever. It is also the version most likely to go wrong, because the item may simply not drop, and nobody has agreed in advance what happens then.
What we do not know
We do not publish rates for this and we are not going to start. Any figure would be wrong within a week, it would differ by realm and by hour, and most of these deals are never visible to anyone outside the 2 chat windows involved. What we can describe is the shape of the market and the inputs that move it; the number itself is something you find out by asking in your own realm's channels.
We also have no confirmation of how common this is at launch. The argument for it is structural and does not depend on patch notes, but nobody has published a count of paid runs, and early weeks tend to run on guild favours rather than coin while everyone still knows everyone. Whether layers and how they split a realm make the shortage better or worse is an open question we have not seen tested.
And we have seen no statement from Blizzard that addresses paying another player for a group slot specifically. Absence of a statement is not permission and it is not prohibition; it is absence. If something is published later, it belongs in our notes on the shortage of tanks and healers rather than invented here.
Questions
Is paying a tank the same as buying a boost?
No. A boost is a higher-level character running a lower-level one through content the buyer could not clear, and the buyer is paying for the result. Paying for a role is a group that already has 4 members buying the 5th, and everyone present does their own run. The money moves for the same reason in both cases, but the service is different and so is the price.
Does the rule against gold auctions cover this?
We have not seen anything that says so. The published rule we know about concerns raid loot auctioned to bidders inside the raid, which is a different arrangement from agreeing a fee with one player before a dungeon starts. We are not going to extrapolate from one to the other, and if that changes we will say so rather than guess now.
Who usually ends up paying?
The player who has gold and no time, most often someone with a weekly routine who needs a specific dungeon finished tonight rather than eventually. The player who gets paid is usually the opposite: willing to spend the evening either way, and indifferent between a farming route and a run that pays about the same. When those 2 find each other the deal closes in under a minute.
What stops the person being paid from leaving halfway?
Nothing mechanical. The whole arrangement runs on reputation inside a fairly small group of regulars who all read the same channels, which is why split payment is common and why most repeat business happens inside guilds or between people who have run together before. A first deal with a stranger carries risk on both sides and the terms usually reflect that.
Sources
- Blizzard's official news channel, where any change to grouping tools or loot policy would be posted — World of Warcraft news.
- The official forums, where beta testers post the group-finding reports this page is built on — World of Warcraft forums.