Cross-realm search

Three ways to look at the same market, each answering a different question. Picking the wrong one is why searches sometimes feel slow or unhelpful.

One realm, or the whole region

The realm picker has an extra entry above the servers: Entire Region. It changes the question completely, and most confusion about the site comes from not noticing which mode you are in.

Region view aggregates every realm into one row per item: the cheapest price anywhere, which realm has it, total supply, and how many realms carry it at all. That last number is the one to look at before getting excited — an item on two realms does not have a market.

Why region searches take a moment

A realm search reads one server's listings. A region search reads all of them and aggregates. There is no way to make that free, and anyone claiming otherwise is showing you cached numbers without saying so.

What we do instead is be honest about it: the default region view is pre-warmed the moment fresh data lands, so it opens instantly. Add an unusual filter combination and you are asking a question nobody has asked since the last wave, and it takes a second or two to answer. After that it is instant for everyone until new data arrives.

Filters that change the answer

Most filters narrow a list. Three of them change what is being compared, and they are the ones worth understanding:

When a filter is set, the price shown is the matching version's price — not the item's cheapest listing overall. Ask for socketed and you get the cheapest socketed one, not the cheapest plain one with a socket mentioned somewhere on the realm.

Hunting by keyword

Sometimes you do not want one item, you want a family of them — every Tarnished piece, everything from a profession, everything matching a word. The keyword hunt scans across realms and groups what it finds, which is the fastest way to see whether a whole category is mispriced somewhere rather than one item.

Expanding a result keeps your place in the list rather than throwing you back to the top, because comparing twenty results means opening and closing them repeatedly.

Commodities are different

Herbs, ore, cloth and other stackable goods are not sold per realm — they trade region-wide on a single shared market. Comparing them across realms is meaningless, because there is only one price.

That is what the commodities toggle is for. Turn them off when you are hunting for realm-to-realm differences, because they will otherwise fill your results with items that are the same price everywhere by definition.

Then check the timestamp

Every price carries the time its realm last published. Before acting on a number, glance at it — and note that the two regions behave differently, which the update timing guide covers. A European comparison is a single moment; an American one carries a couple of minutes of blur.