The Forbidden Rites: a market that starts from nothing

On September 4 at 1 PM PDT, Path of Exile 2 gets patch 0.5.5 and an event league called The Forbidden Rites. Almost everything written about it this week is about Rituals and Wisps. This is about the other half of a league start: the money, which begins at zero and spends a day or two working out what it is worth.

What has actually been announced

Grinding Gear Games has confirmed the date and the shape of the event. Ritual comes to the campaign: you kill what guards an effigy, then raise it for another fight while the plague spreads. The Wildwood returns in the endgame with three kinds of Wisp that make monsters stronger and their rewards better. Eight challenges carry cosmetic rewards and a hideout statue. The largest single change in the patch is an overhaul of the Trial of Chaos. The Runes of Aldur league keeps running for anyone still finishing an Atlas or a challenge set.

The full patch notes are due a few days before launch, not now. That is worth holding on to, because everything circulating this week about what moves into the core game is a summary of a summary. If something tells you what will be expensive on day two, it is guessing.

An event league is a market of its own

A league in this game is a world of its own — its own characters, its own drops, its own trading. Nobody carries a stash into it. Whatever the mechanics turn out to be, that is the part that decides how prices behave in the first hours.

You can watch such a market come into existence, which is a strange thing to be able to say about an economy. The currency exchange publishes an hourly digest for each league, and the first time a league is named in that feed is the moment its market exists at all. This site reads those digests for every public league, so a new name reaches the switcher on the economy pages as soon as the exchange mentions it — usually before anyone has traded in it. That is deliberate: a league with no prices yet says so, instead of looking exactly like a league that ended long ago.

Why the first day’s numbers lie

They are not wrong, exactly. They are true statements about four trades.

Nobody holds anything. Early volume is thin enough that one impatient buyer moves a ratio further than a week of ordinary trading will later. The number on the page is real; what it describes is one person in a hurry.

The unit is moving too. Prices here are denominated in Exalted Orbs for Path of Exile 2, and in the first hours the meaning of one Exalted Orb is itself unsettled. A ratio is two moving things divided by each other, and early on both of them move.

Direction reverses. Things that look scarce at hour three are often ordinary by hour thirty, because scarcity on day one usually means nobody has got there yet rather than that the drop is rare.

So the number to look at first is not the price. It is the volume beside it. A thirty percent move on four trades and a thirty percent move on four hundred are the same sentence in a table and different events in the world.

What to read instead

Read the shape. A currency that climbed steadily through eight hours has been repriced by many people agreeing; one that leapt in a single hour and sat still has been repriced by one. The sparkline on the dashboard exists to tell those apart, and on the first day it carries most of the meaning the price itself does not have yet.

If the columns are not second nature, how to read the economy dashboard covers them properly.

Worth doing before launch day

Save your regex sets now. They are strings, not league data — the sets you keep for waystones, tablets, relics and vendor search work in a new league on the first evening, exactly as they did in the last one. Signing in keeps them across devices, and that is the only thing signing in does.

Decide where you will be trading. A fresh league is where people lose the most time asking the exchange for things it cannot sell them, and asking strangers for things the exchange would hand over in seconds. Currency exchange or trade site is the short version.

Expect the first stable prices to take longer than the first prices. There will be numbers within hours. There will be numbers worth pricing against somewhat later, and the gap between the two is where most launch-day trades go wrong.

We will be recording it hourly from the first hour the exchange publishes, the same way we record everything else — the whole point of keeping the hours rather than a snapshot is that a market’s first day can be looked at afterwards, by anyone, instead of remembered. Once those hours exist we will write up what they looked like: the first two days of a currency market, hour by hour, with the volumes beside the prices.