One Auction House Serves Every Ruleset
A ruleset describes how a character plays. It does not automatically describe what that character pays. If the rulesets in Forever list into the same market, then the price of a herb stack is set by every gatherer on the realm set at once, and the ruleset label on a buyer changes nothing about the number they see.
What a shared market actually means
Most discussion of rulesets is about risk and death, not about money. The money question is simpler and it has one hinge: does a hardcore character, an RP-PvP character and an ordinary character see the same list of stacks when they open the auction window. If they do, supply pools. A shortage caused by a handful of gatherers logging off on one ruleset is covered by gatherers who never share a zone with them, and the shortage never reaches the price.
That pooling works in both directions. Demand pools as well, so a buying wave started by one group of players is paid for out of everybody's stock. The auction house becomes the one place where rulesets stop being separate worlds and behave as a single population of buyers and sellers. Everything we publish about what gold costs to buy assumes exactly that, which is why one market read is offered rather than one per ruleset.
Where the rulesets stop being the same market
Shared supply does not mean shared demand. A hardcore character buys differently because a mistake ends the character rather than the evening, so the shopping list leans toward anything that prevents a death and away from anything that merely saves time. The same logic runs through the hardcore ruleset bill, and it is a demand pattern, not a separate shelf. The stacks come off the same listings as everyone else's; the basket is what differs.
There are also players who are shut out of the market by choice or by rule. A character running under self-found restrictions contributes neither supply nor demand and simply does not appear in the price at all. Death handling pulls the other way: where a mistake costs coin instead of a character, repair and corpse-run costs drain gold out of the same wallets that would otherwise bid on the shelf.
What a shared shelf does to the price curve
A pooled market is a calmer market. Spikes need more buyers to start them and more missing sellers to sustain them, because the gap can be filled by anyone on any ruleset. The flip side is that a shock nobody on your ruleset caused still lands on your bill: a raid-night buying wave somewhere else empties the same listings you were planning to shop from, and the only visible sign is the number on the stack.
Two divisions survive the pooling. Factions still shop apart on most stock, so the size of each faction's buyer pool keeps two different prices alive inside one realm. Population spread matters too, and what layering does to gathering decides how much raw material reaches the shelf in the first week. Mechanics do the rest: how commodities and items are listed sets whether a stack competes on price alone.
What we have not seen confirmed
We have not seen a published note that spells out which realms and rulesets share listings in Forever, and we are not going to assume the arrangement is identical for every ruleset. The open questions are concrete: whether hardcore listings sit beside standard ones, whether the RP-PvP realms are inside the same pool or beside it, and whether neutral auction houses behave the same way as faction ones. Nothing on this page should be read as an answer to those three.
Our reading: plan as if supply is shared and demand is not. That assumption costs nothing if the markets turn out to be split, because a split market only makes local scarcity more visible, not less. If a note lands that contradicts any of it, the section above gets rewritten rather than quietly adjusted, and the history block at the bottom will say so.
Questions
Do hardcore and standard characters buy from the same listings?
That is the working assumption behind every price figure we publish, but it is an assumption rather than a confirmed arrangement. We have not seen Blizzard spell out which rulesets share an auction house in Forever, so treat a shared shelf as the likely case and a split one as possible until a note says otherwise.
If the market is shared, is there one price for everything?
No. Factions shop apart on most stock, so each side of a realm can carry its own price for the same item, and the neutral auction house is a separate venue with its own fees and its own thin supply. A shared ruleset pool removes one division, not all of them.
Can I buy cheap on one ruleset and sell high on another?
If the listings are genuinely shared, there is nothing to arbitrage, because both sides of the trade are looking at the same list. If they are not shared, the characters still cannot move between rulesets with their bags, so the only thing that could cross is a separately earned stock on a separate character.
Does a self-found character affect the shared price?
Only by absence. A character that cannot trade or use the auction house adds no supply and places no bids, so it sits outside the market entirely. The practical effect is a population that looks larger than the buyer pool actually is, which matters most when judging how deep demand really goes.
Sources
- Blizzard's official news feed, where any note about auction houses, realm sets or ruleset handling would be published first — World of Warcraft news.