What Sells in the Trade Services Channel
Most of the Forever economy is goods: stacks, bars, bags, finished craft. A smaller part of it is time, and time is sold in a different place and often for a different kind of payment. This is how the services side of the market is organised, what gets offered in it, and which parts of it we cannot yet describe with confidence.
A separate channel for selling time
Goods and services do not advertise well in the same place. A player scanning for a stack of herbs reads past a run offer, and a group looking for a tank reads past 40 lines of ore. Splitting the two is the reason retail clients carry a services channel alongside the ordinary trade channel, usually joined as /4 and shown as Trade (services). The number is not fixed to the name: it depends on which channels your character has joined and in what order, so the same offer can sit on a different key for the person reading it.
What goes into that channel is narrow. Run offers, crafting with a customer's own materials, enchanting a weapon handed over in a trade window, summons, portals and lockbox work. None of it is an item listing, which is why the auction house never sees it and why none of it shows up in any price history. A service is agreed in whispers, performed once, and leaves no record except in the two players' logs.
The economic effect is that a visible slice of demand never touches the supply side at all. A buyer who pays for an evening of somebody's time buys no reagents and lists nothing afterwards, and gold paid for class utility moves between players without a single item changing hands.
Paid in loot rather than coin
The second half of the services market is not priced in gold. A tank who joins a dungeon group as the fifth name can ask for an item instead of a fee: one drop from the run, named before the group sets off, reserved for them if it appears. Healers do the same, and so do players who bring a specific utility a group cannot form without. The payment is conditional, which is the whole appeal for the buyer, since nothing is owed if the item never drops.
This is a different arrangement from the one that is out of bounds. A reserve is agreed before the run, covers a named item and involves no bidding, while raids run as a gold auction price every drop during the raid and split a pot afterwards. The two are easy to confuse in a trade channel advert and are not the same thing in practice. What a reserve actually replaces is the ordinary roll, which is why the group's own agreement on need, greed and soft reserve matters more than the fee ever did.
For the person selling, a reserve is a bet on a drop rate rather than a wage. For the person buying, it is a way to fill a role without touching their bank. Neither side ends the evening with a number that can be compared against a farming hour, and that is the honest limit of this part of the market for a dungeon role.
Where the rules stop being clear
Three lines are firm. Anything paid for outside the game is outside the game's rules, whatever channel it was arranged in. Advertising is expected to stay in the channel built for it rather than spread across every other one. And an agreement between two players is still an agreement between two players: the game arbitrates nothing, holds nothing in escrow and remembers nothing about what was promised before the run.
The grey part sits between a reserve and an auction. A single named item agreed in advance reads as payment for a role. The same conversation held during the run, with several people naming figures, reads as something else, and the distinction is in the timing and in whether anyone bid. We are not aware of published wording that draws this line precisely for Forever, and we do not describe what happens to accounts on either side of it, because that is not ours to state.
The practical reading is to settle terms before the first pull, in plain words, in a channel you can scroll back through, and to treat anything agreed mid-run as a favour rather than a contract. The same caution applies to the payment step itself, where how gold reaches the other character is the part most arrangements leave to the end.
What we have not confirmed
We have not verified that Forever ships the dedicated services channel at all, nor which number it lands on for a given character, nor whether it is joined by default. Everything above about the channel describes how the split works where it exists; if Forever keeps a single trade channel, the offers simply share space with the goods and the rest of the arrangement is unchanged.
We also have no figures. We do not know what share of dungeon groups pay a tank anything, what a reserve is typically worth against a cash fee, or how often a reserved item fails to drop and the service is performed for nothing. None of that is published, and none of it can be read off the auction house, since services leave no listings behind. Where the rest of the market can at least be measured, the shape of the Forever economy has a blank in this corner, and we would rather name it than fill it with an estimate.
Questions
Why is there a separate channel for services?
Because goods and time are read by different buyers. Someone scanning trade chat for materials skips run offers, and a group assembling for a dungeon skips stack listings, so keeping the two apart makes both readable. Where the split exists, services sit in a channel usually joined as /4 and labelled Trade (services), though the number depends on which channels your character has joined rather than on the name.
Is paying a tank with a reserved item allowed?
An item named before the run and set aside for one player is an ordinary loot agreement between the group and the person filling the role, and it involves no bidding and no pot. What is out of bounds is the auction format, where drops are priced during the raid and the gold is divided at the end. We do not describe penalties on either side; the useful part is to agree the item before the first pull and in writing.
Does any of this show up in auction house prices?
No. A service is arranged in chat, performed once and paid in a trade window or in a loot roll, so it produces no listing and no price history. That means a real share of player spending is invisible to anyone reading the auction house, and any estimate of its size is a guess rather than a measurement.
Is a reserve better than a flat fee for the person selling?
It depends on the drop, which is exactly why both arrangements exist. A flat fee pays the same whatever the run produces; a reserve pays nothing when the item does not appear and more than a fee when it does. We have no published drop figures to compare the two against, so treat the choice as a preference for certainty or for upside rather than as a solved sum.
Sources
- Blizzard's support site is where chat channel behaviour and in-game conduct policy are published — Blizzard Support.
- Beta reports about how services are advertised and paid for are posted by testers here — Official WoW forums.