December 11: what full release changes for trading

Path of Exile 2 launches as a fully free-to-play game on December 11 (PST). Grinding Gear Games announced the date at gamescom’s Opening Night Live on August 25, along with the Duelist, and that is the extent of what is settled. ExileCon on November 7 and 8 is where the rest gets explained.

That is a strange amount of certainty to plan around: a date, a price of admission, and a class. This is what can be said about the money side without inventing the rest.

Free-to-play is the economy story

For two years, playing this game required buying in. That paywall was doing something to the market nobody talks about: it filtered the population. Everyone trading with you had paid to be there.

On December 11 that filter comes off, and the trading population changes shape rather than merely growing. Expect more players, a much larger share of them new, far more small trades, and a different mix of what people want to buy — early progression gear and cheap currency rather than the top of the market. Prices move where demand concentrates, and demand from a crowd learning the game concentrates in different places than demand from a veteran population.

Two consequences worth preparing for.

The bottom of the market gets busy. Things experienced players ignore because they are worth a fraction of an Exalted Orb are exactly what a new player needs, in volume.

Scam pressure follows new players. It always does, and it works on people who do not yet know what a normal trade looks like. If you are one of them in December, trading in Path of Exile 2 for beginners is worth twenty minutes before your first big one.

The question nobody can answer yet

What happens to your Early Access characters, your stash and the leagues they live in has not been announced.

That is not a gap in this article; it is a gap in the public record, and it is the single most consequential thing for anyone holding currency right now. Every confident answer circulating today — that everything migrates, that nothing does, that there will be a launch league to start fresh in — is somebody’s guess wearing a headline.

The honest position is to know the shape of the uncertainty. Ask what a plan of yours assumes, and whether it survives being wrong. Currency you are holding for December is a bet on rules that have not been published; currency you are using now is not. GGG will explain this at ExileCon, five weeks before release, which is enough time to act on the real answer.

What our numbers will and will not carry across

We have recorded the currency exchange hourly since it opened in July 2026, which means the whole Early Access era of prices sits in one place, per league, per hour.

Whatever December brings, that record stays what it is: a picture of how a market behaved when everyone in it had paid to be there. A market that opens to everybody is a different market, and comparing the two will be interesting precisely because they are not the same population.

What it will not be is predictive. Anyone showing you an Early Access price chart as evidence of what a currency will be worth in a free-to-play launch league is comparing two things that share a name and nothing else.

Between now and then

The event league that started on September 4 is the nearer thing, and it rehearses in miniature exactly what December does at scale: a market from zero, thin and loud in its first hours, settling into something readable. The Forbidden Rites: a market that starts from nothing covers how to read one of those without being fooled by it.

Between them sits ExileCon, on November 7 and 8, streamed for everyone not in Auckland. That is when the release stops being a date and becomes a set of rules — and when planning for December turns from guessing into arithmetic.

Your saved regex sets, at least, are safe from all of it. They are strings, not league data: whatever happens to characters and stashes, the sets you keep here will still work on the first evening of whatever comes next.