Services Players Sell for Gold
Not every coin in Forever is paid for something you can put in a bag. A summon, a portal, an opened lockbox and a craft made from the customer's own materials are all sold for gold, and none of them adds a single item to the listings.
A service sells an outcome, not an item
Every other income in Forever ends with something in a bag: a stack of ore, a pile of hides, a finished item that goes up for sale. A service ends with nothing to show. The warlock finishes a cast, the mage opens a doorway, the rogue works a lock, and what the customer paid for lasted a few seconds. That makes the service side the one part of the economy that takes coin without adding supply to the auction house, which is why it reads differently from making gold level by level.
The services players actually charge for in a Classic-shaped game are a short list, and they repeat on every realm:
- summons to a dungeon entrance or a far quest hub;
- portals to a capital for a player who does not want the flight path;
- opening lockboxes for players without a rogue or a key;
- crafting an item when the buyer supplies the materials.
All 4 sell the same underlying good, which is the customer's time. That matters for pricing: a service is worth whatever the ride, the flight or the alt would have cost in minutes, and it goes soft the moment the customer has nothing better to do with the evening. It also sits beside the wider paid services market rather than inside it, because nothing here needs a profession slot to start.
Summons and portals are travel sold by the trip
A summon is the clearest case. The warlock cannot do it alone: the ritual needs 2 other players to help channel it, so the seller is usually a group that wants a body at the stone anyway, and the fee is really a tip paid by the person arriving late. The economics of that are worked through in charging gold for a summon, and the short version is that the price tracks the length of the ride being skipped, not the effort of the cast.
Portals are simpler to sell and harder to price. The mage casts one spell, the customer walks through, and the only cost on the seller's side is the reagent, which belongs with the rest of reagents a caster buys weekly. Because the supply of mages standing in a capital is large and the work is trivial, portal money behaves like tipping rather than like a market: it holds up where there are few mages around and collapses in a crowded city square.
Payment order is the whole risk. A trade window moves coin and goods at the same moment, but a summon or a portal cannot be put in a trade window at all, so one side always goes first. Sellers who charge regularly take the coin before casting and say so plainly in the whisper; buyers who are nervous about that usually find somebody who will cast first for a smaller fee.
Lockboxes, keys and the rogue's side of it
Lockboxes come out of humanoids and chests all through the levelling range, and a character with no rogue alt either carries them around or pays somebody. The seller is a rogue with Lockpicking ranked high enough for the box, or a buyer of blacksmith-made keys, which makes this one of the few services where a crafting trade feeds a service market directly. That link back to the supply side is covered in professions as the supply side.
The awkward part is delivery. Opening a box takes 2 handovers: the customer trades the box across, the rogue opens it, and the rogue trades it back. The second handover is not protected by anything, which is why most of this trade happens inside a guild or between players who already know each other. Mail is the fallback for boxes that will travel, and that fallback disappears entirely under a hold on trade and mail.
Priced against the contents, the service is usually cheap, because what comes out of a box is mostly vendor-grade. Rogues who sell it steadily do so in volume in a capital rather than as a negotiated job, and most of the money is made on the convenience of not carrying 6 boxes in a bag that is already full.
Crafting with the customer's materials
The oldest service in the game is the one where the buyer brings everything and pays only for the skill. The crafter risks nothing but time, the customer avoids paying a crafter's markup on materials he already gathered, and the fee lands somewhere between a tip and a real wage depending on how rare the recipe is. The mechanics of taking work in that way are set out in orders placed with a crafter.
Two things limit it. The first is trust: materials go across in one trade, the finished item comes back in another, and nothing in the client ties the 2 together. The second is binding. An item that binds when it is made never reaches the customer at all, so the entire category described in gear that binds on pickup is outside this market, no matter who supplies the bars. Crafters with rare soulbound recipes sell nothing; they can only wear the result.
What we do not know. We have no confirmed statement about whether Forever ships any formal order interface for crafting, whether its summon and portal spells differ from the Classic versions, or which lock ranks the boxes in this bracket require. We are also not going to guess at going rates for any of these services before the realms are populated, because a service price is set by how many sellers happen to be standing in the same city, and that is not knowable from a test client. Anything on this topic that is not confirmed will be marked as unconfirmed when it is added, the same way we handle it in the economy without a Token.
Questions
Can a warlock really charge gold for a summon?
Yes, in the sense that nothing in the game prices a summon, so whatever 2 players agree on is the price. The practical limit is that the ritual needs 2 additional players to help channel it, which means a lone warlock cannot sell summons on demand and the trade tends to happen around groups that are forming anyway.
Is it safer to take payment before or after the service?
A summon, a portal and a lock opening cannot be placed in a trade window, so one side has to go first and there is no mechanism that settles both halves at once. Sellers who do this often ask for the coin first and say so up front. Buyers who prefer not to pay blind usually look for a seller willing to cast first for less.
Can a crafter make soulbound gear for another player if the materials are supplied?
No. An item that binds when it is created stays with the character who made it, so supplying the materials changes nothing about who can wear it. Only recipes that produce tradeable results can be sold as a crafting service, which is why the soulbound half of a profession earns nothing from customers.
Do service fees move with the auction house?
Not directly. A service adds no item to the listings, so its price is set by how many sellers are standing in the same place and how long the customer would otherwise spend travelling. That makes service money steadier than material prices in some weeks and worthless in others, depending on how crowded the city is.
Sources
- Blizzard's official World of Warcraft site, where Forever announcements and patch notes are published — World of Warcraft official site.
- Blizzard support, for the current guidance on in-game trading between players — Blizzard Support.