Archnemesis Rare Changes (Part 2)

After making some numerical balance changes yesterday, we are now making a functional change to how Archnemesis Modifiers spawn on rare monsters. Previously, rare monsters you encountered generally had two Archnemesis mods, but could spawn with as many as three or four. Now, they will default to one modifier, with a chance of having two or three. Update: This patch has been deployed as a serverside hotfix.Archnemesis mods are designed so that certain pairs are very challenging to overcome. And we are generally pretty happy with the difficulty of those particular encounters if they occur infrequently. However, modern Path of Exile is pretty liberal with spawning rare monsters, and with a default of two modifiers each, these intense encounters were occurring far too often.With this change to a default of one modifier, the complexity and difficulty of rare monster fights will be lower. You'll still occasionally encounter modifiers that pro... Read more

Rare and Magic Monster Balance

Okay, we shipped them a little overtuned. We have just deployed a hotfix that reduces rare monster life and damage and slightly reduces that of magics.I'll explain how this occurred.Transitioning from the old monster mod system to Archnemesis was meant to make rare and magic monster fights more challenging. And it certainly did. We tested it extensively, and were happy with the level of difficulty when we released it. In general, we feel that in Path of Exile it's better to introduce things slightly too challenging than slightly too easy, and so we awaited player feedback and death data to see if it was actually too hard for the average player.Well, 12 hours of feedback and data is enough to know that we need to take the edge off the difficulty. Rare and magic monsters are still going to be hard, just not as difficult as they were today. We will follow up with more tweaks (including to more specific mods) in the coming days once we get ti... Read more

Rare and Magic Monster Balance

Okay, we shipped them a little overtuned. We have just deployed a hotfix that reduces rare monster life and damage and slightly reduces that of magics.I'll explain how this occurred.Transitioning from the old monster mod system to Archnemesis was meant to make rare and magic monster fights more challenging. And it certainly did. We tested it extensively, and were happy with the level of difficulty when we released it. In general, we feel that in Path of Exile it's better to introduce things slightly too challenging than slightly too easy, and so we awaited player feedback and death data to see if it was actually too hard for the average player.Well, 12 hours of feedback and data is enough to know that we need to take the edge off the difficulty. Rare and magic monsters are still going to be hard, just not as difficult as they were today. We will follow up with more tweaks (including to more specific mods) in the coming days once we get ti... Read more

Communication and the Sacred Orb

Hi everyone,I wanted to post myself to clear up some misunderstanding, because when our communication about new items is through bite-sized single sentences and pictures that are designed for easy sharing on social media, some explanation and context can be missed. This often leads to fun speculation by the community, but can occasionally lead to misunderstandings.This league, we've been working hard at improving our communication so that we are more transparent about what to expect from future changes and what our intentions and thoughts are when making these changes. When we posted the Sacred Orb teaser earlier today, there was a strong reaction to it which is understandable given that we failed to provide enough context for how rare this item is. I am really sorry about that and I hope that I can clear things up by explaining our thinking. The senior designers and I have spent a lot of today going through your feedback and discussing ... Read more

Over the weekend, we launched Path of Exile: Expedition! We've been really enjoying watching the community play through the new content and conquer the challenges that lie within. We have deployed many hotfixes and a restartless 3.15.0b patch so far, and have more coming! This post provides more details.A lot of players have tried to derive our player concurrency numbers based on the data shown for Steam users, and have expressed concern that fewer people played this expansion than the previous two. To be transparent, the number is that 23% fewer players joined us at launch compared to our all-time record, and this is something we were prepared for. In addition to the normal variance between releases, we completely understand that Path of Exile had a lot of changes in 3.15 and this is definitely unnerving to some players. Thank you to everyone who has tried it out so far. We're really enjoying reading about your experiences playing with the recent... Read more

Over the weekend, we launched Path of Exile: Expedition! We've been really enjoying watching the community play through the new content and conquer the challenges that lie within. We have deployed many hotfixes and a restartless 3.15.0b patch so far, and have more coming! This post provides more details.A lot of players have tried to derive our player concurrency numbers based on the data shown for Steam users, and have expressed concern that fewer people played this expansion than the previous two. To be transparent, the number is that 23% fewer players joined us at launch compared to our all-time record, and this is something we were prepared for. In addition to the normal variance between releases, we completely understand that Path of Exile had a lot of changes in 3.15 and this is definitely unnerving to some players. Thank you to everyone who has tried it out so far. We're really enjoying reading about your experiences playing with the recent... Read more

In the near future, we'll be making some improvements to how Path of Exile utilises your video memory. This post explains what impact that will have on your gameplay and when to expect the patch.Graphics cards have a certain amount of Video RAM (VRAM), which is used to hold the various assets that we are rendering for the current game scene. If you run out of VRAM while playing under DirectX 11, our default renderer, the game will still work but your frame rate will drop as it has to render assets that reside in system memory. The graphics driver would also move assets back and forth between main memory and VRAM, further slowing things down. For users without enough VRAM, performance under DirectX11 is pretty terrible.While the Vulkan rendering API has all sorts of performance benefits, it doesn't have the default-to-system-memory fallback that was present under DirectX 11, and its default behaviour is to just crash when out of memory. When we ini... Read more

In the near future, we'll be making some improvements to how Path of Exile utilises your video memory. This post explains what impact that will have on your gameplay and when to expect the patch.Graphics cards have a certain amount of Video RAM (VRAM), which is used to hold the various assets that we are rendering for the current game scene. If you run out of VRAM while playing under DirectX 11, our default renderer, the game will still work but your frame rate will drop as it has to render assets that reside in system memory. The graphics driver would also move assets back and forth between main memory and VRAM, further slowing things down. For users without enough VRAM, performance under DirectX11 is pretty terrible.While the Vulkan rendering API has all sorts of performance benefits, it doesn't have the default-to-system-memory fallback that was present under DirectX 11, and its default behaviour is to just crash when out of memory. When we ini... Read more

Engine Performance Bug Found

Today we tracked down a bug that causes local shader compilation to stall other engine tasks such as texture streaming. This means that if you were playing content that used shaders that were not present in your local cache, then the loading of necessary assets would be stalled (causing the low-quality stand-in textures to be used for way longer than intended). This doesn't resolve all graphical/performance issues that we are investigating, but it should help. We have deployed this change and it'll automatically download next time you run Path of Exile. We are continuing our investigation into other weird behaviour and will keep you updated. Thanks for your feedback and patience!
Read more

Engine Performance Bug Found

Today we tracked down a bug that causes local shader compilation to stall other engine tasks such as texture streaming. This means that if you were playing content that used shaders that were not present in your local cache, then the loading of necessary assets would be stalled (causing the low-quality stand-in textures to be used for way longer than intended). This doesn't resolve all graphical/performance issues that we are investigating, but it should help. We have deployed this change and it'll automatically download next time you run Path of Exile. We are continuing our investigation into other weird behaviour and will keep you updated. Thanks for your feedback and patience!
Read more

20 Users Banned for Exploit Abuse

Earlier today, we learned of a bug in Ultimatum that allows players to generate excessive rewards. Shortly after its discovery, we deployed a hotfix that capped the amount of experience and items that Ultimatums could yield.We have banned 20 accounts that abused this exploit multiple times. These bans will last until Ultimatum ends in July. We will also void the characters they made in Ultimatum so that they (and their items) will not be transferred to their parent leagues.If you uncover an exploit in Path of Exile and abuse it for your benefit, we will ban you.
Read more

20 Users Banned for Exploit Abuse

Earlier today, we learned of a bug in Ultimatum that allows players to generate excessive rewards. Shortly after its discovery, we deployed a hotfix that capped the amount of experience and items that Ultimatums could yield.We have banned 20 accounts that abused this exploit multiple times. These bans will last until Ultimatum ends in July. We will also void the characters they made in Ultimatum so that they (and their items) will not be transferred to their parent leagues.If you uncover an exploit in Path of Exile and abuse it for your benefit, we will ban you.
Read more

Ultimatum Launch: Server Issues and Streamer Priority

UPDATE: Server stability issue appears fixed. Be careful with your database page sizes, people.Hey everyone, It's been a long day but we wanted to put together a few thoughts while we have a moment waiting for our next server fix to build. This launch has been rough, to say the least. In this post, we plan to address both the ongoing technical realm stability issues and the conversation around streamers getting priority in the login queue. We are sorry that this is being addressed so late in the day - we have been giving the server issues absolute priority and haven't had time until now to write up this explanation.Let's start with the technical issues.Immediately upon launch of the league, we could see that the queue was running incredibly slowly. At the rate that it was emptying, it'd be at least two hours to get everyone into the game. The reason was that when players logged into their accounts, the server would ... Read more

Ultimatum Launch: Server Issues and Streamer Priority

UPDATE: Server stability issue appears fixed. Be careful with your database page sizes, people.Hey everyone, It's been a long day but we wanted to put together a few thoughts while we have a moment waiting for our next server fix to build. This launch has been rough, to say the least. In this post, we plan to address both the ongoing technical realm stability issues and the conversation around streamers getting priority in the login queue. We are sorry that this is being addressed so late in the day - we have been giving the server issues absolute priority and haven't had time until now to write up this explanation.Let's start with the technical issues.Immediately upon launch of the league, we could see that the queue was running incredibly slowly. At the rate that it was emptying, it'd be at least two hours to get everyone into the game. The reason was that when players logged into their accounts, the server would ... Read more

Ultimatum Launch: Server Issues and Streamer Priority

UPDATE: Server stability issue appears fixed. Be careful with your database page sizes, people.Hey everyone, It's been a long day but we wanted to put together a few thoughts while we have a moment waiting for our next server fix to build. This launch has been rough, to say the least. In this post, we plan to address both the ongoing technical realm stability issues and the conversation around streamers getting priority in the login queue. We are sorry that this is being addressed so late in the day - we have been giving the server issues absolute priority and haven't had time until now to write up this explanation.Let's start with the technical issues.Immediately upon launch of the league, we could see that the queue was running incredibly slowly. At the rate that it was emptying, it'd be at least two hours to get everyone into the game. The reason was that when players logged into their accounts, the server would ... Read more

Ultimatum Launch: Server Issues and Streamer Priority

UPDATE: Server stability issue appears fixed. Be careful with your database page sizes, people.Hey everyone, It's been a long day but we wanted to put together a few thoughts while we have a moment waiting for our next server fix to build. This launch has been rough, to say the least. In this post, we plan to address both the ongoing technical realm stability issues and the conversation around streamers getting priority in the login queue. We are sorry that this is being addressed so late in the day - we have been giving the server issues absolute priority and haven't had time until now to write up this explanation.Let's start with the technical issues.Immediately upon launch of the league, we could see that the queue was running incredibly slowly. At the rate that it was emptying, it'd be at least two hours to get everyone into the game. The reason was that when players logged into their accounts, the server would ... Read more

Extremely Slow Queue Processing

When the Ultimatum league started this morning, it was immediately apparent that the login queue was moving quite slowly. We are investigating this, and so far it appears that the reason is that this league's character migrations (which are a process that runs when a character logs in, to convert it to the new internal version) are much slower than normal.Users are getting in and the game is stable once they are through the queue, but it's going to take a while for the queue to clear and we're very sorry about that. We're acutely aware that a similar problem occurred last league launch and we thought we had resolved it.Queue processing should speed up as more characters are converted, and we are trying to find other solutions that will help in the meantime.Once again, we're very sorry about the delayed start to the league for most users. We will make sure that this never happens again.We will update this thread as more information is known!EDIT: We have... Read more

Extremely Slow Queue Processing

When the Ultimatum league started this morning, it was immediately apparent that the login queue was moving quite slowly. We are investigating this, and so far it appears that the reason is that this league's character migrations (which are a process that runs when a character logs in, to convert it to the new internal version) are much slower than normal.Users are getting in and the game is stable once they are through the queue, but it's going to take a while for the queue to clear and we're very sorry about that. We're acutely aware that a similar problem occurred last league launch and we thought we had resolved it.Queue processing should speed up as more characters are converted, and we are trying to find other solutions that will help in the meantime.Once again, we're very sorry about the delayed start to the league for most users. We will make sure that this never happens again.We will update this thread as more information is known!EDIT: We have... Read more

Extremely Slow Queue Processing

When the Ultimatum league started this morning, it was immediately apparent that the login queue was moving quite slowly. We are investigating this, and so far it appears that the reason is that this league's character migrations (which are a process that runs when a character logs in, to convert it to the new internal version) are much slower than normal.Users are getting in and the game is stable once they are through the queue, but it's going to take a while for the queue to clear and we're very sorry about that. We're acutely aware that a similar problem occurred last league launch and we thought we had resolved it.Queue processing should speed up as more characters are converted, and we are trying to find other solutions that will help in the meantime.Once again, we're very sorry about the delayed start to the league for most users. We will make sure that this never happens again.We will update this thread as more information is known!EDIT: We have... Read more

Extremely Slow Queue Processing

When the Ultimatum league started this morning, it was immediately apparent that the login queue was moving quite slowly. We are investigating this, and so far it appears that the reason is that this league's character migrations (which are a process that runs when a character logs in, to convert it to the new internal version) are much slower than normal.Users are getting in and the game is stable once they are through the queue, but it's going to take a while for the queue to clear and we're very sorry about that. We're acutely aware that a similar problem occurred last league launch and we thought we had resolved it.Queue processing should speed up as more characters are converted, and we are trying to find other solutions that will help in the meantime.Once again, we're very sorry about the delayed start to the league for most users. We will make sure that this never happens again.We will update this thread as more information is known!EDIT: We have... Read more