Gold, silver and premium: reading the Albion market

Silver comes out of the world: mobs, dungeons, market trading, farming. Gold comes from outside: it is bought with real money and can also be bought from other players with silver. Nothing about that is exotic —what matters is that the exchange rate between the two is set by players every hour of the day, which means it moves.

What you are actually buying

• Premium status: paid in gold, for 30 days, and it is the only subscription the game has.
• Gold as a store of value: it does not lose value with patches the way silver does, because the amount of silver in the world keeps growing.
• Silver as working capital: it is what you need to buy a set on Monday and sell it on Thursday.

When someone says “the premium costs X silver”, they mean the gold price of premium multiplied by the current silver-per-gold rate. Those are two different numbers and they move for different reasons: the gold price of premium is a decision by the studio; the silver price of gold is a market.

How to read the gold page

The page shows the price of gold in silver, with its history for the current server. Read three things and ignore the rest: the direction over a couple of weeks, the range of the last few days, and the gap between the current price and that range. A single spike is usually a small trade moving a thin book; a sustained move over days is what actually changed.

The two taxes that decide your margin

Every market sale pays a transaction tax, and every order pays a setup fee. Premium cuts the transaction tax in half, which sounds cosmetic until you do the maths on a stack of enchanted gear: at low margins, the difference between the two rates is the whole profit. This is the single most common reason a crafting plan that looked profitable ends up at zero.

• Count the tax on the sale price, not on your cost.
• Count the setup fee on every order you place and cancel, including the ones you cancel to re-price.
• Decide the price with the tax inside it: if you need 10% net, the sell order has to be higher than cost plus 10%.

Where the mount page fits

Mounts are the cleanest example of a market with real demand: everyone needs one, they die constantly in lethal zones and their price follows the price of leather and the price of the materials used to craft them. The mount page groups them by tier and shows what each is worth now, so you can see at a glance whether breeding or crafting one is worth the materials —or whether buying it is simply cheaper.

All the numbers on these pages come from the game's public market API, refreshed every few minutes. That means they are real trades and real orders, not an estimate: if the page says a hundred units sold at a price today, that is what the market did today.