Faction Choice Is an Economic Decision
Most faction arguments are about racials and capital cities. The money part is simpler and harder to undo: the side a character stands on decides who competes for its nodes, who is left to buy its stock, and whether the choice was ever fully the player's to make.
Forced balance decides who gets to roll
Several threads running over the past days keep circling the same point: on a PvP ruleset faction balance is enforced by the game rather than left to the players to sort out. The exact mechanism described differs from post to post — some read it as a hard block on creating characters for the crowded side, others as a softer steer applied at busy hours — and none of those posts quote an official wording. What matters for a gold plan is the consequence rather than the mechanism: the side a character farms on can be decided by when the account logs in.
That turns an ordinary roster decision into a scheduling problem. A gathering plan built on several characters only works if they end up on the same side, because a roster split across both factions cannot hand materials to itself through mail or a guild vault. Anyone intending to feed one crafter from two or three gatherers should create those characters inside the same session rather than across a week, and running a roster of alts is where the rest of that cost sits.
None of this applies evenly across realm types. A balance rule attached to open-world PvP is a different constraint from one on a realm where the two sides rarely meet, and realm type and farming speed already decides how long a route takes before faction enters the calculation. Treat the balance rule as one more input into which realm to start on before 4 November, not as something to work around afterwards.
Tauren gatherers crowd the same nodes
The second strand of the discussion is about Tauren and herbalism. The racial bonus to that gathering skill has been part of the character sheet since the original, and Forever hands a gathering profession to every character for free at around level 3, which means the bonus now lands on a far wider set of characters than it used to. A player who intends to spend evenings on herb routes has a reason to roll one specific race, and a number of posters say they are doing exactly that.
The money effect is not the bonus itself. It is the concentration. When one race is the obvious pick for one gathering trade, the players who care about that trade cluster on the side that race belongs to, and the herb routes there get walked more often by more people. Deeper supply means a seller clears stacks more slowly and for less, while an alchemist on the same side buys inputs cheaply. Racial bonuses that help gathering set the direction; the crowding decides what it is worth.
Node competition is also the part of farming that scales worst with company. Two gatherers on the same circuit do not double the take, they halve it, which pushes anyone serious about herbs towards off-hours or towards less obvious zones. How that trade-off plays out against other farming styles is covered in farming in a group against alone, and the arithmetic there does not change just because the competition shares your faction.
The buyer side skews with the population
Faction choice is usually argued as a supply question, and that is the half players underweight. Every stack posted has to be bought by somebody standing on the same side of the map, so the smaller faction is not only short of gatherers, it is short of customers. On a thin side, listings sit longer, undercutting bites harder on the items that move at all, and the gap between the price a seller wants and the price a stack actually clears for gets wider.
Which items suffer is not uniform. Raid and dungeon demand is the steadiest buyer list on any realm, and it scales with how many groups are actually forming rather than with the headcount on the login screen: potion and water restocking is ordered in stacks on a side that raids and in singles on one that does not. Service work points the other way. Fewer competitors means an enchanter or a summoning class on the smaller faction can quote a firmer price, because the buyer has nowhere else to go.
One structural detail changes the whole calculation if it holds. If the auction house pools listings across realm types, the shelf a seller faces is wider than one population, and a shelf shared between rulesets matters more than local headcount. The broader version of that argument, including what balance does to prices over a longer stretch, sits in faction balance and market prices.
What is not settled yet
We have not found an official statement describing how the balance rule on PvP rulesets is implemented, what it measures, or at what point it starts acting. Everything above about it is drawn from player posts, and those posts disagree with each other. We also have no published population split for either faction on any realm, so nothing on this page should be read as a claim that one side is larger than the other.
The same caution applies to the herb market. That Tauren carry a herbalism bonus is a character-sheet fact; that this will visibly move herb prices on one faction is our reading of how gatherers cluster, not a measurement. We are not quoting skill values, node counts or any figure that changes with a patch. If the balance rule turns out to work differently from how the threads describe it, the node competition and the buyer-side skew still stand, because both follow from where players end up rather than from how they got there.
Questions
Does faction choice actually change how much gold a character makes?
Not directly. No faction pays more per quest or per mob. What changes is competition and demand: how many other players walk the same gathering routes, and how many are left on your side to buy what you post. Both of those move the money, and neither is written on the faction select screen.
Should a gatherer roll Tauren for the herbalism bonus?
If herb routes are the plan, the bonus is a real advantage on that one trade. The counterweight is that every other player reasoning the same way lands on the same side, which thickens supply and sharpens node competition. We have no measurement of how strong either effect is, so treat it as a trade-off rather than as a settled answer.
Can a roster split across both factions share materials?
No. Characters on opposite factions cannot pass items through mail or a guild vault to each other, so a gathering plan built on several alts only works if all of them sit on the same side. If a balance rule can block creation on the crowded side, that is a reason to create those characters in one session rather than over several days.
Is the smaller faction better or worse for selling?
Both, depending on what is being sold. Goods compete against a smaller shelf but also against a smaller buyer list, so stacks sit longer. Service work tends to go the other way, because fewer competitors means a firmer quote. We have no population figures for either side, so this is reasoning about structure rather than a read on any specific realm.
Sources
- Blizzard's official World of Warcraft site, which is where any statement about realm rulesets and faction rules would appear first — World of Warcraft official site.