Hard Reserve Took the Place of GDKP
Removing the pot did not take gold out of raiding. It pushed it into reserved loot lists, carry fees and a long tail of small paid jobs, each with its own mechanics and its own money trail. This is how those arrangements work and where the coin actually ends up.
A hard reserve is a loot rule first
A hard reserve is an agreement made before the group forms. The organiser names a short list of items that will not be rolled on by the raid: when one of them drops, it goes to whoever the list says, and everything else is handed out under whatever system the rest of the run uses. Nothing about that requires money to change hands. The rule is older than Forever, it was normally used to keep a guild's priority drops out of a pug roll, and it works the same way with or without a fee attached.
What changed is the weight it carries. With a bidding pot out of the picture under the rule against GDKP runs, an organiser who wants a specific item has one obvious lever left: reserve it, fill the remaining seats with players who want the rest of the loot, and pay the raid in drops rather than in coin. The gold trail is shorter than a pot run. Either a buyer pays the organiser once, or there is no payment at all and the reserve is simply the price of the invite.
These runs are advertised where everything else is, and the services channel in trade carries most of the listings. Reading one means knowing the shorthand: which items are reserved, whether the reserve belongs to the organiser or to a paying guest, and what happens to a reserved item nobody has claimed. That last line is where pugs argue after the kill, and loot rules agreed before the pull settle it far faster than any discussion afterwards.
Carries are priced by the run, not by the drop
Boosting is the second arrangement that moved into the gap. A character able to clear a dungeon quickly takes a paying passenger through it, and the fee is quoted per run, per hour or per level rather than per item. The product is time, so the price does not move with the loot table. boosting through low dungeons is the version most players meet first, and the demand behind it comes out of the levelling brackets rather than out of raid night.
The raid version is the same deal with a bigger roster. A guild sells seats in a clear it intended to run anyway, the buyer gets the kill and whatever loot the agreement allows, and payment happens once. Where a pot paid the attending players, a carry pays the organiser and the organiser decides what the raid receives. That is the same gold distributed differently, and it concentrates income in fewer hands than the format it replaced.
Roles complicate the quote. A group short of a tank or a healer will pay to fill the slot rather than sit in the queue, and paying for a tank or healer is a separate market from boosting even though the coin moves the same way. Both rest on the assumption that an evening has a value, which is the part of services sold for gold that stays constant whatever the loot rules on the realm happen to be.
The small jobs underneath the raid listings
Beneath the carry and reserve adverts sits a longer tail of small work. Opening a lockbox, summoning somebody across the map, applying an enchant to an item the owner already carries, handing over a quest drop so a collection step can close: none of these is a run, and each is priced in minutes. a rogue opening lockboxes and a warlock selling summons are ordinary examples, and in both cases the alternative the buyer is avoiding is a long walk.
Enchanting shows most clearly how a service price forms, because the output cannot be posted on the shelf at all. enchants applied in person are quoted as a fee on top of materials, which is also how a bench charges for anything a customer brings to it. Where a reserve run hides the money inside a loot agreement, these jobs keep it in plain view: one trade, one fee, nothing to divide afterwards.
For a buyer the practical difference is worth naming. A boost or a small job is payment for work that is finished when it is finished. A reserved seat is payment for an opportunity: the item has to drop before the arrangement means anything, and the run can end with none of the reserved list on the floor. Asking which of the two is being sold is more useful than haggling over the quote.
What we cannot tell you yet
We have no published figures for what reserve seats, carries or small jobs are charged for on Forever, and we are not going to print a number we have not measured ourselves. We also do not know how the split between free reserves and paid ones settles once the first tier is open, since that depends on how many guilds would rather fill a roster than sell one, and that is a decision nobody has made in public yet.
Blizzard's stated position covers the pot format rather than every arrangement built around loot, and we have not seen a line that names hard reserve on its own. Until something is published, treat the sorting of these schemes as players reading a rule, not as a confirmed list. What is settled is that the money side of raiding did not vanish when the pot did: it moved into fees and loot agreements, which are harder to count from the outside.
Questions
Is a hard reserve run the same thing as a GDKP?
No. A GDKP is built on a pot: attendees bid gold for drops and the pot is split among the raid at the end. A hard reserve is only a loot rule, saying which items are not rolled on. It can be arranged with no gold involved at all, and when money is involved it usually moves once, from a buyer to the organiser, with nothing paid out to the other players in the group.
Do hard reserve runs always cost gold?
No. Plenty of them are guild runs where the reserve exists so that the people who organised the raid get the drops they came for, and the pug seats are paid in the rest of the loot rather than in coin. A fee only appears when somebody outside the group wants a specific item and the organiser is willing to sell the reservation. Read the advert rather than assuming either case.
Where did the income players used to take from a pot go?
It did not vanish, but it stopped being spread across the roster. Carry fees, role pay and small jobs are all paid to whoever did the work or arranged the run, so the same gold now reaches fewer wallets per raid. For an individual player, the replacement for pot income is usually selling a role, a boost or a profession service rather than attending a raid and collecting a share.
What should I ask before joining a listed run?
Three things: which items are reserved and for whom, how the rest of the loot is distributed, and what happens if a reserved item never drops. If a fee is involved, agree when it is paid and whether any part of it is returned. Those answers take one line each in a whisper and remove almost every argument that happens after a kill.
Sources
- Blizzard's official World of Warcraft site, where the Forever announcements and rule statements are posted — worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com.