The Forbidden Rites, hour by hour

Four days ago we wrote that a league start is a market coming into existence, and that once the hours existed we would write up what they looked like. They exist. The currency exchange published the Forbidden Rites for the first time at 22:00 UTC on 4 September, and what follows is the forty hours since, with the volume beside every price.

Nothing here is remembered. Every figure came out of the same hourly digests the league dashboard is drawn from, through the same arithmetic, so a number in this post and the same number on its item page are the same number.

The first hour was seven markets and one trade

At 22:00 the exchange named the league for the first time. It held seven markets, every one of them against the Exalted Orb: Orb of Chance, Regal Orb, Lesser Jeweller’s Orb, Armourer’s Scrap, Gemcutter’s Prism, Greater Jeweller’s Orb, and an Uncut Skill Gem.

Six of the seven had stock and no trade, and the stock is worth reading out: one Gemcutter’s Prism, one Greater Jeweller’s Orb, a couple of skill gems, five Armourer’s Scraps. Single digits, all of them.

The seventh is the first trade of the league: two Exalted Orbs for four Regal Orbs, at one Exalted for two Regals.

That is the whole economy of the league at hour one. Thirty-nine hours later it is 1,791 markets.

The exchange opens a league a few pairs at a time

Hour (UTC)	Markets published	Of them, priced
4 Sep 22:00	7	1
4 Sep 23:00	106	32
5 Sep 00:00	229	100
5 Sep 03:00	597	287
5 Sep 06:00	842	439
5 Sep 09:00	1,091	609
5 Sep 12:00	1,208	727
5 Sep 15:00	1,338	851
5 Sep 18:00	1,353	895
5 Sep 21:00	1,362	888
6 Sep 00:00	1,433	974
6 Sep 03:00	1,498	989
6 Sep 06:00	1,593	1,108
6 Sep 09:00	1,662	1,139
6 Sep 12:00	1,713	1,231
6 Sep 13:00	1,791	1,283

Two different things grow in that table, and the second column is the one nobody prints. A pair appears the moment somebody lists stock in it. It gets a ratio only in an hour when something actually changed hands there — so the right-hand column is not “markets we like the look of”, it is markets that traded.

That changes how the early hours read. A price from hour three is not merely a price from a thin market; it is a price from a market list that has barely been written. Seven pairs in eight that exist now did not exist then, so “nothing else was selling” was literally true, and had nothing to do with scarcity.

Neither column grows tidily once the first day is over. The exchange published 1,368 markets at 16:00 on 5 September and 1,329 an hour later, and the priced column went 895, then 888, then 974 across the rows above. A pair drops out of the list when its stock runs out, and by the second day stock runs out about as often as it appears.

The gap between the columns is the other half of it. In the first hour, one market in seven carried a price. By the second afternoon it is closer to seven in ten — and the remaining five hundred and eight pairs still have stock standing in them and nothing moving.

The Divine curve

Hour (UTC)	Price (Exalted)	Volume
4 Sep 23:00	29.5	416
5 Sep 00:00	34.5	6,796
5 Sep 02:00	44	52,089
5 Sep 03:00	33	83,110
5 Sep 04:00	47	120,824
5 Sep 06:00	46	205,955
5 Sep 08:00	50.5	296,306
5 Sep 10:00	53	374,958
5 Sep 11:00	56	422,359
5 Sep 12:00	47	467,846
5 Sep 13:00	66.5	562,973
5 Sep 14:00	54.5	655,753
5 Sep 15:00	73	677,712
5 Sep 16:00	75	673,091
5 Sep 18:00	69.5	624,437
5 Sep 20:00	68	575,545
5 Sep 22:00	73	605,344
6 Sep 00:00	72.5	747,968
6 Sep 02:00	79	993,081
6 Sep 03:00	73	1,138,083
6 Sep 04:00	40	1,200,449
6 Sep 05:00	38	1,306,199
6 Sep 06:00	71.5	1,554,004
6 Sep 07:00	39	1,725,500
6 Sep 08:00	84	1,866,262
6 Sep 10:00	88.5	2,144,832
6 Sep 12:00	83	2,486,888
6 Sep 13:00	95	2,871,691

The Divine Orb does not appear at all until the second published hour, at 29.5 Exalted. It has since more than tripled, which is the boring half of the table. Thirty-nine of the forty hours carry a price for it, and the table above shows twenty-eight of them.

The interesting half is that it did not treble smoothly. It went 44, then 33, then 47 over three hours of the first morning, and 56, 47, 66.5 in the middle of that day. The second morning then did it properly: 73, 40, 38, 71.5, 39, 84 — six consecutive hours in which the most heavily traded pair in the league halved and doubled and halved and doubled again. A thin market is the usual explanation for that, and it is not available here: the 40 was printed on 1,200,449 Exalted of volume, and the 39 on 1,725,500.

The volume column is the other thing worth staring at. The Divine market moved 416 Exalted in its first priced hour and 2,871,691 thirty-nine hours later. That factor of nearly seven thousand, and not the price, is the real event of a league start: a number nobody stood behind was replaced by a number that close to three million Exalted an hour stand behind.

What it cost to be early

Between the league’s opening quotes and now, these rose the most:

Item	From	To	Volume
Idol of Sirrius	2	51.5	7,881
Primate Idol	2	27	8,321
Greater Essence of Opulence	1	13	14,626
Uncut Spirit Gem (Level 8)	2	20	976

Read that as a list of things that went up and you have learned nothing true. Each of them opened at a round number somebody invented, because on hour one nobody knows what an Idol of Sirrius is worth, and 1 or 2 is what you type when you want it gone. The market then found out. Whoever sold at the invented price paid for the finding out.

The falls are the more useful list, because they have real markets behind them. The Uncut Support Gem (Level 5) opened at 13.5 Exalted and is now 3 — and it is the twenty-third busiest pair in the league, on 50,054 Exalted of volume, so that is not four people changing their minds. Greater Essence of Abrasion went from 25 to 1.5. Preserved Jawbone, from 11 to 2.

The post that promised this one put it in the abstract: scarcity on day one usually means nobody has got there yet, rather than that the drop is rare. This is the same sentence with prices on it.

What the league actually trades

Item	Price (Exalted)	Volume
Divine Orb	95	2,871,691
Chaos Orb	3	372,316
Omen of Abyssal Echoes	31	266,206
Perfect Jeweller’s Orb	88	237,463
Origin Spark	305.5	158,053
Origin Cradle	278.5	149,234
Omen of Light	70	142,950
Gemcutter’s Prism	6.5	131,684
Preserved Rib	17	129,747
Armourer’s Scrap	2	109,285

Currency and crafting orbs, with omens and bones in among them. The Divine market on its own is nearly eight times the size of the next one down.

What two days cannot say

The window is 40 published hours. Of the 1,791 pairs standing in the freshest of them, 666 are quoted against the Exalted Orb — those are the ones the dashboard lists, the rest trade two other things against each other — and 619 pairs carried a usable price at some point, over 17,318 market-hours, of which 487 are busy enough to be worth quoting at all. Set against a league, that is nothing.

The hole this post was going to end on has filled itself in the meantime. Yesterday afternoon no market in the league had a price from twenty-four hours earlier to be compared against, so the 24h column on the dashboard was blank, and the ranking of sharpest single-day moves, normally the most interesting thing we can compute, had nothing in it at all. Every one of the fifteen sharpest we can compute today is dated 6 September, because that is the first day on which the comparison exists at all. The sharpest of them is the Idol of Ralakesh: one Exalted in the small hours of 5 September, 87 at midnight on 6 September, on 10,677 Exalted of volume. The column did not need repairing. It needed a day.

And the Regal Orb is a standing reminder of what a first print is worth. The league’s opening trade valued one at half an Exalted. It is now an eighth of one, and its cheapest hour of the two days was a twelfth.

The hours arrive whether anybody writes them up or not. The league dashboard is the live version of everything above, and if the columns are not second nature, how to read the economy dashboard covers them properly.