MMO News Weekly #11 — WoW Forever Bans GDKP Before It Opens

Edition #11 · Week of September 14 – September 20, 2026

Two of the year's biggest content events landed four days apart — Guild Wars 2's Code of Creation finale and the World of Warcraft: Forever beta — and between them they moved almost nothing. The week's real market news was written in rules, not prices: Blizzard outlawed a gold-laundering ritual in a WoW economy that does not exist yet, and CCP put a date on the patch that deletes an EVE Online commodity's reason to exist.

Market Movers

World of Warcraft: Forever bans GDKP before it opens a single auction house. The WoW Forever beta went live Thursday September 17 and ran through a developer Q&A the same day, where Senior Game Designer Josh Greenfield said flatly that Forever will not allow GDKP raiding — the gold-for-loot raid format that, where it takes root, crowds out guild raiding and funnels players toward buying gold. Blizzard paired it with a promise of "a more aggressive approach to combatting gold selling, and more importantly gold buying", citing WoW Season of Discovery as the precedent that worked. The structural detail matters more than either: WoW Forever has no realm list at all. Four rulesets — Normal, PvP, Roleplaying, Hardcore later — each run as one shared world per region, so Forever opens with the largest single-pool level-60 gold market Blizzard has ever run, and no WoW Token feeding it. Launch is November 4.

Guild Wars 2's Code of Creation lands and the Trading Post doesn't blink. The Visions of Eternity finale arrived Tuesday September 15 with the Leyspring Hollows zone, the Nexus of Eternity raid and Convergence, the Solitary Throne fractal and the Wages of Stars legendary sword. A new legendary normally drags a materials rally behind it. This one didn't: AuricDB's Guild Wars 2 board closed the week dead flat, 23,976 of 27,754 Trading Post items unchanged. Either the run-up already happened quietly or it is still coming — and the raid's Challenge Mode on September 29 is the next date that would trigger it.

WoW Retail's gear board liquidates while its recipe board goes vertical. Three of four WoW Retail realms we track fell double digits in a day, led by Area 52 at −15.3%, with the Tarnished Dawnlit gear complex marked down 33–90% across realms. The money went somewhere specific: profession recipes, which were essentially the only green prints on the board. That is what positioning into an unannounced WoW Retail patch 12.1.5 looks like — and 12.1.5, with its five-million-gold Sporebearer Fungal Strider, still has no date.

Albion Online's mount bid unwinds as bag money climbs the ladder. Last week's spectacular Albion Online mount rally gave it back — Swiftclaw −2.8%, Journeyman's Riding Horse −12% — while the Albion bag complex split cleanly by tier: Grandmaster's and Master's bid up, the cheap Adept and Expert lines dumped. Traders rotated up-market, not out.

What Our Data Shows

• Guild Wars 2's Iron Ore printed 67 trades at −2.2% and was once again the only item on the Guild Wars 2 Trading Post with real volume — every other mover managed exactly five trades, in the week its biggest update of the year shipped.
• WoW Retail's Pattern: Thalassian Competitor's Cloth Gloves hit 50,000g on the realm Illidan, up 9,898.2%, with Pattern: Thalassian Competitor's Leather Wristwraps at 17,491g (+1,843.6%) on Area 52 and Design: Stoic Eversong Diamond at 30,000g (+521.1%) on Azjol-Nerub. Four trades each — thin, but all pointed one way.
• FFXIV's Rose Gold Ingot is the cleanest cross-world divergence of the week: +139.2% on Gilgamesh, +52.4% on Adamantoise, −10.1% on Balmung and −51% on Behemoth. Same ingot, same seven days. The broad FFXIV metal bid that followed the FFXIV 7.56 patch has narrowed to a handful of names — Electrum Ingot gave back 83.1% on Adamantoise and 70% on Behemoth.
• Path of Exile's 3.29 Curse of the Allflame league saw its crafting tape move: Orb of Fusing +42.8% against Stacked Deck −29.6% and Ancient Orb −29.8%. Gambling sold, crafting bought — a late-league signature.
• Albion Online's Grandmaster's Bag ran to 180,000 silver (+48.8%) on 124 trades while the highest-volume item on the whole Albion board, an Expert's Bag line, fell 28.5% on 182. Worth an alert either way before the next Albion Online Invasion Day.

Around the Games

Final Fantasy XIV had no news at all — its board is still digesting the September 8 FFXIV 7.56 patch, with all four tracked worlds' indices down 1.5–2.5% and Black Star off another 83.7% on Gilgamesh. WoW Retail got September 15 hotfixes that raised the Tidal Spark Dust base cap from 1 to 3 and retuned Midnight Season 2 trinkets by 15–80% — a direct input to crafted-gear demand. Path of Exile saw no 3.29 Curse of the Allflame content patch in week eight, and the Lesser Eldritch Ichor run that led the Allflame board for three weeks flattened to zero. Albion Online published its Region Queue guide on September 14 and closed Guild Season 34 bundles on September 18. WoW MoP Classic remains in its final raid tier, Siege of Orgrimmar; WoW TBC Anniversary still has no Phase 4 date; Path of Exile 2, RAID: Shadow Legends, Black Desert and Throne and Liberty were all quiet in window.

The Wider Market

• EVE Online announced its Force Projection major update on September 15, shipping September 22, and it is the biggest commodity story of the week: Ansiblex Jump Bridges stop burning Liquid Ozone and switch to a capacitor charge, access narrows to alliance-only, and capitals are barred outright. CCP has said it will watch the market and adjust sinks — a polite way of saying nullsec's largest ozone sink is being switched off. Triglavian hulls also get cheaper on reduced material requirements.
• Lost Ark published Roadmap Part 4 on September 17: the eight-player Belgardin raid, The Denouement at Extreme, and a brand-new equipment slot in Bracers whose upgrade materials are gated behind Belgardin — a new honing curve on a market still absorbing September's server merges.
• RuneScape 3's Leagues II: Equilibrium closed September 21 after six weeks. Because RS3 league characters are ironmen with no trading and no Grand Exchange, the mode drained main-game GE activity rather than feeding it — the close hands it back.

Storylines to Watch

• World of Warcraft: Forever's new economy — beta opened September 17, GDKP banned outright, gold buyers warned of permanent bans, and a realmless four-ruleset structure that means one auction house per ruleset per region.
• WoW Retail patch 12.1.5 — still no date, while our realm boards dump WoW Retail gear and bid its recipes in anticipation.
• Guild Wars 2's Code of Creation — shipped September 15 with the Wages of Stars legendary sword and produced no measurable Trading Post move at all.
• EVE Online's Ansiblex ozone shock — finally dated: September 22.
• Path of Exile's 3.29 Curse of the Allflame league — week eight, no content patch, and the Lesser Eldritch Ichor rally is over.
• Albion Online's Dragonfire mount-as-material economy — the mount bid unwound this week; bag money moved up-tier instead.
• FFXIV's Dawntrail 7.5x cycle into Evercold — four negative world indices and a metal bid that narrowed rather than held.

Industry Notes

Amazon's exit from MMO publishing keeps setting dates rather than making news: New World: Aeternum's servers close January 31, 2027, while the Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty handovers to Smilegate and NCsoft stay on track. Three player economies changing custodian inside six months.

The Week Ahead

• Dune: Awakening — console launch (PS5, Xbox Series X|S) and character-centric PC update, September 22 UTC
• EVE Online — Force Projection major update; Ansiblex Liquid Ozone consumption removed, September 22 UTC
• Guild Wars 2 — Code of Creation raid Challenge Mode (Nexus of Eternity), September 29 UTC
• Darkfall: Rise of Agon — beta testing opens, September 30 UTC
• Albion Online — Guild Season 34 mid-season Invasion Day and storage payout, October 10 UTC
• Guild Wars 2 — Code of Creation Legendary Mode, October 13 UTC
• World of Warcraft: Forever — beta ends, October 21 UTC
• Final Fantasy XIV — Tokyo Fan Fest, Evercold expansion details, October 31 – November 1 UTC
• World of Warcraft: Forever — launch, November 4 UTC
• Path of Exile — ExileCon 2026, Auckland, November 7–8 UTC
• Path of Exile 2 — 1.0 launch, ending the Runes of Aldur and Forbidden Rites leagues, December 11 UTC