MMO News Weekly #16 — Path of Exile's Allflame Wealth Walks to Standard

Edition #16 · Week of October 19 – October 25, 2026

Nothing shipped in Path of Exile this week, and it still produced the biggest market story. With 15 days left on the 3.29 Curse of the Allflame league, wealth has started walking to PoE Standard, and our price tracking caught the handoff in the currency tab before any patch note mentioned it. Elsewhere, the reverse: three weeks after WoW Retail's patch 12.1.5 turned its auction house into a recipe market, the recipes priced out.

Market Movers

Path of Exile's Allflame wealth starts walking to Standard. The 3.29 Curse of the Allflame league closes November 9 at 21:00 UTC, with PoE 3.30 following November 13 and its reveal at ExileCon on November 7–8 in Auckland — dates Grinding Gear Games locked in on October 12. Traders are front-running the rollover. On Path of Exile, the Allflame-to-PoE-Standard Mirror of Kalandra discount narrowed to 60.1%, breaking a three-week run of record-wide spreads, while PoE Standard currency was bid hard enough to lift its whole materials category +30%. Allflame currency went the other way. That is end-of-league migration: nobody wants to hold league currency on November 9, and PoE Standard is where it lands. Expect the discount to keep narrowing into the close.

WoW Retail's recipe land-rush prices out. Last edition, every one of our twelve highest-volume WoW Retail items was a recipe or pattern. They still are — eleven of twelve — but the bid is gone. Recipe: Silvermoon Spire Fountain traded at 8,800g a week ago and clears at 367g now, on slightly higher volume. The pattern repeats down the board: a land-rush, not a new baseline — volume stayed, price discovery finished. Blizzard also handed WoW Retail players a gear route that bypasses the auction house — the October 20 hotfixes uncapped Conquest, Bloody Tokens and Mistcrests, added a Spoils of War buff worth +50% Conquest, and put the Venomous Equipment Chest on the conquest quartermaster. (Blizzard)

Albion Online's Black Market turns seller. After five straight weeks of bidding bags up, the inversion cooled: Albion Online's Expert's Bag printed −1.5% on 144 trades against +75.2% last week. More telling, the Black Market flipped red across the board — Expert's Mage Robe −11.6%, Grandmaster's Cleric Robe −5.6%, Master's Bag −4.3%. The Black Market is Albion's demand sink for destroyed gear, so softening there is the first read on October 16's Item Freeze, which protects gear taken into the Dragonfire areas. Less destruction, less replacement demand — and if it reaches city prices, Albion crafters feel it.

What Our Data Shows

• Path of Exile's split Mirror. The Mirror of Kalandra sits at 1,835.6 div in PoE's Allflame league against 4,599.1 div in PoE Standard — a 60.1% discount, in from 63.8%.
• PoE Standard currency bid, Allflame currency sold. PoE Standard's Exalted Orb 23c +53.8%, Ancient Orb 35c +44%, Stacked Deck 10c +44.3%. In the Allflame league the same Exalted Orb is 2.7c, −11.7%, and Turbulent Catalyst fell 45.2%.
• WoW Retail's pain moved realms. Our WoW Retail aggregate board has basically stopped falling — 8,855 down against 8,481 up of 17,871, versus −6.2% last week — but the realm Illidan took −18.1% in 24 hours, with 713 of 953 items down, against just −2.3% a week ago. Azjol-Nerub, Area 52 and Stormrage all decelerated.
• FFXIV's ingots broke down as a class. On Final Fantasy XIV, Ra'Kaznar Ingot fell 88.3% to 600 gil on 255 trades, reversing last week's +25.1%; Black Star −82.1% and Rose Gold Ingot −31.1% on 313 trades, our top-volume FFXIV item. The FFXIV world Balmung is now −48.1% over thirty days, an eighth down week. Against it, FFXIV's Rhodochrosite printed +1,900% on 230 trades with no FFXIV patch in the window to explain it.
• Guild Wars 2 finally twitched. The Guild Wars 2 Trading Post index printed 0.0% for a sixth straight week — 24,435 of 27,758 items flat — but the materials category came in at −0.5%, its first non-zero reading in six weeks. Iron Ore is still the only genuinely liquid GW2 item on our board, at 64 trades. Shadow of the Mad King has not moved it.

Around the Games

Path of Exile had no content patch; the whole story is the Allflame league's exit, above. WoW Retail followed its October 20 currency uncapping with class tuning due October 27, where Subtlety Rogue takes −8%. Final Fantasy XIV shipped no Market Board change, but had an awkward week of service: emergency maintenance hit the Companion App on October 21, the route players use to reach the Market Board and retainers away from the client, and Square Enix compensated game time on October 23 after new logins were unexpectedly suspended. Guild Wars 2 had no build at all; Shadow of the Mad King runs to November 3. Albion Online had no patch either — its week was the Black Market reversal and the October 19 expiry of the +15% Dragonfire bonus for Europe and the Americas.

Among the WoW variants, WoW TBC Anniversary was the only one with news, and it was a faucet story: its Phase 3.5 opened Zul'Aman on October 22 and spread Badges of Justice across five more raids, diluting the badge and pulling demand off crafted gear. WoW Forever's beta closed October 23, extended from October 21, with nothing carrying to its November 4 launch. WoW MoP Classic, WoW Season of Discovery, WoW Classic Era and Path of Exile 2 were all quiet. RAID: Shadow Legends began its Orynyx Mindcrawler mixed fusion event on October 22.

The Wider Market

• OSRS launched its fourth raid and five new tradeables with it. The Fractured Archive opened October 20 at 11:00 UTC, putting the Rondache, Zorya's Tome, Ascension Crossbows and the Obligator into the Old School RuneScape Grand Exchange. Price discovery was brutal: Zorya's Tome opened near 298M gp and fell roughly 81%, to the 50–55M range on most trackers. Jagex also flagged its own listing rule as broken — the OSRS Grand Exchange buy limit on Ascension Shards is "set too low at 100," fix pending. (Jagex)
• EVE Online widened an ISK faucet mid-event. The October 20 patch raised Crimson Harvest drop rates for three NPC-sellable commodities — Overseer Sabik Vials, Tetrimonic Warclone Blanks and Cybernetic Neural Lattices — and sharply increased Criterion Cipher drops, while pushing Class 3 Hollow Origin sites into every lowsec system. The EVE event ends November 3. (CCP)
• Black Desert touched its Central Market twice in two days. The October 22 patch reset certain Central Market orders and listings; an October 23 Central Market maintenance then moved every listed item to the warehouse and granted one extra use of the Old Moon Trade Pass effect, "in preparation for a future content update." (Pearl Abyss)
• Lost Ark added a whole gear slot. The Arbiter of Death update landed October 21 in the West with the Belgardin Shadow Raid and Vambraces, a new slot carrying both weapon and armor stats — a fresh upgrade-demand sink — plus new Tier 4 farming stages. Lost Ark isn't on AuricDB yet. (Smilegate)

Storylines to Watch

• Path of Exile's 3.29 Allflame league endgame — the Mirror discount narrowed to 60.1% and PoE Standard currency jumped up to 54% as wealth began migrating ahead of the November 9 close.
• WoW Retail's patch 12.1.5 crafting economy — the recipe bid was a one-week land-rush; prices collapsed up to 96% while volume stayed put.
• Albion Online's bag and cape complex — the five-week inversion cooled, and the Black Market turned seller for the first time since Item Freeze.
• OSRS's Fractured Archive raid uniques — Zorya's Tome down ~81% in week one, with an acknowledged broken Grand Exchange buy limit on Ascension Shards.
• EVE Online's Crimson Harvest loot shock — CCP raised commodity and Criterion Cipher drop rates on October 20; the reward track extends October 27.

The Week Ahead

• WoW Retail — class tuning with weekly maintenance, October 27 UTC
• WoW Forever — character creation and Early Name Reservation open, October 27 UTC
• EVE Online — Crimson Harvest seasonal reward track extends, October 27 UTC
• FFXIV — Fan Festival 2026 in Tokyo, October 31 – November 1 UTC
• WoW Forever — launch, November 4 23:00 UTC
• PoE — ExileCon 2026, PoE 3.30 reveal, November 7–8 UTC
• PoE — 3.29 Curse of the Allflame league ends, November 9 21:00 UTC
• Throne and Liberty — service transfer maintenance to NC, November 10 UTC