Faction Balance Splits the Auction House
Horde and Alliance do not trade in the same market. Each side posts into its own auction house, so the people who can bid on your stack are a share of the realm rather than all of it. When a realm leans one way and a faction lock holds it there, the two markets drift apart and stay apart.
Two auction houses on one realm
The first thing a seller runs into is that the realm population is not the buyer pool. Listings posted in a Horde capital are visible to Horde characters; Alliance characters shop from their own houses. The neutral auctioneers that sit outside the capitals are the only bridge, and they take a larger cut and sit further from where anybody is levelling. For everyday stock that is not a route most sellers use, which means the buyer pool for a stack of herbs is the part of the realm that plays your colour during the hours you post.
Depth is what changes when that pool shrinks. On the heavier faction there are many competing listings, so the spread between what a gatherer takes home and what a crafter pays stays narrow, and one seller dumping stock barely moves anything. On the lighter faction the same dump can set the price for a day, and a shortage can last until one gatherer decides to work that node again. This is the mechanism behind most complaints that a realm has an expensive side, and what actually reaches the listings explains more of it than demand does.
Thin markets also cost more to work. Fewer bidders means more items expire unsold, more relisting, more deposits paid twice on the same stack. A seller on the lighter side carries that overhead on every posting cycle, and it is the main reason buying low to resell higher behaves differently on each faction of the same realm.
What a faction lock does to the ratio
When a realm skews far enough, new character creation on the heavier side is closed. That stops the gap from growing, but it does not close it. Everybody already rolled stays where they are, and the players who would have joined the crowded side go to another realm or to the other faction entirely. The lock freezes the ratio rather than correcting it, so the imbalance a realm shows in its first weeks is broadly the imbalance it trades in afterwards.
For a gold plan that turns a temporary-looking condition into a planning assumption. A crafter who picks a trade on the thin side because materials are scarce and prices are high is betting that supply arrives later; a lock on the other side makes it less likely that the people who would have supplied it ever show up. The same logic runs the other way: a gatherer on the crowded side is competing with more people for the same nodes, and who is actually online buying decides whether that competition is worth the hours.
Locks also move players sideways rather than away. A household that wants both factions ends up with characters on two realms or two accounts, and the roster plan absorbs the cost. That is a different bill from the one a single-faction roster pays, and it lands before a single stack is posted.
Where the two markets actually diverge
Supply splits first. Levelling corridors are not shared: each faction has its own starting zones, its own quest hubs and its own set of convenient routes, so the herbs, ore and hides that hit the listings early are not the same mix on both sides. On contested ground the heavier faction holds the node fields more often, which means the lighter side pays in interruptions for the same stack. That cost is real and it is paid in time, which is the arithmetic in gathering routes on a PvP realm.
Race is the other half of the supply split, because the racial lists are faction-bound. A gathering bonus that sits on the skill itself belongs to one side only, and the perks on the other side may pay in movement rather than in yield. Over a realm's worth of gatherers that difference shows up as a small permanent tilt in how much raw material reaches each auction house, and what a racial adds to a route is where that tilt starts.
Demand diverges in a louder way. Service markets need a crowd: paying for a dungeon role, for an enchant, for a summon, all of it depends on enough strangers being online at once to make the asking price normal. The lighter faction has fewer sellers and fewer buyers, so prices for gold paid for a dungeon role are set by whoever happens to be available rather than by a going rate.
What we are not claiming here
We have no published faction ratios for Forever realms, and we are not going to estimate them. We also have no statement describing the threshold at which creation closes on a side, how often it is reviewed, or whether a lock is lifted once the gap narrows. Anything circulating with a specific ratio attached to it is somebody's reading of a login queue, not a figure from Blizzard.
The same applies to the neutral auctioneers. We know they exist as the cross-faction route and that their cut is the higher one; we have not seen a confirmation that Forever keeps the cut where previous Classic versions had it, and we are not quoting a number for it. If that changes, the thin-side arithmetic above changes with it, because a cheaper bridge makes the two markets behave more like one.
What is safe to plan around is structural rather than numeric: the houses are separate, the levelling corridors are separate, the racial lists are separate, and a lock holds whatever ratio a realm settled into. Everything else on this topic is worth treating as a guess until somebody publishes it.
Questions
Can I sell to the other faction at all?
Yes, through the neutral auctioneers, which are the only cross-faction route for goods. They charge a larger cut than a capital house and sit away from the places people level, so for ordinary stock most sellers never use them. They matter most for items that exist on one side and are wanted on the other, where the higher cut is still smaller than the shortage.
Does the heavier faction always have cheaper goods?
Usually for common materials, because more gatherers are feeding the same listings and the competition between sellers narrows the spread. It is less reliable for services and for anything that depends on a single crafter, where having more people also means more buyers chasing the same seller. The pattern to expect is not cheaper everywhere, but steadier: prices on the crowded side move less from one evening to the next.
Is the lighter faction a bad place to make gold?
It is a different place, not automatically a worse one. Materials sell for more and competition for nodes is thinner, which suits gatherers; the cost is slower turnover, more unsold listings and a service market that depends on who happens to be online. The side that pays better depends on whether your plan sells volume or sells time.
Will the ratio even out later?
A lock stops it from getting worse rather than reversing it, since the players already on the heavy side are not moved and new arrivals are sent elsewhere. We have no statement on whether locks are lifted once a gap narrows, so treat the ratio your realm shows as the one you will be trading in for the levelling window.
Sources
- Blizzard's own news archive, where realm and faction announcements are posted when they happen — World of Warcraft news.