[2019] Developer Q&A

Last week we asked the community for questions for our developers to answer. We have answered many of the large questions in this post, and will follow up next week with another set of answers. If your question wasn't answered in this post, it may be in the following one. Many questions have been rewritten for reasons that are apparent if you see the original ones.

As the game becomes bigger and more people with varying views on the game join us, how do you cluster feedback and do you still have a primary target audience?

When we look at feedback, we make sure to take into account the experience of the user and the nature of their core problem (rather than just the proposed solution).Despite its growth, we want Path of Exile to remain true to its core values. We feel that compromising its depth would do more long-term damage than any short-term benefit we might get in terms of being more approachable to new users.

Having said that, Path of Exile can remain a very hardcore game and still have its accessibility improved. We understand we can do a better job at making new features more understandable to both new and existing players, and are working hard to improve at this.

What was the team's takeaway from the community feedback on Synthesis?

At a low level, there were a lot of individual problems with Synthesis which we read the feedback on, made changes to address, and deployed patches for.

We already understand exactly what we did wrong during the league's production. It was incorrectly scoped during a busy period. We thought we had enough time to make something of great quality, but were wrong.

Why didn't you delay the release of Synthesis?

We actually did delay it a week internally, before we announced the date. When we announced the date, we were pretty sure we'd be able to finish the league in time.

Why didn't we delay it further? Once we put a countdown timer up and announce a release date, we really want to hit that date. People take time off work and plan around these release. Delaying a release not only upsets a few million people, but throws our entire schedule out for the year.

We did release a playable league. It just wasn't good enough.

Will you ever return to making more simple leagues like Breach, Abyss, Domination, Bloodlines and Rampage? If not, why?

I like the idea of easy-to-understand, mechanically clean leagues with a lot of meta depth. We have been experimenting with various prototypes and are quite excited about the one we picked for 3.7.0. While our current production infrastructure lets us put a lot of content in it, it'll probably be reminiscent of the era of Breach/Essence/Abyss leagues.

Do you think the current big, complex leagues are sustainable?

Yes, if we don't have other priorities consuming our time (see this post). So we'll try to scope our leagues carefully to not run into problems with this.

Does the team feel required to 1-up in both scope and scale the league before?

Even if we specifically decide not to do this, it often happens organically as the team think of more and cooler things to add to the league. This can create a cycle that is difficult to maintain (both in terms of our own development expectations and the expectations of the players).

For 3.7.0 we are trying to downscope some aspects. It has turned out quite well. We're excited to see what you think.

What are your thoughts about the current state of dropped rare items, particularly normal ones (i.e. not Shaped/Elder/Fractured/etc)?

So many rare items drop. There are so many different item classes and each item class has so many different base types available, only a few of which are useful for your character. This results in a situation where many rare items are just left on the ground, because it's very unlikely they'll be an upgrade for an item you currently have equipped. In addition, the presence of Shaped/Elder/Fractured rares means that regular rares are even less likely to be game-breaking. New crafting systems such as Fossils also reduce the chance that a given rare drop will be an upgrade.

The above situation isn't good, and we want to fix it. It's going to be a very slow process, across many, many expansions (probably with 4.0.0 doing some of the heavy lifting), but we'll get there.

Do you feel that the master revamp, fossil crafting and Synthesis crafting introduced more power creep? If so, what are your thoughts on this?

Yes, every new crafting system introduces a little bit of power creep to the best items that are possible. This is intentional and desirable. If a new crafting system didn't let you make new best items then it wouldn't be very interesting to people.

We're trying hard to control the level of power creep over time so that people's previous-best items are not made irrelevant. It's quite difficult and expensive to use these crafting systems to make something incredibly good, so the relative power level of previous mirror-worthy items in Standard is still quite high.

Do you have any plans to help separate league mechanics from the crafting systems introduced with leagues as they transition to standard?

We aren't announcing any specific plans for this but it's certainly on the table. If the right way to merge a league with the core game involves breaking apart the league mechanic from the crafting system then that's what we'll do. For some complex crafting systems, we're happy for them to only be available sparingly from interaction with an old league when it's accessible.

Do you think there is room to make higher end crafting more accessible to the average player?

We certainly want more players to experience the fun of crafting and make some cool stuff, but we have to be very careful to not damage the economy in the process.

High-end crafting is expensive for a reason - because it can make really expensive items. To make it more accessible, that means reducing the costs associated with it which reduces the value and exclusiveness of the best items in the game. We feel it is critically important that in an Action RPG, the absolute best items are exclusive and very valuable.

Do you have any plans to change how Syndicate crafting is unlocked?

The veiled item system has received quite a bit of feedback that we are processing. We're considering some options like normalising the frequency of mods appearing, because the more valuable ones already take more experience to level up anyway. We may also have to make master-specific ones easier to level because they're rarer to acquire. Don't take this speculation as a guaranteed plan though, it's just what we're considering currently.

Why do we have to unlock master crafting recipes every league? Can they be account-wide unlocks?

In the Betrayal expansion, we changed how master crafting works so that you unlock it by performing various tasks within the league. These have to be unlocked again from scratch in each new league.

One of our core design philosophies is that players shouldn't be able to get an advantage in a new league based on their actions in a past league. This gives a level playing field and makes it clear that you can return to Path of Exile at a new league and be on equal footing with other players. Because of this, it will never be possible for crafting recipes to be unlocked on a per-account basis.

The intention of the master crafting recipe system is that you can ideally look up a recipe that you want to use and find out exactly where to go and unlock it. The recipes that are locked behind the Level 3 Incursion rooms are too difficult to unlock because of the RNG required to get that room to spawn. We will move these recipes elsewhere. If we find other ones that require too much RNG to get, we'll consider that for them too.

Have you considered adding a safer way to purchase Betrayal crafts from other players?

This is an interesting topic of discussion that extends far beyond just Betrayal Crafting, as there are many game systems that players attempt to trade the rewards of in a trust-based manner. But for Betrayal Crafting, it is potentially possible for us to build it into the trade screen with a decent-sized revamp. We'll keep discussing.

Is there any plan to allow players to opt out of certain past league content?

If a player doesn't want to interact with specific past league content, then it's usually possible to just avoid starting the event. For example in the case of Abyss or Breach, you can just walk around the object that triggers it. However, this typically feels pretty bad for players, because the content usually comes with generous rewards, so players are missing out if they choose not to play it.

We see the current set of past league content enabled in Path of Exile as a thing that we curate and modify over time. As we get more and more, various leagues will cycle in and out. Please let us know feedback about which ones you enjoy and which you avoid, so that we can bear this in mind.

We have heard the feedback about Intervention encounters in Betrayal and are discussing it.

Clear speed seems to becoming more and more of a necessity with each league mechanic you add. Are you happy with this trend and do you feel like this is affecting build diversity?

People certainly aren't playing Path of Exile at the speed that I initially imagined when we started development back in 2006, but I know that if we made a big effort to slow down top-end play, it'd probably ruin the enjoyment that many of our most-engaged users have. We have seen other games make that mistake and don't want to repeat it.

We are fully aware of clear-speed concerns when designing new league content. We generally try to create content that doesn't require insane clear-speed. Of course, it is true that the faster you can complete an area and get its rewards, the faster you will progress, so there's an implicit incentive to making good (i.e. fast) characters.

As a player who wants to delve and only Delve, is there any way to reduce the reliance on mapping to access Delve content?

The honest answer here is that we believe that game systems like Delve will become boring if you have unlimited access to them, and so it's important to limit their access by requiring regular Path of Exile play between sessions of special content.

The other factor that is Delve-specific is that rewards from Delve are strong, so it'd be an economic problem if people had more access.

Having said that, Scarabs and other game mechanics can help you trade for more Delve time.

It has been 18 months since you posted the Trade Manifesto. Do you still stand by it?

This question prompted a long discussion. Many hours of senior developers talking about trade. Our conclusion was: Yes, we do stand by everything we wrote in the manifesto. We are not adding a Trade Market to the PC version of Path of Exile.

Trying to trade in bulk maps, currency, and fragments is incredibly inconvenient and time consuming leading to more time spent attempting to acquire items to play the game rather than actually playing the game. Could improvements to the trade system for these types of items be made to help better facilitate bulk trading?

This question also prompted a long discussion, which turned into a conversation about how people acquire specific maps for Atlas completion. Our current thoughts are that we could make this easier, and so we are considering adding an occasional chance for map bosses to drop a map from an adjacent location. If we go ahead with this in 3.7.0, you'll see it in the Patch Notes.

For now there will be no changes to trade itself related to this.

Have you considered creating an in-game version of the Path of Exile wiki for convenience?

We're probably going to embed a web browser in the client that will be able to load the wiki, trade sites and other community web resources.

Do you think that the last few leagues' mechanics (namely Incursion, Delve, Betrayal, Synthesis) discourage the creation of new characters due to progress (mostly) being character-bound, and if so do you have any plans to address this?

Incursion was per-character but had a low cycle time (11 areas), so you were only losing a small amount of progress if you made a new character.

Delve was initially per-character but we changed this to per-account when this problem became apparent.

Betrayal was per-character and had a longer cycle time than Incursion, but it was not really possible to make this per-account. We don't see a big problem here (you can still come back and finish that particular Mastermind cycle if you want to).

Synthesis was per-character and spawned boss and reward memories rather rapidly, so that you weren't losing a lot of reward state if you started a new character. It would have been hard to make this one per-account because the various memories had specific levels associated with them.

We do consider this when making leagues, and will try to make the right decision. We don't want people to have anything that would discourage them from trying out new characters.

Do you plan on improving the drops from map bosses so they feel as rewarding as the rest of the map, or are you happy with them as they are?

Map bosses generally don't drop a lot of items relative to the rest of the map, but they also usually don't take a lot of time to fight. Some bosses die quickly, and others are more substantial fights. We are going to add extra monsters (that yield item and experience) to the substantial boss fights (during their mitigation phases) to make them worth the time of fighting them more. Examples of maps that have been modified in this way in 3.7.0 are Belfry, Lava Lake, Sunken City and Gardens. We'll keep propagating this to more maps over time.

Is there a reason there are a limited number of balance changes to skills in every expansion?

Each expansion is planned, developed, tested and released within 13 weeks. This limits the number of specific skills that we can change and fully test within that cycle. The testing of these skills has to occur within the context of other changes in that expansion (like if we're hypothetically changing how say Accuracy or Leech work, then a skill that cares about these needs to be tested under the new systems).

With 3.6.0 and 3.7.0, we are quite pleased with the number of existing skills we have been able to improve.

How do you handle QA and development processes? Do you work with different teams on different parts of the game or do you work feature by feature with everyone involved? Do you use Agile methods?

Everyone generally works on everything that fits within their specialisation. Sometimes we assign a specific person to work on some long-term project, but most of the time the developers are working on a combination of features for the next expansion, fixes to the last one and longer-term changes. It helps keep enough variety in the work, and lets people work on things they are good at and feel ownership of particular systems in the game.

Path of Exile development doesn't use Agile methodology, but because we have a rapid release cycle we do get many of its advantages.

Does GGG split bugs/patching into its own team, or are the same people responsible for making the new content?

The same people work on making content and fixing that content if it's broken. Having someone fix it who didn't work on it would introduce even more problems.

At what point during a development cycle do QA get to properly test a new league's content?

They test it throughout its development, but only get to do serious testing in the last few weeks once all the parts of it are in. For some leagues that came in too late, this period has indeed been too short. This is something we are working on improving.

Are there any plans to update the game engine?

We update it constantly with each new league and have released dozens of major improvements over the last few years. Our engine team grows by the year, and there's plenty more to come.

Do you plan to release Path of Exile in the PlayStation store in Japan?

Ideally, but this involves getting a Japanese translation which will take some time and resources.

Are there any plans to change the six second disconnect timer duration?

Yes, but we haven't prioritised them.

Do you have any plans to make sustaining maps less tied-up with past league content like Betrayal, Delve and Incursion?

We have two options. We can either make it so that you don't get maps during past league content (and buff the non-map rewards), or have some reliance on those systems for providing map drops.

Because people tend not to play content that doesn't have map drops, we picked the option where league content drops maps.

Can you comment on the state of spam bots in chat?

We are putting resources into this and while it appears from the outside that this is having no effect because there's still spam, we're stopping almost all of it and hope to improve it over time.

You must have some vague plans on what development will look like after 4.0.0. Are we going to see any major changes to how things are running?

All our efforts are focused on 3.7.0, 3.8.0, 3.9.0, 3.10.0 and any other expansions leading up to and including 4.0.0. We plan to tackle what the post-4.0.0 world looks like when we get to it.

When a new league is in development, is it designed for it to be implemented into the core game?

Not always. For Bestiary, Incursion, Delve and Betrayal, we had a specific plan to put them in the game together with the 3.5.0 release. Most leagues are assessed after we've had a chance to see how the community feels about them.

Will we see any improvements to guilds?

Yes, but it's not a high priority. We have to get ahead on core development before we can focus on complex QoL features. Having said that, we are always keen to hear about how the guild functionality can be improved in case some of those improvements can come earlier than the hard ones.

Will there ever be South African servers?

We can add servers to a new region once we know we have access to a reliable server host at cost-effective pricing, enough local players to justify the region, and tests of the servers meet our reliability standards. I don't know which of these issues has prevented South Africa in particular, but will bring it up with the server team to make sure it's considered.

Hypothetically speaking, if every single developer on the Path of Exile team gets horribly sick for three months and you have no time to develop any content for a new league - your only option is to re-run one of the past leagues. Which one do you pick and why?

This is a tricky one. Until recently, our answer would have been Legacy, but we've gradually added those old league mechanics in so many places that Legacy wouldn't be quite as impactful as it was the first time we ran it. Most of the recent leagues have been added to the core game, so re-running something like Delve isn't that much of a big difference from the core game.

Having said that, we're constantly looking for smart league designs that don't require insane amounts of content and are fun to play. Hopefully we can stockpile a few of these for the future, in case that hypothetical plague hits.

Are you going to continue the unique item balance changes that you began in Betrayal?

I expect the scope and nature of unique balance changes is going to vary from expansion to expansion. In 3.7.0, let's just say there are certainly some uniques being rebalanced, as you'll find out soon.

Do you have a stash tab planned for fossils and resonators?

We plan to make fossils stack game-wide and then evaluate whether a tab is still needed. There are some small technical hurdles we need to first overcome before this stacking is possible.

Are the office hours fixed time or are most people working with flextime? Or are most of the teams shift-based, at least for the support and technical teams (e.g. network / server infrastructure)?

The development team can work whenever they want, though most people are typically in the office during the middle of the day regardless of whether they work early or late. Our customer support team are shift-based and and our server team have an on-call roster.

Has the port of Path of Exile to PlayStation made any advancements towards controller support for PC?

We're interested in doing this but there's no timeline for it yet. It's tricky because we'd have to swap out the game's entire user interface at runtime.

Is there any update to the implementation of text chat on console platforms?

We really want to get this deployed. We have something that is 80% implemented, but it's still a few weeks of development away. The developer who was working it unfortunately left our company recently to start his own project, so console chat is in limbo until we free someone up to take over.

What are you doing about performance on console platforms?

Improving performance on all platforms is an ongoing goal of our growing engine team. Within the next few workdays, we'll be deploying a patch that makes a number of memory-related performance improvements to the console platforms. Memory usage and memory-related crash rates are improved on both Xbox One and PS4.

On the Xbox One, we have split out the 4k textures so that they're only downloaded by the Xbox One X version. While this does require a redownload of the entire game, it's smaller now, has faster load times, reduced memory usage and significantly fewer memory-related crashes.

Also, please note that if you encounter stuttering during gameplay and are playing on a Wireless internet connection, try plugging an ethernet cable in. Almost all of the time, this has a dramatic impact on network-related stuttering (which pauses the local game simulation when packet loss occurs until the data arrives).

Can we have a short AFK timer so that players who aren't at their console don't have their items appear on the Trade Market?

This won't work. If we require players to be at their console for others to see their items then people will just find a way to get around it. We already banned popsicle sticks. I really don't want to ban rubber bands too.

Can we get Cross Play between console platforms?

That'd be awesome. Players should let Sony know that they're interested in Cross Play being enabled for Path of Exile.

What will be done about people sending abusive messages on the console Trade Market?

We want to add a reporting feature. It just hasn't been a high priority.

When will Tab Pricing for consoles be ready?

This is a feature that requires very senior developers to implement it, and they have been perpetually busy with critical tasks for a very long time. We want to see it done.

Do you have plans to introduce PVP on console?

This is a really low priority because almost no one uses the PvP features on PC, and they're very much about critical mass to find opponents.

Will we ever get custom item filters on console platforms?

Now that we have added support for console players to be able to log into the website, this is something we can work on.

What about guilds and guild stashes on console platforms?

The missing ingredient was the ability for console users to log into the website to manage their guilds. Now that this works, we can finish off the console user interface for this feature as soon as we have time around our other commitments. We should note that it requires chat to be finished to be fully useful.

Are there any improvements coming to desync and rubberbanding under Predictive mode or on consoles?

We believe that this can still be tightened up more. Our last big push to identify and find subtle bugs that cause desync under Predictive mode was a few years ago when we introduced Lockstep mode. It's possible that a few more have crept in since then, and while they take an inordinate amount of time to track down, it'll be worth it.

In 3.6.0 you stopped supporting DirectX 9. Will you stop supporting 32-bit clients as well?

Eventually, yes. The 64-bit client is significantly better from a memory point of view and once the rate of people using 32-bit versions of Windows drops low enough, we'll be able to eventually stop supporting it. This won't be in the near future.

Are there any plans to rework what race seasons were and bring them back in the foreseeable future? Or, in other words, any short event series that lasts longer than a weekend and is available for everyone, not only streamers or players who signed up for certain private leagues?

Races are awesome, but the big race seasons we used to run weren't the best way to approach it. Interest dropped off pretty fast during a season and a lot of development time was spent on their rewards. The seasons also caused players to feel they had to wake up at all hours to participate in as many races as possible.

We have plans to extend our Private League system into a Custom Race system. We'll post more details about this when it's getting closer to release.

This doesn't mean we won't be running races in the meantime, just that they probably won't be structured as formal seasons.

Now that Method has a Path of Exile team are you going to support/sponsor more community race events?

We are providing prizes for four events which will see the winner of each event flown to New Zealand to compete in the racing finals at ExileCon in November. Two of the races are run by community members, one by an esports company, and one by us. We hope to increase this support in the future.

Why is the BEAT race an invitational with only top streamers invited?

That's the format of the race they wanted to run, and we trust their decision. They consulted with community members and racers about how they wanted it run, and checked it with us.

We understand that there has been a lot of community concern about the fairness of this race's ExileCon prize package not being available for general entry. The other three races which yield ExileCon prize packages are public entry. We should have clarified this in the initial post, and explained the structure in advance. I am very sorry for the poor communication on this. We'll have more information about the other races in the news as soon as we have dates locked in.

What should we expect from the race finale at ExileCon?

We're flying over the four people who win the ExileCon prize packages throughout the year, to compete on the ExileCon stage in the grand racing finals. This will be streamed live and casted so you can watch from home if you're not attending in person. The exact details of the race structure and its prizing have not been announced yet. We're expecting it to be a very interesting competition!

This year's experiment of having four races feed into a finals is also a small-scale test to see how it goes. We're hoping to ramp support for this up in the future.

Would you consider creating more alternative game modes besides private leagues such as the previous April's fool game mode, Battle Royale?

We really enjoy making things like Royale, and would love to create more when we find time. Realistically, our schedule leading up to 4.0.0 is packed enough that I don't expect us to release any new alternate game modes like Royale before then, unless we think of a brilliant idea that is so awesome that we can't help but distract ourselves with it.

Why did you choose Flashback over Mayhem and Turmoil for the end-of-league Synthesis event?

Feedback and data shows us that players prefer to play in unvoided leagues so that they can keep the items. We also wanted to provide an opportunity for players to complete their Synthesis challenges, which wouldn't have been possible from Mayhem or Turmoil.

From a design philosophy point of view, our team feels that a slow burn event is better than the quick rush of adrenaline that Mayhem gives you. You get a variety of different mods per area, rather than a giant number of one specific thing. It's something we enjoy more and we felt that players would as well. Historically, there was much higher engagement with Flashback than with the other event types.

Having said that, we have definitely heard your feedback and will bear it in mind for future events.

What about another Legacy League as an end-of-league event?

It's a popular request, but Legacy actually has a number of problems. For a start, it was designed around difficulty levels which were removed in 3.0.0, so work would be required to unlock leaguestones in a different way. Secondly, most of the Legacy league content has gradually made its way into the game in different forms, so would feel less exclusive. The amount of work required to fix up this league to work as an event would be significantly more than we could put in at the moment. Possible for the future though!

Have you considered doing a small event around a single mechanic or aspect of the game? Like all items dropping white and increased currency drops?

Yes, that'd be a lot of fun. Though we have to be careful when announcing events to make sure there's something for everyone. Maybe if we bring back some type of groups of events like race seasons, we can run some like this with more of an emphasis on the economy for players who are driven by that.

As a side note, there's no need to increase currency drops when all items drop as normal (white) items. It's quite a lot of fun to actually have a use for the current currency that does drop. Try it out in a private league!

Keep an eye on the news next week for the second set of answers!

Hey everyone, we've done our best to gather all the most pressing questions into the first part of this Q&A. Let me know if there are any missing and I'll make sure we get them into part two's answers next week.

Two weeks ago we asked the community for questions for our developers to answer. We answered many of the big questions in a post last week, and have the final set of answers today.

Can you please make Betrayal per-league rather per-character?

The question resulted in a long discussion and the eventual answer was Yes. We're not yet sure whether the change will be in 3.7.0 or 3.8.0 yet.

Can you please make Sulphite per-league rather than per-character?

Surprisingly, this actually became another Yes. Again, we aren't sure which expansion it'll go in, as there are a bunch of things we have to change at the same time to resolve our concerns with Sulphite being shared across all your characters in the league.

Master content such as Incursion and Betrayal can be distracting and disrupts the flow of just grinding maps. Do you have any plans to change this?

We have an idea for a potential change that we are quite excited about. We want more time to think about it before committing and so we aren't going to explain it here but we will follow up in a few weeks if we decide to go ahead with it (and if not, what other steps we'll take regarding this issue).

Players feel that map sustainability is tied up with Betrayal and other master content, making it non optional. What is your stance on this?

We also have a plan for this that we are considering at the same time as the changed mentioned in the answer to the last question. We'll hopefully post about it within a few weeks.

Have you guys considered allowing us to trade maps of a tier for any other map of that same tier for a small cost at an NPC?

Our current plan is to add Orbs of Horizons to the main drop pool so that it's easier to perform the transformation you want to do here.

As a follow up to the DX9 question, do you have any intention to implement newer faster APIs such as Vulkan?

Yes.

You indicated that knowing a monster could drop something that improves your character could be a good motivator for playing one more level. It feels like item drops don't compare anymore and the focus is on crafting systems with most rares being used for the Chaos Orb recipe. Do you think changing item drops could improve the trading environment?

Absolutely. I think big improvements are needed here. As I mentioned in the past Q&A post, improvements in this direction will take time across a number of releases (with some systems changes in 4.0.0 doing a lot of the heavy lifting).

Would you consider creating a SSF version where you can't migrate back to the trade league but would have increased drop rates?

We feel that providing permanent access to a version of Path of Exile where players progress more quickly would be a mistake. Sometimes we run special events that have mods that make the game more rewarding, but these are not available perpetually.

Why can't we hide fractured items on our item filters?

The reason why we have new items like that unhideable at the start is so that people's existing filters don't hide them. If you have a filter that hides a lot of rare items you don't want to see, and we introduce a new mode of rare item that technically would be hidden if it wasn't special, then players wouldn't find the new content. So we default it to on for a league until filters have updated.

I believe that in 3.7.0 there's a change that makes the fractured items filterable. Having said that, Synthesis isn't going core any time soon so it's a bit of a moot point in this case.

Now that your console player base is bigger, do you have any plans to make the official website more mobile-friendly?

We do plan to improve this, but it's a slow process. We make sure that important new pages we add such as the trade site and expansion announcements are as mobile-friendly as we can make them.

Will you make console trading easier like it is on PC?

There is internal discussion about opening up the trade API for console realms, to allow support for trade sites that find items in your premium stash tabs. Currently we haven't reached a definitive conclusion on this. One thing to note is that text chat on consoles (which isn't yet finished) is probably necessary for this system to work well.

Do you plan to add extra mods for private leagues? For example, would we ever be able to pay for a private league with infinite Delve?

We will add more extra mods in the future. We are not keen on adding mods that make the game easier, though. The purpose of private leagues is a place to play in a clean economy with your friends, with optional additional challenge for players or groups who think they can take it on.

We are likely to add a Custom Race system in the future which will allow us to add fun modes (like infinite Delve, but no promises yet). Custom races will be a lot shorter and don't have long-term character or economy progress.

I think there is a huge difficulty spike between T15-T16 Maps and Shaper Guardian bosses, to the point where I feel forced to get a character specifically designed to tackle these bosses. Do you plan on reducing the difficulty on these bosses, or maybe add an extra Map Tier to lessen the difficulty spike?

We don't plan to reduce the content of the ultimate encounters, because a lot of our top players are able to complete that content and are looking for even harder challenges. While we don't see anything wrong with players feeling encouraged to make specialised characters for certain fights, we will consider the feedback about the difficulty ramp here.

Favour points are difficult to get and are too focused on us getting our daily missions done. Do you plan on reducing the cost of Hideout Decorations? Maybe lower the cost as Masters level up?

This is an ongoing topic of discussion internally. We don't have anything to announce at the moment, but please know that many developers are sympathetic towards your thoughts.

What video game character would you be?

Before I lost some weight this year, people suggested I could do a convincing Hargan cosplay.

How many employees does the company currently have? Do you still have (physical) space for more in your office?

Almost 140 at our office in New Zealand, plus some overseas translators and art outsourcing companies. We have some room at our office still, and are gradually expanding within our building as we can.

Do all employees work on site, or are some remote?

All of our core development staff work on-site.

Who has the most outrageous battlestation at work?

It's about keyboards. There's just so much competition between developers to have the craziest keyboards.

What games are popular among GGG staff besides Path of Exile?

This answer is going to vary massively throughout out team, but both Jonathan and I are really enjoying Dead Cells at the moment. I hear Anno 1800 mentioned constantly at work also.

How many of you have written your own books?

Several, actually! Our co-founder Erik Olofsson wrote an industrial design textbook before we started GGG, and one of our level designers has released both fiction and non-fiction books.

Do you hold birthday barbeques or similar events at GGG? If so, do you have somewhere special in New Zealand where you like to meet?

While we don't have a barbeque at our current office, the team like to host events on Friday evenings for birthdays, game competitions, challenging other development studios, etc.

How do you keep your mindset fresh when thinking about Path of Exile? I can imagine that sometimes - much like the players - you get stuck with a certain point of view about a game design issue.

It really helps that our development team constantly challenge our assumptions and surface issues that we haven't considered. Also, taking a break and playing another game for a few days over a weekend can really help prompt new solutions to problems that we were at an impasse on.

Does GGG hire interns?

Generally, no. We prefer to just hire the person fulltime as a permanent employee if they have the skills we need.

Do you have relationships with N.Z. schools, Universities, Colleges for sourcing talent?

Yes, we do help out some local universities with their courses and visit them to talk to the students about their work. It's quite useful for finding new talent.

Does GGG as an entity, or individual developers mentor other people from other organisations?

Not formally, but we encourage our developers to share our learnings by presenting talks at local game development meetups, conferences, etc. We'll have a few of these talks at ExileCon for you to enjoy.

Regarding getting into the game industry as a programmer. Do you guys recommend learning many different languages, or mastering a single language?

The most important thing is experience with programming. Focus on making hobby games in whatever language you can, and always explore other tools to find the right one for the job. We use C++ at GGG, so significant experience in that language is also required to work for us, but when we ask to see hobby projects and examples of your personal game programming, it doesn't matter much what language they were written in.

I work as a Server Admin/Engineer and am interested in what you can tell us about your back-end servers? Particularly in regards to virtualisation, load balancing, and clustering.

Path of Exile's backend infrastructure and main realm database run on dedicated bare metal hardware in Texas. The actual servers that players play on (the game instance servers) are spread around the world, in as many local regions as we can get access to (to reduce latency to players). These servers are also bare metal dedicated servers, though we have recently started small experiments with virtualisation for handling emergency spikes of activity. Load balancing is simple - the game instances get spread among the available machines in the region and if there aren't going to be enough, we order more as quickly as possible.

Hello, I'm a first-year student in Game Design. I hear that joining a video game company is extremely difficult. Are companies that selective? If so, what are the fields (programming, art, etc.) that are the most sought-after?

It's generally pretty difficult to get hired at game development companies. We receive hundreds of applications for every interview that we grant, and only hire a fraction of the people who are interviewed. But don't give up! Keep working on building a portfolio and honing your craft. Hard work and determination will show themselves in the quality of work. Even if you don't manage to get a job at Grinding Gear Games, there are plenty of other great studios out there.

In terms of most sought-after fields, it honestly depends on the type of company and what their current requirements are. For example, we find ourselves needing a lot of Visual Effects Artists and C++ Gameplay Programmers.

Will there ever be a merchandise store?

Hopefully, but probably after ExileCon.

When are you planning to sell the Shaper T-shirt from the T-shirt competition?

We have included it in the lineup of merchandise available at ExileCon. We haven't made a judgement call yet about which items could be exclusive to the convention and which we may sell extra stock of afterwards on our website, so there's a chance it is available for public sale later if we have enough stock.

Will we ever get the option to purchase microtransaction points in smaller amounts?

The tricky part is just that credit card processing fees start to represent a larger portion of the total for small transactions. We are working on some improvements here but I don't know when they'll be ready.

Why do weapon effect microtransactions that you buy directly from the cash shop apply to a single weapon when dual wielding? Compared to a supporter pack's weapon effect microtransaction which will apply to both weapons.

This is because historically the weapon effects affected a single weapon. They were priced so that players who needed two (for dual wielding or multiple characters) could purchase a second one. When we introduced supporter packs that contained weapon effects, they were too expensive to expect users to buy two copies of the entire pack to dual wield, so the weapon effects applied to both weapons. I'll discuss this situation with the team more.

Is there any chance we might see microtransactions for quivers?

There have been some cool ideas suggested for this.

Do you plan to make another game in the future? If so what genre would it be? What do you think about making a Path of Exile board game or card game?

We don't have any plans to make other games at the moment. There's so much we want to explore with Path of Exile, so all of our work is focussed on expanding that. In terms of genres, our core expertise is in Action RPGs, and we feel that Path of Exile was successful because we knew exactly what type of Action RPG we wanted to play. We'd only attempt another genre in the future if it were something we knew a lot about.

A Path of Exile board or card game would be fun, but at the moment it'd probably be a distraction from core development.

Have you thought about doing another Twitch drop event, like the one you had with the helmet microtransaction a couple of years ago?

Yes, it'll happen.

Will the upcoming league be friendlier to Flicker Strike fans in terms of league content and the reworks to Melee?

Yes, though we can't be specific about changes related to this build at this stage. I can assure you that the league currently doesn't have patches of black stuff that you don't want to accidentally flicker into.

Are there any plans to add new slots for the Harbinger currencies that are now part of the core game to the currency tab and/or rearrange it to make crafting easier on the item slot in the middle of the tab?

As those exotic currency items are now given out as rewards in core game content pretty often, we will most likely integrate them into the currency stash tab at some stage. We'll have a look at the layout concerns you mention also, but that might be in a different update to it.

It seems to be a widely held desire to have a death log showing the last few damage sources prior to death. Is this something you have plans to add to the game? If so, are there any software/hardware limitations getting in the way that you could describe at a higher level?

For simple scenarios, this isn't too hard to do. If a boss walks up to you and cleanly kills you in two hits, that's not too difficult to track or display to the user. But the reality of modern Path of Exile combat is substantially more complex, with dozens of complex debuffs dealing (or reflecting) small amounts of damage 30 times per second. It's a technical challenge to track all of this data constantly and would introduce additional server performance overhead. I'm not saying we can't/won't do it, just that it's hard and we have a lot of other pressing priorities.

A few expansions ago you mentioned that Curses would be changing substantially. Has that change already happened or is there another big change coming to Curses?

That specific change was to Temporal Chains and Enfeeble having less effect on rare and unique enemies, while lessening of curse reduction on bosses. We're going to keep an eye on it to see if more changes are required, but have no immediate plans.

You mentioned a while ago that Elemental Equilibrium and Elemental Overload were way too powerful for an individual node. Any timeline for those changes?

Elemental Equilibrium and Overload changes come with a whole host of associated re-balances, especially to Burning, Ignite and Cold Damage over Time. We'll be doing this as a major balance pass alongside a future league, but we've yet to decide which.

Are there any plans to release Path of Exile on Google Stadia when it's released?

We're open to investigating this.

Are there any plans for a Nintendo Switch version?

There is no Nintendo Switch version of Path of Exile in development at the moment and no plans to start a port in the near future. We are just too busy.

Is there any word on a Mac port?

Not yet, but I really personally want this because I use a Macbook as my current laptop.

Do you have any plans on implementing Ubuntu support? Currently it's too hard to run PoE on it.

I would like to add Linux support for the game client (the game servers actually already run on Linux, as it's what we use for our online infrastructure). It's a difficult project to prioritise because such a small slice of our playerbase runs Linux on their desktop. I switched from Linux to Windows in 2006 to work on PoE, so I appreciate how important this would be for those players.

Will you add 2-factor authentication on the website?

The tricky part of this is the policy for what happens when someone loses their second factor and has to prove account ownership to customer support to have it removed.

Currently, the safest way to play Path of Exile is to have a strong, unique password backed by an email account (that has a different, strong unique password) with two factor authentication enabled. That, combined with our unlock code system, should provide protection because the password isn't reused and the email account can't be attacked to take over the PoE account.

Are there any plans for introducing more "tag team" boss fights like Uber Elder? It seems like a perfect opportunity to re-use existing phased bosses.

We have a lot of interesting boss fights coming up in the future, and the team are very aware that that fight is popular. No promises, though :)

Will items such as crossbows, flails, and javelins ever be added to the game in a similar capacity to how they were utilised in other Action RPGs?

We'd like to add more weapon types in the future. We don't have a firm timeline for this as it has significant animation requirements. 4.0.0 seems like a logical place, but that expansion already involves the largest amount of animation work we have ever attempted before.

Are there any plans to once again have colourblind friendly sockets?

This is something that we want to improve but have not managed to do yet.

Are there plans to make standalone players be able to track how many hours they have spent playing the game?

It's difficult because we track the playtime by character, and that's lost when you delete a character. So if we started tracking it on a per-account basis now, it'd potentially be missing historical data.

Why does a dead hardcore league character get transferred to Standard instead of the softcore version of its league?

We want hardcore deaths to have consequences. If we had the characters transfer to the standard version of the challenge league, then many people would feel heavily incentivised to play in hardcore despite it not being the right mode for them, splitting up parties of friends at league launches, etc.

Why do so many items drop from the game even though we're just filtering them out?

That's a good question, and one we hope to very carefully fix over time. An example of a reason that we don't just suppress white items that would almost certainly be filtered out is that some are needed for obscure builds and vendor recipes (it'd be bad if we culled Stone Hammers, for example).

Do you think Path of Exile could be successful with a different camera perspective, for example, in third person?

Not really, no. We feel that it's important for players to play the game rather than play the camera. In addition, being immediately recognisable as an Action RPG at first glance was an important part of how we gained awareness when initially marketing Path of Exile.

What are the chances we could get a map editor so that we could create our own quests/races for submission to the game or inclusion in private leagues?

Pretty low, but I appreciate the enthusiasm. Making our developer tools accessible to the public would be very difficult, but we are hoping to open up more options with private leagues/races in the future.

Have you ever removed something from the game because it was too gruesome to stomach?

There used to rarely be dead babies washed on up on the beach of the Twilight Strand. We removed them a long time ago.

Are you continuing to work on sound improvements in game (environment sound etc)? Will you add more talking weapons like Oni-Goroshi or Jack the Axe?

Absolutely. We have scaled our internal audio team up from two people to four people in the last few months. The community really love talking weapons so we're keen to try more experiments with that in the future.

Any news on regional ladders?

No news, but this is still a fun feature we'd like to add.

Will we ever know more about Kalandra?

She is an area of Path of Exile lore that we haven't explored yet, but it would be a spoiler to answer this question directly.

Dialla mentions something called the Twist in Act 3. Will we ever find out what it was/is?

That's the Cataclysm, isn't it?

I'm excited for ExileCon in November! Do you have any recommendations for places to visit on my first trip to New Zealand?

It's time for a road trip! We called out a few awesome places on our ExileCon page and we strongly recommend them. In addition, there are some awesome beaches and bush walks around the Auckland area that you can check out while in our city for the convention.

Two weeks ago we asked the community for questions for our developers to answer. We answered many of the big questions in a post last week, and have the final set of answers today.

Can you please make Betrayal per-league rather per-character?

The question resulted in a long discussion and the eventual answer was Yes. We're not yet sure whether the change will be in 3.7.0 or 3.8.0 yet.

Can you please make Sulphite per-league rather than per-character?

Surprisingly, this actually became another Yes. Again, we aren't sure which expansion it'll go in, as there are a bunch of things we have to change at the same time to resolve our concerns with Sulphite being shared across all your characters in the league.

Master content such as Incursion and Betrayal can be distracting and disrupts the flow of just grinding maps. Do you have any plans to change this?

We have an idea for a potential change that we are quite excited about. We want more time to think about it before committing and so we aren't going to explain it here but we will follow up in a few weeks if we decide to go ahead with it (and if not, what other steps we'll take regarding this issue).

Players feel that map sustainability is tied up with Betrayal and other master content, making it non optional. What is your stance on this?

We also have a plan for this that we are considering at the same time as the changed mentioned in the answer to the last question. We'll hopefully post about it within a few weeks.

Have you guys considered allowing us to trade maps of a tier for any other map of that same tier for a small cost at an NPC?

Our current plan is to add Orbs of Horizons to the main drop pool so that it's easier to perform the transformation you want to do here.

As a follow up to the DX9 question, do you have any intention to implement newer faster APIs such as Vulkan?

Yes.

You indicated that knowing a monster could drop something that improves your character could be a good motivator for playing one more level. It feels like item drops don't compare anymore and the focus is on crafting systems with most rares being used for the Chaos Orb recipe. Do you think changing item drops could improve the trading environment?

Absolutely. I think big improvements are needed here. As I mentioned in the past Q&A post, improvements in this direction will take time across a number of releases (with some systems changes in 4.0.0 doing a lot of the heavy lifting).

Would you consider creating a SSF version where you can't migrate back to the trade league but would have increased drop rates?

We feel that providing permanent access to a version of Path of Exile where players progress more quickly would be a mistake. Sometimes we run special events that have mods that make the game more rewarding, but these are not available perpetually.

Why can't we hide fractured items on our item filters?

The reason why we have new items like that unhideable at the start is so that people's existing filters don't hide them. If you have a filter that hides a lot of rare items you don't want to see, and we introduce a new mode of rare item that technically would be hidden if it wasn't special, then players wouldn't find the new content. So we default it to on for a league until filters have updated.

I believe that in 3.7.0 there's a change that makes the fractured items filterable. Having said that, Synthesis isn't going core any time soon so it's a bit of a moot point in this case.

Now that your console player base is bigger, do you have any plans to make the official website more mobile-friendly?

We do plan to improve this, but it's a slow process. We make sure that important new pages we add such as the trade site and expansion announcements are as mobile-friendly as we can make them.

Will you make console trading easier like it is on PC?

There is internal discussion about opening up the trade API for console realms, to allow support for trade sites that find items in your premium stash tabs. Currently we haven't reached a definitive conclusion on this. One thing to note is that text chat on consoles (which isn't yet finished) is probably necessary for this system to work well.

Do you plan to add extra mods for private leagues? For example, would we ever be able to pay for a private league with infinite Delve?

We will add more extra mods in the future. We are not keen on adding mods that make the game easier, though. The purpose of private leagues is a place to play in a clean economy with your friends, with optional additional challenge for players or groups who think they can take it on.

We are likely to add a Custom Race system in the future which will allow us to add fun modes (like infinite Delve, but no promises yet). Custom races will be a lot shorter and don't have long-term character or economy progress.

I think there is a huge difficulty spike between T15-T16 Maps and Shaper Guardian bosses, to the point where I feel forced to get a character specifically designed to tackle these bosses. Do you plan on reducing the difficulty on these bosses, or maybe add an extra Map Tier to lessen the difficulty spike?

We don't plan to reduce the content of the ultimate encounters, because a lot of our top players are able to complete that content and are looking for even harder challenges. While we don't see anything wrong with players feeling encouraged to make specialised characters for certain fights, we will consider the feedback about the difficulty ramp here.

Favour points are difficult to get and are too focused on us getting our daily missions done. Do you plan on reducing the cost of Hideout Decorations? Maybe lower the cost as Masters level up?

This is an ongoing topic of discussion internally. We don't have anything to announce at the moment, but please know that many developers are sympathetic towards your thoughts.

What video game character would you be?

Before I lost some weight this year, people suggested I could do a convincing Hargan cosplay.

How many employees does the company currently have? Do you still have (physical) space for more in your office?

Almost 140 at our office in New Zealand, plus some overseas translators and art outsourcing companies. We have some room at our office still, and are gradually expanding within our building as we can.

Do all employees work on site, or are some remote?

All of our core development staff work on-site.

Who has the most outrageous battlestation at work?

It's about keyboards. There's just so much competition between developers to have the craziest keyboards.

What games are popular among GGG staff besides Path of Exile?

This answer is going to vary massively throughout out team, but both Jonathan and I are really enjoying Dead Cells at the moment. I hear Anno 1800 mentioned constantly at work also.

How many of you have written your own books?

Several, actually! Our co-founder Erik Olofsson wrote an industrial design textbook before we started GGG, and one of our level designers has released both fiction and non-fiction books.

Do you hold birthday barbeques or similar events at GGG? If so, do you have somewhere special in New Zealand where you like to meet?

While we don't have a barbeque at our current office, the team like to host events on Friday evenings for birthdays, game competitions, challenging other development studios, etc.

How do you keep your mindset fresh when thinking about Path of Exile? I can imagine that sometimes - much like the players - you get stuck with a certain point of view about a game design issue.

It really helps that our development team constantly challenge our assumptions and surface issues that we haven't considered. Also, taking a break and playing another game for a few days over a weekend can really help prompt new solutions to problems that we were at an impasse on.

Does GGG hire interns?

Generally, no. We prefer to just hire the person fulltime as a permanent employee if they have the skills we need.

Do you have relationships with N.Z. schools, Universities, Colleges for sourcing talent?

Yes, we do help out some local universities with their courses and visit them to talk to the students about their work. It's quite useful for finding new talent.

Does GGG as an entity, or individual developers mentor other people from other organisations?

Not formally, but we encourage our developers to share our learnings by presenting talks at local game development meetups, conferences, etc. We'll have a few of these talks at ExileCon for you to enjoy.

Regarding getting into the game industry as a programmer. Do you guys recommend learning many different languages, or mastering a single language?

The most important thing is experience with programming. Focus on making hobby games in whatever language you can, and always explore other tools to find the right one for the job. We use C++ at GGG, so significant experience in that language is also required to work for us, but when we ask to see hobby projects and examples of your personal game programming, it doesn't matter much what language they were written in.

I work as a Server Admin/Engineer and am interested in what you can tell us about your back-end servers? Particularly in regards to virtualisation, load balancing, and clustering.

Path of Exile's backend infrastructure and main realm database run on dedicated bare metal hardware in Texas. The actual servers that players play on (the game instance servers) are spread around the world, in as many local regions as we can get access to (to reduce latency to players). These servers are also bare metal dedicated servers, though we have recently started small experiments with virtualisation for handling emergency spikes of activity. Load balancing is simple - the game instances get spread among the available machines in the region and if there aren't going to be enough, we order more as quickly as possible.

Hello, I'm a first-year student in Game Design. I hear that joining a video game company is extremely difficult. Are companies that selective? If so, what are the fields (programming, art, etc.) that are the most sought-after?

It's generally pretty difficult to get hired at game development companies. We receive hundreds of applications for every interview that we grant, and only hire a fraction of the people who are interviewed. But don't give up! Keep working on building a portfolio and honing your craft. Hard work and determination will show themselves in the quality of work. Even if you don't manage to get a job at Grinding Gear Games, there are plenty of other great studios out there.

In terms of most sought-after fields, it honestly depends on the type of company and what their current requirements are. For example, we find ourselves needing a lot of Visual Effects Artists and C++ Gameplay Programmers.

Will there ever be a merchandise store?

Hopefully, but probably after ExileCon.

When are you planning to sell the Shaper T-shirt from the T-shirt competition?

We have included it in the lineup of merchandise available at ExileCon. We haven't made a judgement call yet about which items could be exclusive to the convention and which we may sell extra stock of afterwards on our website, so there's a chance it is available for public sale later if we have enough stock.

Will we ever get the option to purchase microtransaction points in smaller amounts?

The tricky part is just that credit card processing fees start to represent a larger portion of the total for small transactions. We are working on some improvements here but I don't know when they'll be ready.

Why do weapon effect microtransactions that you buy directly from the cash shop apply to a single weapon when dual wielding? Compared to a supporter pack's weapon effect microtransaction which will apply to both weapons.

This is because historically the weapon effects affected a single weapon. They were priced so that players who needed two (for dual wielding or multiple characters) could purchase a second one. When we introduced supporter packs that contained weapon effects, they were too expensive to expect users to buy two copies of the entire pack to dual wield, so the weapon effects applied to both weapons. I'll discuss this situation with the team more.

Is there any chance we might see microtransactions for quivers?

There have been some cool ideas suggested for this.

Do you plan to make another game in the future? If so what genre would it be? What do you think about making a Path of Exile board game or card game?

We don't have any plans to make other games at the moment. There's so much we want to explore with Path of Exile, so all of our work is focussed on expanding that. In terms of genres, our core expertise is in Action RPGs, and we feel that Path of Exile was successful because we knew exactly what type of Action RPG we wanted to play. We'd only attempt another genre in the future if it were something we knew a lot about.

A Path of Exile board or card game would be fun, but at the moment it'd probably be a distraction from core development.

Have you thought about doing another Twitch drop event, like the one you had with the helmet microtransaction a couple of years ago?

Yes, it'll happen.

Will the upcoming league be friendlier to Flicker Strike fans in terms of league content and the reworks to Melee?

Yes, though we can't be specific about changes related to this build at this stage. I can assure you that the league currently doesn't have patches of black stuff that you don't want to accidentally flicker into.

Are there any plans to add new slots for the Harbinger currencies that are now part of the core game to the currency tab and/or rearrange it to make crafting easier on the item slot in the middle of the tab?

As those exotic currency items are now given out as rewards in core game content pretty often, we will most likely integrate them into the currency stash tab at some stage. We'll have a look at the layout concerns you mention also, but that might be in a different update to it.

It seems to be a widely held desire to have a death log showing the last few damage sources prior to death. Is this something you have plans to add to the game? If so, are there any software/hardware limitations getting in the way that you could describe at a higher level?

For simple scenarios, this isn't too hard to do. If a boss walks up to you and cleanly kills you in two hits, that's not too difficult to track or display to the user. But the reality of modern Path of Exile combat is substantially more complex, with dozens of complex debuffs dealing (or reflecting) small amounts of damage 30 times per second. It's a technical challenge to track all of this data constantly and would introduce additional server performance overhead. I'm not saying we can't/won't do it, just that it's hard and we have a lot of other pressing priorities.

A few expansions ago you mentioned that Curses would be changing substantially. Has that change already happened or is there another big change coming to Curses?

That specific change was to Temporal Chains and Enfeeble having less effect on rare and unique enemies, while lessening of curse reduction on bosses. We're going to keep an eye on it to see if more changes are required, but have no immediate plans.

You mentioned a while ago that Elemental Equilibrium and Elemental Overload were way too powerful for an individual node. Any timeline for those changes?

Elemental Equilibrium and Overload changes come with a whole host of associated re-balances, especially to Burning, Ignite and Cold Damage over Time. We'll be doing this as a major balance pass alongside a future league, but we've yet to decide which.

Are there any plans to release Path of Exile on Google Stadia when it's released?

We're open to investigating this.

Are there any plans for a Nintendo Switch version?

There is no Nintendo Switch version of Path of Exile in development at the moment and no plans to start a port in the near future. We are just too busy.

Is there any word on a Mac port?

Not yet, but I really personally want this because I use a Macbook as my current laptop.

Do you have any plans on implementing Ubuntu support? Currently it's too hard to run PoE on it.

I would like to add Linux support for the game client (the game servers actually already run on Linux, as it's what we use for our online infrastructure). It's a difficult project to prioritise because such a small slice of our playerbase runs Linux on their desktop. I switched from Linux to Windows in 2006 to work on PoE, so I appreciate how important this would be for those players.

Will you add 2-factor authentication on the website?

The tricky part of this is the policy for what happens when someone loses their second factor and has to prove account ownership to customer support to have it removed.

Currently, the safest way to play Path of Exile is to have a strong, unique password backed by an email account (that has a different, strong unique password) with two factor authentication enabled. That, combined with our unlock code system, should provide protection because the password isn't reused and the email account can't be attacked to take over the PoE account.

Are there any plans for introducing more "tag team" boss fights like Uber Elder? It seems like a perfect opportunity to re-use existing phased bosses.

We have a lot of interesting boss fights coming up in the future, and the team are very aware that that fight is popular. No promises, though :)

Will items such as crossbows, flails, and javelins ever be added to the game in a similar capacity to how they were utilised in other Action RPGs?

We'd like to add more weapon types in the future. We don't have a firm timeline for this as it has significant animation requirements. 4.0.0 seems like a logical place, but that expansion already involves the largest amount of animation work we have ever attempted before.

Are there any plans to once again have colourblind friendly sockets?

This is something that we want to improve but have not managed to do yet.

Are there plans to make standalone players be able to track how many hours they have spent playing the game?

It's difficult because we track the playtime by character, and that's lost when you delete a character. So if we started tracking it on a per-account basis now, it'd potentially be missing historical data.

Why does a dead hardcore league character get transferred to Standard instead of the softcore version of its league?

We want hardcore deaths to have consequences. If we had the characters transfer to the standard version of the challenge league, then many people would feel heavily incentivised to play in hardcore despite it not being the right mode for them, splitting up parties of friends at league launches, etc.

Why do so many items drop from the game even though we're just filtering them out?

That's a good question, and one we hope to very carefully fix over time. An example of a reason that we don't just suppress white items that would almost certainly be filtered out is that some are needed for obscure builds and vendor recipes (it'd be bad if we culled Stone Hammers, for example).

Do you think Path of Exile could be successful with a different camera perspective, for example, in third person?

Not really, no. We feel that it's important for players to play the game rather than play the camera. In addition, being immediately recognisable as an Action RPG at first glance was an important part of how we gained awareness when initially marketing Path of Exile.

What are the chances we could get a map editor so that we could create our own quests/races for submission to the game or inclusion in private leagues?

Pretty low, but I appreciate the enthusiasm. Making our developer tools accessible to the public would be very difficult, but we are hoping to open up more options with private leagues/races in the future.

Have you ever removed something from the game because it was too gruesome to stomach?

There used to rarely be dead babies washed on up on the beach of the Twilight Strand. We removed them a long time ago.

Are you continuing to work on sound improvements in game (environment sound etc)? Will you add more talking weapons like Oni-Goroshi or Jack the Axe?

Absolutely. We have scaled our internal audio team up from two people to four people in the last few months. The community really love talking weapons so we're keen to try more experiments with that in the future.

Any news on regional ladders?

No news, but this is still a fun feature we'd like to add.

Will we ever know more about Kalandra?

She is an area of Path of Exile lore that we haven't explored yet, but it would be a spoiler to answer this question directly.

Dialla mentions something called the Twist in Act 3. Will we ever find out what it was/is?

That's the Cataclysm, isn't it?

I'm excited for ExileCon in November! Do you have any recommendations for places to visit on my first trip to New Zealand?

It's time for a road trip! We called out a few awesome places on our ExileCon page and we strongly recommend them. In addition, there are some awesome beaches and bush walks around the Auckland area that you can check out while in our city for the convention.

Two weeks ago we asked the community for questions for our developers to answer. We answered many of the big questions in a post last week, and have the final set of answers today.

Can you please make Betrayal per-league rather per-character?

The question resulted in a long discussion and the eventual answer was Yes. We're not yet sure whether the change will be in 3.7.0 or 3.8.0 yet.

Can you please make Sulphite per-league rather than per-character?

Surprisingly, this actually became another Yes. Again, we aren't sure which expansion it'll go in, as there are a bunch of things we have to change at the same time to resolve our concerns with Sulphite being shared across all your characters in the league.

Master content such as Incursion and Betrayal can be distracting and disrupts the flow of just grinding maps. Do you have any plans to change this?

We have an idea for a potential change that we are quite excited about. We want more time to think about it before committing and so we aren't going to explain it here but we will follow up in a few weeks if we decide to go ahead with it (and if not, what other steps we'll take regarding this issue).

Players feel that map sustainability is tied up with Betrayal and other master content, making it non optional. What is your stance on this?

We also have a plan for this that we are considering at the same time as the changed mentioned in the answer to the last question. We'll hopefully post about it within a few weeks.

Have you guys considered allowing us to trade maps of a tier for any other map of that same tier for a small cost at an NPC?

Our current plan is to add Orbs of Horizons to the main drop pool so that it's easier to perform the transformation you want to do here.

As a follow up to the DX9 question, do you have any intention to implement newer faster APIs such as Vulkan?

Yes.

You indicated that knowing a monster could drop something that improves your character could be a good motivator for playing one more level. It feels like item drops don't compare anymore and the focus is on crafting systems with most rares being used for the Chaos Orb recipe. Do you think changing item drops could improve the trading environment?

Absolutely. I think big improvements are needed here. As I mentioned in the past Q&A post, improvements in this direction will take time across a number of releases (with some systems changes in 4.0.0 doing a lot of the heavy lifting).

Would you consider creating a SSF version where you can't migrate back to the trade league but would have increased drop rates?

We feel that providing permanent access to a version of Path of Exile where players progress more quickly would be a mistake. Sometimes we run special events that have mods that make the game more rewarding, but these are not available perpetually.

Why can't we hide fractured items on our item filters?

The reason why we have new items like that unhideable at the start is so that people's existing filters don't hide them. If you have a filter that hides a lot of rare items you don't want to see, and we introduce a new mode of rare item that technically would be hidden if it wasn't special, then players wouldn't find the new content. So we default it to on for a league until filters have updated.

I believe that in 3.7.0 there's a change that makes the fractured items filterable. Having said that, Synthesis isn't going core any time soon so it's a bit of a moot point in this case.

Now that your console player base is bigger, do you have any plans to make the official website more mobile-friendly?

We do plan to improve this, but it's a slow process. We make sure that important new pages we add such as the trade site and expansion announcements are as mobile-friendly as we can make them.

Will you make console trading easier like it is on PC?

There is internal discussion about opening up the trade API for console realms, to allow support for trade sites that find items in your premium stash tabs. Currently we haven't reached a definitive conclusion on this. One thing to note is that text chat on consoles (which isn't yet finished) is probably necessary for this system to work well.

Do you plan to add extra mods for private leagues? For example, would we ever be able to pay for a private league with infinite Delve?

We will add more extra mods in the future. We are not keen on adding mods that make the game easier, though. The purpose of private leagues is a place to play in a clean economy with your friends, with optional additional challenge for players or groups who think they can take it on.

We are likely to add a Custom Race system in the future which will allow us to add fun modes (like infinite Delve, but no promises yet). Custom races will be a lot shorter and don't have long-term character or economy progress.

I think there is a huge difficulty spike between T15-T16 Maps and Shaper Guardian bosses, to the point where I feel forced to get a character specifically designed to tackle these bosses. Do you plan on reducing the difficulty on these bosses, or maybe add an extra Map Tier to lessen the difficulty spike?

We don't plan to reduce the content of the ultimate encounters, because a lot of our top players are able to complete that content and are looking for even harder challenges. While we don't see anything wrong with players feeling encouraged to make specialised characters for certain fights, we will consider the feedback about the difficulty ramp here.

Favour points are difficult to get and are too focused on us getting our daily missions done. Do you plan on reducing the cost of Hideout Decorations? Maybe lower the cost as Masters level up?

This is an ongoing topic of discussion internally. We don't have anything to announce at the moment, but please know that many developers are sympathetic towards your thoughts.

What video game character would you be?

Before I lost some weight this year, people suggested I could do a convincing Hargan cosplay.

How many employees does the company currently have? Do you still have (physical) space for more in your office?

Almost 140 at our office in New Zealand, plus some overseas translators and art outsourcing companies. We have some room at our office still, and are gradually expanding within our building as we can.

Do all employees work on site, or are some remote?

All of our core development staff work on-site.

Who has the most outrageous battlestation at work?

It's about keyboards. There's just so much competition between developers to have the craziest keyboards.

What games are popular among GGG staff besides Path of Exile?

This answer is going to vary massively throughout out team, but both Jonathan and I are really enjoying Dead Cells at the moment. I hear Anno 1800 mentioned constantly at work also.

How many of you have written your own books?

Several, actually! Our co-founder Erik Olofsson wrote an industrial design textbook before we started GGG, and one of our level designers has released both fiction and non-fiction books.

Do you hold birthday barbeques or similar events at GGG? If so, do you have somewhere special in New Zealand where you like to meet?

While we don't have a barbeque at our current office, the team like to host events on Friday evenings for birthdays, game competitions, challenging other development studios, etc.

How do you keep your mindset fresh when thinking about Path of Exile? I can imagine that sometimes - much like the players - you get stuck with a certain point of view about a game design issue.

It really helps that our development team constantly challenge our assumptions and surface issues that we haven't considered. Also, taking a break and playing another game for a few days over a weekend can really help prompt new solutions to problems that we were at an impasse on.

Does GGG hire interns?

Generally, no. We prefer to just hire the person fulltime as a permanent employee if they have the skills we need.

Do you have relationships with N.Z. schools, Universities, Colleges for sourcing talent?

Yes, we do help out some local universities with their courses and visit them to talk to the students about their work. It's quite useful for finding new talent.

Does GGG as an entity, or individual developers mentor other people from other organisations?

Not formally, but we encourage our developers to share our learnings by presenting talks at local game development meetups, conferences, etc. We'll have a few of these talks at ExileCon for you to enjoy.

Regarding getting into the game industry as a programmer. Do you guys recommend learning many different languages, or mastering a single language?

The most important thing is experience with programming. Focus on making hobby games in whatever language you can, and always explore other tools to find the right one for the job. We use C++ at GGG, so significant experience in that language is also required to work for us, but when we ask to see hobby projects and examples of your personal game programming, it doesn't matter much what language they were written in.

I work as a Server Admin/Engineer and am interested in what you can tell us about your back-end servers? Particularly in regards to virtualisation, load balancing, and clustering.

Path of Exile's backend infrastructure and main realm database run on dedicated bare metal hardware in Texas. The actual servers that players play on (the game instance servers) are spread around the world, in as many local regions as we can get access to (to reduce latency to players). These servers are also bare metal dedicated servers, though we have recently started small experiments with virtualisation for handling emergency spikes of activity. Load balancing is simple - the game instances get spread among the available machines in the region and if there aren't going to be enough, we order more as quickly as possible.

Hello, I'm a first-year student in Game Design. I hear that joining a video game company is extremely difficult. Are companies that selective? If so, what are the fields (programming, art, etc.) that are the most sought-after?

It's generally pretty difficult to get hired at game development companies. We receive hundreds of applications for every interview that we grant, and only hire a fraction of the people who are interviewed. But don't give up! Keep working on building a portfolio and honing your craft. Hard work and determination will show themselves in the quality of work. Even if you don't manage to get a job at Grinding Gear Games, there are plenty of other great studios out there.

In terms of most sought-after fields, it honestly depends on the type of company and what their current requirements are. For example, we find ourselves needing a lot of Visual Effects Artists and C++ Gameplay Programmers.

Will there ever be a merchandise store?

Hopefully, but probably after ExileCon.

When are you planning to sell the Shaper T-shirt from the T-shirt competition?

We have included it in the lineup of merchandise available at ExileCon. We haven't made a judgement call yet about which items could be exclusive to the convention and which we may sell extra stock of afterwards on our website, so there's a chance it is available for public sale later if we have enough stock.

Will we ever get the option to purchase microtransaction points in smaller amounts?

The tricky part is just that credit card processing fees start to represent a larger portion of the total for small transactions. We are working on some improvements here but I don't know when they'll be ready.

Why do weapon effect microtransactions that you buy directly from the cash shop apply to a single weapon when dual wielding? Compared to a supporter pack's weapon effect microtransaction which will apply to both weapons.

This is because historically the weapon effects affected a single weapon. They were priced so that players who needed two (for dual wielding or multiple characters) could purchase a second one. When we introduced supporter packs that contained weapon effects, they were too expensive to expect users to buy two copies of the entire pack to dual wield, so the weapon effects applied to both weapons. I'll discuss this situation with the team more.

Is there any chance we might see microtransactions for quivers?

There have been some cool ideas suggested for this.

Do you plan to make another game in the future? If so what genre would it be? What do you think about making a Path of Exile board game or card game?

We don't have any plans to make other games at the moment. There's so much we want to explore with Path of Exile, so all of our work is focussed on expanding that. In terms of genres, our core expertise is in Action RPGs, and we feel that Path of Exile was successful because we knew exactly what type of Action RPG we wanted to play. We'd only attempt another genre in the future if it were something we knew a lot about.

A Path of Exile board or card game would be fun, but at the moment it'd probably be a distraction from core development.

Have you thought about doing another Twitch drop event, like the one you had with the helmet microtransaction a couple of years ago?

Yes, it'll happen.

Will the upcoming league be friendlier to Flicker Strike fans in terms of league content and the reworks to Melee?

Yes, though we can't be specific about changes related to this build at this stage. I can assure you that the league currently doesn't have patches of black stuff that you don't want to accidentally flicker into.

Are there any plans to add new slots for the Harbinger currencies that are now part of the core game to the currency tab and/or rearrange it to make crafting easier on the item slot in the middle of the tab?

As those exotic currency items are now given out as rewards in core game content pretty often, we will most likely integrate them into the currency stash tab at some stage. We'll have a look at the layout concerns you mention also, but that might be in a different update to it.

It seems to be a widely held desire to have a death log showing the last few damage sources prior to death. Is this something you have plans to add to the game? If so, are there any software/hardware limitations getting in the way that you could describe at a higher level?

For simple scenarios, this isn't too hard to do. If a boss walks up to you and cleanly kills you in two hits, that's not too difficult to track or display to the user. But the reality of modern Path of Exile combat is substantially more complex, with dozens of complex debuffs dealing (or reflecting) small amounts of damage 30 times per second. It's a technical challenge to track all of this data constantly and would introduce additional server performance overhead. I'm not saying we can't/won't do it, just that it's hard and we have a lot of other pressing priorities.

A few expansions ago you mentioned that Curses would be changing substantially. Has that change already happened or is there another big change coming to Curses?

That specific change was to Temporal Chains and Enfeeble having less effect on rare and unique enemies, while lessening of curse reduction on bosses. We're going to keep an eye on it to see if more changes are required, but have no immediate plans.

You mentioned a while ago that Elemental Equilibrium and Elemental Overload were way too powerful for an individual node. Any timeline for those changes?

Elemental Equilibrium and Overload changes come with a whole host of associated re-balances, especially to Burning, Ignite and Cold Damage over Time. We'll be doing this as a major balance pass alongside a future league, but we've yet to decide which.

Are there any plans to release Path of Exile on Google Stadia when it's released?

We're open to investigating this.

Are there any plans for a Nintendo Switch version?

There is no Nintendo Switch version of Path of Exile in development at the moment and no plans to start a port in the near future. We are just too busy.

Is there any word on a Mac port?

Not yet, but I really personally want this because I use a Macbook as my current laptop.

Do you have any plans on implementing Ubuntu support? Currently it's too hard to run PoE on it.

I would like to add Linux support for the game client (the game servers actually already run on Linux, as it's what we use for our online infrastructure). It's a difficult project to prioritise because such a small slice of our playerbase runs Linux on their desktop. I switched from Linux to Windows in 2006 to work on PoE, so I appreciate how important this would be for those players.

Will you add 2-factor authentication on the website?

The tricky part of this is the policy for what happens when someone loses their second factor and has to prove account ownership to customer support to have it removed.

Currently, the safest way to play Path of Exile is to have a strong, unique password backed by an email account (that has a different, strong unique password) with two factor authentication enabled. That, combined with our unlock code system, should provide protection because the password isn't reused and the email account can't be attacked to take over the PoE account.

Are there any plans for introducing more "tag team" boss fights like Uber Elder? It seems like a perfect opportunity to re-use existing phased bosses.

We have a lot of interesting boss fights coming up in the future, and the team are very aware that that fight is popular. No promises, though :)

Will items such as crossbows, flails, and javelins ever be added to the game in a similar capacity to how they were utilised in other Action RPGs?

We'd like to add more weapon types in the future. We don't have a firm timeline for this as it has significant animation requirements. 4.0.0 seems like a logical place, but that expansion already involves the largest amount of animation work we have ever attempted before.

Are there any plans to once again have colourblind friendly sockets?

This is something that we want to improve but have not managed to do yet.

Are there plans to make standalone players be able to track how many hours they have spent playing the game?

It's difficult because we track the playtime by character, and that's lost when you delete a character. So if we started tracking it on a per-account basis now, it'd potentially be missing historical data.

Why does a dead hardcore league character get transferred to Standard instead of the softcore version of its league?

We want hardcore deaths to have consequences. If we had the characters transfer to the standard version of the challenge league, then many people would feel heavily incentivised to play in hardcore despite it not being the right mode for them, splitting up parties of friends at league launches, etc.

Why do so many items drop from the game even though we're just filtering them out?

That's a good question, and one we hope to very carefully fix over time. An example of a reason that we don't just suppress white items that would almost certainly be filtered out is that some are needed for obscure builds and vendor recipes (it'd be bad if we culled Stone Hammers, for example).

Do you think Path of Exile could be successful with a different camera perspective, for example, in third person?

Not really, no. We feel that it's important for players to play the game rather than play the camera. In addition, being immediately recognisable as an Action RPG at first glance was an important part of how we gained awareness when initially marketing Path of Exile.

What are the chances we could get a map editor so that we could create our own quests/races for submission to the game or inclusion in private leagues?

Pretty low, but I appreciate the enthusiasm. Making our developer tools accessible to the public would be very difficult, but we are hoping to open up more options with private leagues/races in the future.

Have you ever removed something from the game because it was too gruesome to stomach?

There used to rarely be dead babies washed on up on the beach of the Twilight Strand. We removed them a long time ago.

Are you continuing to work on sound improvements in game (environment sound etc)? Will you add more talking weapons like Oni-Goroshi or Jack the Axe?

Absolutely. We have scaled our internal audio team up from two people to four people in the last few months. The community really love talking weapons so we're keen to try more experiments with that in the future.

Any news on regional ladders?

No news, but this is still a fun feature we'd like to add.

Will we ever know more about Kalandra?

She is an area of Path of Exile lore that we haven't explored yet, but it would be a spoiler to answer this question directly.

Dialla mentions something called the Twist in Act 3. Will we ever find out what it was/is?

That's the Cataclysm, isn't it?

I'm excited for ExileCon in November! Do you have any recommendations for places to visit on my first trip to New Zealand?

It's time for a road trip! We called out a few awesome places on our ExileCon page and we strongly recommend them. In addition, there are some awesome beaches and bush walks around the Auckland area that you can check out while in our city for the convention.