Logistics Decide Your Gold per Hour
Most farming plans are written as if the character is already standing on the node. The walk out, the walk back and the trip to a buyer are part of the same hour, and in Forever they are paid for in fares, in saved coin and in evenings that end before the route does.
The road is already in the hour you are counting
A route is usually described by what it yields once you are on it: so many nodes in a loop, so many stacks at the end. That description quietly assumes the character arrived for free. It did not. Getting to the zone, running the loop wide enough that the first node has respawned, and getting back to somewhere the stack can be sold are all inside the same evening. The yield belongs to the whole trip, not to the part of it spent gathering.
That matters most in the brackets where movement is slowest. A character on foot spends a larger share of its session travelling than one that has bought riding, which is why the real price of a mount is argued about as an income decision rather than a convenience. The same applies to the hops between zones: fares charged by flight masters are small each time and are charged again on every leg, so a plan built on constant repositioning pays for itself twice.
The honest way to read a route, then, is door to door. Count from the moment the character leaves a city to the moment the goods are listed and the bags are empty again. Routes that look close on paper separate quickly under that test, because one of them ends at a flight point and the other ends two zones from anywhere with an auctioneer.
Selling is a second trip, not a footnote
Gathered goods do not turn into gold where they are gathered. They turn into gold on a shelf, and the shelf is in a city. A loop that fills bags quickly but sits far from a capital is really two activities: the farming, and the haul. The haul has no yield of its own, which is why experienced players tend to pick slightly poorer routes with better exits over rich ones that strand them. How the shelf itself behaves is a separate matter, and the rules behind auction listings decide what the trip is worth once it ends.
Part of that trip can be removed rather than shortened. Characters parked in cities exist to receive mail and post it, and a network of bank alts turns a haul into a mailbox stop. The gatherer stays in the field, the seller never leaves town, and the only cost left is the delivery delay. That arrangement is also where a storage problem starts, since the goods have to wait somewhere between the field and the sale.
Bag capacity is the quiet half of all of this. A character that fills up mid-loop has to leave early, and the trip back is charged at the same travel cost as a full run. Buying carrying space is how that is avoided, and bag and bank slot costs are usually counted as a comfort purchase when they are really a logistics one.
Not every road is the same length on both sides
The map was never symmetrical. Capitals, flight networks and the zones that hold the richest gathering are laid out differently for each side, and that difference lands on the clock rather than on the loot table. One faction reaches a given zone with fewer stops; the other arrives later and leaves later. Nothing about the nodes changes, but the number of hours it takes to clear the same amount of ground does, and that is enough to move which routes are worth running at all.
The same asymmetry shows up on the selling end. Who is standing in the city when the goods arrive determines what they fetch, and faction balance and market depth is the part of the trip that a gatherer cannot route around. A short haul into a thin market is not obviously better than a long haul into a busy one.
This is also why faction asymmetry belongs in a logistics discussion rather than only in a levelling one. The gathering speed described in general guides assumes a neutral map. On a realm where one side is crowded and the other is not, the contested part is the road and the node, both at once.
Shortcuts you can buy, and what they take
Some of the road can be bought off. Riding is the big one and the obvious one. After that the shortcuts stop being purchases and start being services: a warlock pulling a group across the map, a mage opening a way to a capital. Those are charged by players, not by vendors, and summons and portals sold for gold exist precisely because the alternative is an hour of flight hops. What they save is time; what they cost is coin that leaves your pocket and stays in the economy.
Vendor-side travel costs behave differently. Fares go to an NPC and vanish, which puts them alongside repairs and training in the list of ways coin leaves the realm, and where gold leaves the economy is the frame to read them in. Over a levelling character's life the total is not large per trip and is noticeable in aggregate, particularly for anyone who repositions constantly.
Group play changes the arithmetic again. Travelling together costs the same per person as travelling alone, but the yield at the end is split or multiplied depending on the method, and farming in a group against solo is where that trade-off is set out properly. A shortcut that is cheap for one character is cheap for five.
What we do not know
We have no published distances, no fare table and no official statement describing travel time as a design target in Forever. Everything above is structural: it follows from how the map and the flight network are built, not from a figure Blizzard released. Where beta reports touched respawn timing and quest reward value, the direction was described without a zone-by-zone breakdown, so any estimate of how much of an hour the road eats is a player estimate.
We also do not publish gold-per-hour numbers for routes, here or anywhere else on the site. They depend on realm population, on which side of the map the character stands, on the hour of day and on how much of the loop is already taken. What we can say is which costs are in the sum. Filling in the figures is a job for your own session, timed door to door.
Questions
Is travel time really a cost if no gold is spent?
Yes, because the hour is the thing being spent. A route that yields the same stack in half the walking is the better route even when both charge nothing in fares. Gold per hour is a ratio, and the denominator includes every minute between leaving the city and listing the goods.
Should a gathering character buy riding as early as possible?
It depends on how much of the session is spent moving. A character that runs long loops across open zones recovers the purchase faster than one that farms a dense area near a flight point. The question is handled properly in our breakdown of what a mount costs and when it pays back.
Does faction choice change how long a farming route takes?
It can. Capitals, flight networks and the zones holding the best gathering sit differently for each side, so the same loop is reached with a different number of stops. The nodes are identical; the travel around them is not, and on a realm with uneven population the selling end differs too.
Are summons and portals worth paying for?
They are worth comparing against the trip they replace. If the alternative is a long chain of flight hops and a run on foot, a paid opening buys back a real part of the evening. If the destination is two zones away and well connected, it usually is not.
Sources
- Blizzard's official site, where Forever announcements and patch notes are posted — World of Warcraft official site.