Chris

Tool-assisted Pantheon Mod Farming

In this post I want to discuss an illegal third-party program which allows players to see what Pantheon Archnemesis Mods are preloaded in a map, in order to farm the valuable ones. This has been a hot topic in the community and there is a lot of misunderstanding related to it. I will describe the mitigations we took proactively during implementation and a hotfix that we made today that solves the issue entirely.

The short explanation is that we had already considered and mostly mitigated this exploit when we implemented Archnemesis mods, so it wasn't of much value to take advantage of, but we have now completely eliminated it.

Here's the longer explanation, if you're interested in technical details:
Some Archnemesis modifiers are more valuable than others because they perform drop conversion (for example, converting all the drops to currency items). These modifiers are the ones attached to... Read more

What Happened with Items

Lake of Kalandra saw a number of balance changes that were not properly communicated before release. After a week of addressing feedback with hotfixes, we have written this post to explain what our intention was, what went wrong, how we have fixed it, and to reassure you about the direction we intend to go in the future.

There's a bit of backstory to explain. I want to start by describing three philosophies that have been guiding our decisions recently:

Philosophy One: Reward mechanisms should scale properly with Item Quantity and Rarity bonuses

For the last few years, we have been using what we internally call item templates to control what drops from league content. This is where a monster (often with a reward symbol over its head) drops a specific type of item when it is killed.

But Path of Exile is a game about opting-in to more difficulty in exchange for more rewards. Yo... Read more

Nerfing Defensive Archnemesis Modifiers

In a patch in the next day or so, we will be reducing the impact of a lot of defensive Archnemesis Modifiers. This post explains why and lists a preliminary version of the changes.

Archnemesis modifiers are meant to make combat more challenging. Even more so when two synergistic mods stack together to create an especially dangerous emergent behaviour. However, this philosophy is mostly meant to apply to offensive mods, rather than defensive ones.

We want defensive modifiers to exist, and these implicitly make rare monsters harder for certain builds to kill. However, we absolutely agree that it's frustrating when multiple similar mods stack together and extend the length of the fight exponentially. A build affected by this has no way to get around the mods, other than enduring a long fight or running away from the monster.

We have nerfed many defensive modifiers. Our primary goal ... Read more

Improvements to Item Drops

We will deploy a patch soon that significantly improves item drops throughout Path of Exile. This post broadly describes the major changes. Detailed patch notes will be posted later.

We have massively increased the rarity bonus for items dropped by monsters with multiple Archnemesis mods. This is proportional to difficulty, so there's a moderate improvement for two mods, a large improvement for three mods and a huge improvement for four mods.

We have massively increased the rarity of items dropped by Map Bosses. They now act like late Act Bosses, dropping fewer normal and magic items but many more rare and unique items.

We have globally increased the drop rate of unique items by 33%. In addition, with the massive item rarity bonuses added to map bosses and multiple-mod rare monsters, they will drop many more uniques than before.

... Read more

What's Next for Archnemesis Modifiers

So far we have numerically reduced their difficulty and have reduced the quantity that spawn on rare monsters. There are two more areas of feedback that we'd like to address.

Specific Mods (and how they affect certain builds)

So there are a few things we're doing here.

Firstly, we have prepared a list of what all the mods actually do. While we usually try to have a sense of exploration with new content, we're seeing a lot of misunderstanding a... Read more

Archnemesis Rare Changes (Part 2)

After making some numerical balance changes yesterday, we are now making a functional change to how Archnemesis Modifiers spawn on rare monsters. Previously, rare monsters you encountered generally had two Archnemesis mods, but could spawn with as many as three or four. Now, they will default to one modifier, with a chance of having two or three. Update: This patch has been deployed as a serverside hotfix.

Archnemesis mods are designed so that certain pairs are very challenging to overcome. And we are generally pretty happy with the difficulty ... Read more

Rare and Magic Monster Balance

Okay, we shipped them a little overtuned. We have just deployed a hotfix that reduces rare monster life and damage and slightly reduces that of magics.

I'll explain how this occurred.

Transitioning from the old monster mod system to Archnemesis was meant to make rare and magic monster fights more challenging. And it certainly did. We tested it extensively, and were happy with the level of difficulty when we released it. In general, we feel that in Path of Exile it's better to introduce things slightly too challenging than slightly too easy, and so we awaited player feedback and death data to see if it was actually too hard for the average player.

Well, 12 hours of feedback and data is enough to know that we need to take the edge off the difficulty. Rare and magic monsters are still going to be hard, just not as difficult as they were today. We will follow up with more tweaks (i... Read more

Communication and the Sacred Orb

Hi everyone,

I wanted to post myself to clear up some misunderstanding, because when our communication about new items is through bite-sized single sentences and pictures that are designed for easy sharing on social media, some explanation and context can be missed. This often leads to fun speculation by the community, but can occasionally lead to misunderstandings.

This league, we've been working hard at improving our communication so that we are more transparent about what to expect from future changes and what our intentions and thoughts are when making these changes. When we posted the Sacred Orb teaser earlier today, there was a strong reaction to it which is understandable given that we failed to provide enough context for how rare this item is. I am really sorry about that and I hope that I can clear things up by explaining our thinking. The senior designers and I have spent a lot of toda... Read more

These are posted in the old PC Bugs section which is now archived. Our QA team can still see those older posts, but they are not available to users.

The Early Bird member group didn't have voting enabled. We put this in place to stop people making multiple 'quick accounts' to manipulate the voting.

Over the weekend, we launched Path of Exile: Expedition! We've been really enjoying watching the community play through the new content and conquer the challenges that lie within. We have deployed many hotfixes and a restartless 3.15.0b patch so far, and have more coming! This post provides more details.

A lot of players have tried to derive our player concurrency numbers based on the data shown for Steam users, and have expressed concern that fewer people played this expansion than the previous two. To be transparent, the number is that 23% fewer players joined us at launch compared to our all-time record, and this is something we were prepared for. In addition to the normal variance between releases, we completely understand that Path of Exile had a lot of changes in 3.15 and this is definitely unnerving to some players... Read more

We did a large backend upgrade, you should be good now.

https://tinypng.com/

In the near future, we'll be making some improvements to how Path of Exile utilises your video memory. This post explains what impact that will have on your gameplay and when to expect the patch.

Graphics cards have a certain amount of Video RAM (VRAM), which is used to hold the various assets that we are rendering for the current game scene. If you run out of VRAM while playing under DirectX 11, our default renderer, the game will still work but your frame rate will drop as it has to render assets that reside in system memory. The graphics driver would also move assets back and forth between main memory and VRAM, further slowing things down. For users without enough VRAM, performance under DirectX11 is pretty terrible.

While the Vulkan rendering API has all sorts of performanc... Read more

Engine Performance Bug Found

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

Those with higher votes will show first, as most users finds these replies the most revelvant. There is no point showing replies first that people don't find helpful. You're still welcome to change the sort order yourself.

Both forum header trailer links are working fine for me.

The PMs aren't built as a chat room of sorts. Delete the PM if you no longer need it and if you want to send a new conversation then start a new PM.

20 Users Banned for Exploit Abuse

Earlier today, we learned of a bug in Ultimatum that allows players to generate excessive rewards. Shortly after its discovery, we deployed a hotfix that capped the amount of experience and items that Ultimatums could yield.

We have banned 20 accounts that abused this exploit multiple times. These bans will last until Ultimatum ends in July. We will also void the characters they made in Ultimatum so that they (and their items) will not be transferred to their parent leagues.

If you uncover an exploit in Path of Exile and abuse it for your benefit, we will ban you.

Ultimatum Launch: Server Issues and Streamer Priority

UPDATE: Server stability issue appears fixed. Be careful with your database page sizes, people.

Hey everyone,

It's been a long day but we wanted to put together a few thoughts while we have a moment waiting for our next server fix to build. This launch has been rough, to say the least. In this post, we plan to address both the ongoing technical realm stability issues and the conversation around streamers getting priority in the login queue. We are sorry that this is being addressed so late in the day - we have been giving the server issues absolute priority and haven't had time until now to write up this explanation.

Let's start with the technical issues.

Immediately upon launch of the league, we could see that the queue was running incredibly slowly. At the rate that it was emptying, it'd be at least two hours t... Read more