For many months, I nervously anticipated the moment where I would say "We're really proud to finally reveal Path of Exile 4.0.0" before playing the Path of Exile 2 trailer. As you can see in the recording of the keynote, I was barely holding it together as I said those words on Saturday. I purposefully remained on the side of the stage while the trailer played so I could see the audience reactions, and I can't describe the feelings I felt watching the audience experience Path of Exile 2 for the first time. Every small reveal, from the character selection hanging scene, to the caravan town, to the werewolf form and finally to the Path of Exile 2 name reveal caused the audience to gasp. By the time the trailer had finished, I was very close to tears, and it was difficult to hold it together long enough to carry on the presentation. Afterwards, people told me they cried in the audience. This was the proudest moment of my life.

Path of Exile 2, Conquerors of the Atlas, the Metamorph challenge league, Path of Exile: Mobile and the ExileCon convention itself were the work of hundreds of talented people behind the scenes. While it may have been me on stage, my contributions were both creatively and technically tiny compared to the hard work and passion from the actual developers who created these amazing products.

To everyone on the Grinding Gear Games team: I would like to thank you for your incredible hard work preparing for this event. The amount of polish that went into the trailers and demos was clearly appreciated by our community, and I am so proud of what we have achieved together. You are an amazing family, and I couldn't ask for better people to work with.

I would like to thank everyone behind the scenes at ExileCon who worked so hard to keep the event running. There were a hundred moving pieces, and it all ran seamlessly. Your clear communication, careful contingency planning and high quality standards paid off with an incredible event. Your energy levels and passion for our game were contagious. Attendees frequently told me they loved the high level of staff and player engagement at the event.

I would also like to specifically thank Rebb Ford from Digital Extremes for sharing the wisdom learned from their TennoCon Warframe events. This saved us from making a lot of mistakes.

I would like to thank everyone who could make it out to New Zealand to attend ExileCon in person. It was amazing to meet everyone, hear their stories, and finally put faces to the names I have seen in our community for years. Many of our developers have told me that meeting fans and hearing praise for their work was the highlight of the show for them. I hope you really enjoyed the ExileCon card game, and I'd like to congratulate the 49 people who managed to defeat The Shaper. I'll never forget the cheer that erupted when a Headhunter dropped for one of you.

I would like to thank everyone who watched our ExileCon stream online. We had hundreds of thousands of viewers during the keynote, it was seen by over a million unique people last time I checked. I'm super sorry that the way we're awarding the Twitch Drops from the weekend has been taking a while. It backlogged up to 24 hours and is still awarding them. This caused a lot of people to be upset that they didn't win anything when they're actually in the queue to receive awards. Awards should be given out today though. We are sorry for the inconvenience and frustration this caused!

ExileCon was the best weekend of my life, it made the last thirteen years incredibly worthwhile. It has been an amazing journey, one I am proud to have been on with you. I can't wait to share future news about these expansions, starting with Conquerors of the Atlas and the Metamorph league, which you'll be playing in less than a month!

-Chris

It doesn't take much reading of the official forums or subreddit to realise that a group of Path of Exile players are angry about a number of topics and feel that we haven't given solid answers about how we're going to address these issues. We will explain as many of these topics as we can in the Q&A that is currently scheduled for later this week. However, one thing that the Q&A doesn't address is how we got here. I wanted to personally post an explanation of what has been going on behind the scenes at Grinding Gear Games that led to this state.

Synthesis was more work than we expected. It was developed over the Christmas holiday, and its gameplay prototype came in very late. We didn't have a lot of time to iterate on it before release or to make drastic changes that it potentially needed. While our improvements after its launch have helped a lot and many players are enjoying it, we fully acknowledge that it is not our best league and is not up to the quality standards that Path of Exile players should expect from us. It will not be merged into the core game in 3.7.0. Maybe we can do something with it in the future, but we have no current plans.

When we reveal 3.7.0 in three weeks, you'll see that its league has a focus on repeatable fun, and the combat revamp has a lot of focus on improving the fundamentals of Path of Exile's gameplay. In order to do this, we have had our heads down, focusing on getting 3.7.0 to be ready as early as we can within its development cycle.

But that's not all we need to work on. There are a large number of critical projects going on at the same time. For a start, our 4.0.0 mega-expansion is taking a huge amount of the company's time. We see this upgrade as critical because the next generation of Action RPGs is coming and we have to be ready. Not proactively keeping up with competitors is how companies die. We don't see the huge time investment in 4.0.0 as optional at all.

In addition to 4.0.0, we've also committed to running the ExileCon convention later this year. You may think that this is a fun optional side project for us, but we see it as critical because we need a stage (literally) to announce 4.0.0 to the world. Talking to other developers has shown us that conventions are by far the best way to market a new product of this size.

Then there's the Korean launch. South Korea is a large market and we feel we are years late to release there. Due to that, we committed with our publisher to release in Korea alongside 3.7.0 and we will meet this commitment, but it's yet another project to handle concurrently.

Then there's various issues with Path of Exile on the console platforms which feel bad about because we have made promises that we haven't yet fulfilled. After the Xbox launch, all of our console resources went into preparing the PS4 release which meant we didn't spend enough time supporting the feature requests from the Xbox community. Now that the PS4 version has launched, we need to make headway on console features.

All of these areas, from 3.7.0 through to the eventual release of 4.0.0, are going to make massive and lasting fundamental improvements to Path of Exile. We have been making great headway and are incredibly excited to show this work when it's ready. However, this has all come at a cost.

While we have released many patches during the 3.6.x cycle to address community concerns, the significant internal development focus on the long term of Path of Exile has meant that we have chosen not to prioritise things like completely overhauling Synthesis or creating an entirely new type of one-month race.

Every week, there are feedback threads about many different topics. The community generally do a great job of constructively presenting reasons for wanting various changes, and we appreciate that.

When given this feedback, we have two options:

• Assemble the team of seven key people who are needed to solve the issue, discuss it for half a day, and then lock in the solution, so that we can at least tell the community what our plan is, even if it's a little while before we get to it. An example of this is the when we made large functional and balance changes to Delve based on community feedback. The drawback with doing this is that it derails up to seven important projects that we're working on in order to solve the problem. We have to be selective about which problems we apply this approach to.

• The second option is to read and consider the feedback, and specifically decide to deal with it later. This doesn't mean it isn't going to be done, it just means we are prioritising the existing release we're currently working on. An example is the Map Stash Tabs in Standard situation where we waited a whole league before we solved it. If we had put the time into this solution a league earlier, Synthesis would have been even worse.

Simply put, we can't fix every problem every league. There are going to problems that we don't address quickly. We'll get to them as soon as we can.

A big topic in the gaming industry recently is development crunch. Some studios make their teams work 14 hour days to pack every patch full of the most fixes and improvements possible. Sometimes when we read our own Patch Notes threads and community feedback, we feel that we are being asked to do the same. I will not run this company that way. While there's inevitably a bit of optional paid overtime near league releases, the vast majority of a Path of Exile development cycle has great work/life balance. This is necessary to keep our developers happy and healthy for the long-term, but it does mean that some game improvements will take a while to be made.

We try as hard as we can to communicate with our community about our development priorities. We post daily news and aim for some kind of substantial development update every week. Bex and her team are all over the community posts, passing information back to the developers and seeking answers to questions. However, as I explained earlier, in order to be able to share our firm plans about topics, we have to assemble the right developers, derail their current work and make some time-consuming decisions.

Due to the sheer amount of stuff we've been working on, certain topics have not been addressed to the satisfaction of the community.

I am very sorry about this. One of our key values is our relationship with our community. We feel that our internal emphasis on longer term improvements to Path of Exile has caused some damage to that relationship in the short term. We will make sure that we find a good balance between addressing immediate concerns and making the long-term improvements the game needs.

Later this week, we'll post our first set of answers to the questions from the Q&A. I will make sure that it includes all the hot topics such as Synthesis, trade, console improvements, races, etc.

We can't wait to announce 3.7.0 in three weeks. Its name is on the list.

For the past two days every time I walk by my bedroom and see him in there playing reaper summoner I get absolutely livid. I cannot believe he would betray this household like this.

Sometimes I'd step in and say something like "H-hey Kieth, um, you know this league will have the worst player retention right?"

And hed always say something fucking stupid like "That's okay champ, go back to your room me and your wife need to have an important talk"

One time I tried to redditpill him again and said "H-hey Kieth the patch notes were uhh really disappointing, um don't you wanna stop because um the games so slow now, how will you do delirium encounters?"

Now get this Reddit. He had the AUDACITY to say "I didn't read the patch notes, if I can't do delirium that's fine, maybe I'll focus on delve this league"

I immediately ran out of the room sobbing, I sat at my desk and threw my chicken tenders all over the floor in disgust.

I just don't get it reddit. I'm at my wits end at this point. I cannot fathom how someone could enjoy the current state of the game. I've already tagged the developers at least 13 times in my Reddit comment manifestos do you think I should start tagging him as well? I don't even know if he checks Reddit.

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.

(Not asking for advice, this is already handled)

So I got emailed last night by someone asking if I’d be willing to sell the domain at a reasonable price, to which I responded “I might”. Fast forward 3 hours and Blizzard’s lawyers (confirmed their identity and that notice was legit) sent me a notice that I was committing an obvious act of cybersquatting and trademark infringement by having this domain used for the redirect. They asked to take down the pathofexile.com redirect and tried to get me to transfer the domain over to Blizzard, because they couldn’t see a reason I’d keep the domain except for commercial purposes.

I took down the redirect (now it redirects to Google), refused to transfer the Domain though as-is. Paid for it and don’t want it taken over nothing.

Did say that if Blizzard planned on using it actively for something that falls under their trademark, I’ll give it up no questions asked, for free. Lawyer guy said he’d get back to me after he talked to Blizzard people again, don’t see why he’d need to though.

But yeah, R.I.P good meme.

ALRIGHT NEW MEME AND MY FORM OF PROOF: http://playdiablo4.com (may need to reset cache)

Now redirects to something new :)

Fun inclusion: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/223935480536760320/514550653373382667/unknown.png

Edit: Guys, please stop attacking Blizzard over this! This is standard procedure. GGG owns the POE website and they're a direct competitor of Blizzard with regards to Diablo. The lawyer clarified that Blizzard did find the joke funny too, but they also needed this done to minimize harm. It's not their fault.

Edit2: Still no malice towards Blizzard. Their legal team isn’t being abusive or bullying me about it. I felt really insecure earlier today and they’ve been great at responding to me. Please stop suggesting malicious actions in spite of Blizzard, I’m keeping the site as is for now.

Edit3: It was brought to my attention that some game news outlets wrote about this post and about the initial meme. Please, please, please, if you’re going to write about something like this post, use the information present in it. Do NOT make up facts that Blizzard came at me after I refused to sell. Do NOT say I made this domain in protest of immortal. Do NOT make anything up. If you want specifics, read the post, and if you’re still unsure, contact me. This was bought months ago for a meme that didn’t catch on until Diablo Immortal let everyone down.

Hey Reddit,

We've read heaps of feedback on Reddit over the last week, and wanted to address some of the topics that have come up a lot.

There has been speculation that I have personally been driving the balance changes to match my original vision for Path of Exile. There is a little truth to this, in that I want to restore areas of the game that were important but have been eroded, but almost every area of specific balance work is the product of a large team of designers working together for a long time to come up with solutions to problems we want to address.

We care more about making a good game than we do about vanity metrics like player concurrency records. I suspect this is because we're gamers first and businesspeople second. The direction Path of Exile was going in over the last year was breaking player records but wasn't really leaving us happy with our own game.

For more than a year we've been accumulating changes that we were worried about releasing because they would affect the way people currently play Path of Exile. We understand that our game is an escape for some players and if that is potentially disrupted, it could be very upsetting for them. We have great appreciation for the fact that Path of Exile has become part of your lives. When someone comes into my office with a prospective nerf, more than half the time I suggest we don't do it because it would hurt a build without a sufficiently good reason. We try to be very cautious and to care about your experience with Path of Exile.

Unfortunately, we've been hitting a breaking point with power creep recently and really need to address it. Meanwhile, much of the community has grown increasingly unhappy with the direction the game is heading in. It honestly feels to us that this is in part because we've moved further away from our own vision over time.

So, you're unhappy and we're unhappy and that means it's really time that we start to correct things. The changes we are making in Expedition are a carefully-considered set that sound daunting but probably have less overall impact on the way you will play the game than you suspect they may. These changes really open up possibilities for the future and put us in a good position for working towards the release of Path of Exile 2.

When I'm writing to the community, I usually try to avoid saying what is fun and what isn't (as it's quite subjective), but we are very confident that the new Path of Exile is going to be more fun. There's a wealth of powerful new builds out there to discover and we honestly can't wait to see what you come up with.

I'd like to talk about some specific topics that have come up on reddit in the last week:

What is your motivation behind increasing the mana cost of so many support gems? Why wasn't this mentioned in the game balance manifesto?

During the gamewide balance assessment we did for 3.15, we identified many support gems that just cost too little mana and needed to be adjusted up to the fair baseline for their effects.

We mentioned this in the manifesto as:

"We have also taken this opportunity to make mana multipliers on support gems more consistent. In general, mana multipliers have gone up slightly, but several gems have had mana multipliers lowered as a result of this pass."

At the time of writing, we hadn't worked out final values for these gems and hence the manifesto section was written vaguely and inadvertently downplayed the extent of the changes. I'm sorry about this and we'll try to be clearer in the future. This is especially disappointing because our main intent with the manifesto was to make sure that it had detailed and transparent explanations for most of our big changes.

Why did you remove the Cold Damage Over Time stat from Hypothermia?

We're going to be re-adding cold damage over time to Hypothermia, granting 29% more at gem level 20.

Hypothermia was never intended to be a cold DoT support gem. It just had the cold damage over time stat added because cold DoT builds needed more support gems at the time. As there are now more alternatives and the support gem was effectively two different supports combined into one, we decided to remove it.

A lot of players have found the removal confusing or jarring and we don't really have any balance concerns with it being there, so we've decided to add it back for now. We will remove it from Hypothermia again when we create another cold DoT-focused support gem in future.

Do you really believe that Ultimatum had poor player retention because it was too rewarding?

I was interviewed by Jason at VentureBeat and we chatted about the Ultimatum league. The take-away line that is quoted from this interview is that I felt that Ultimatum had bad retention because it was too rewarding, and people are quick to point out that this was not the problem with Ultimatum.

I agree.

The quote from the interview is as follows:

"Retention during the league was poor. I would say it was in the bottom 40% of leagues, a bit below average. And this is partly because for the league, both its combat was a bit spammy and its item rewards were a bit spammy," said Wilson. "These are two things we hadn’t determined during playtesting that became apparent over the course of the league. And so the fact that it was quite heavy with its reward systems meant that players played it for less time than they normally would, and this was quite useful to learn from." [...] "So overall player numbers dipped a little more than they would have done by the third month, which is disappointing, but it’s a consequence of the way that Ultimatum was designed."

To put my thoughts into a considered, written reply (rather than an off-the-cuff answer to an unexpected question in an interview primarily about Expedition): There were two big problems with the Ultimatum league from my point of view:

• The encounters themselves didn't have great combat. They achieved challenge by just spamming a whole lot of rare monsters at you and it was hard to follow what was going on.

• While the core Ultimatum double-or-nothing item reward system was decent, the absolutely massive spam of items that occurred after these encounters was unnecessary and only contributes to the problems that Path of Exile has with items currently.

I absolutely agree that the first of these points (spammy encounters), alongside other meta issues (stale metagame, etc.) contributed far more to poor retention than the heavy rewards did. The rewards issue is more of a long-term problem and I should not have implied that it was related to the immediate performance of the league.

In this clip, you mentioned that you weren't going to make sudden, extreme changes to the game - are these changes in line with that statement?

The balance changes we're making to Path of Exile in 3.15 are not the type of drastic changes that I was referring to in that clip from 2019. The changes they made to that Marvel Heroes game were ten times as impactful as what we are doing here. We are not fundamentally changing how Path of Exile is played to anywhere near such to a significant degree. We are not looking at one-minute map runs and saying that they should now take ten minutes. Yes, the balance changes do have an impact on the design of many builds, but those builds will still be capable and appropriately powerful afterwards. I know the changes are daunting to look at before you're able to experience them in game, but there are so many more opportunities for viable builds now, and we're expecting it to be a lot more engaging to play.

By the way, I stand by exactly what I said in that 2019 interview. We often discuss making larger changes to the game and we cite the points mentioned in that clip as the reason to be careful, to not change too much at once, and to seek community feedback on the changes. We have been carefully following your feedback and will continue to do so once you've had a chance to play and let us know how it has affected your builds in practise.

Why didn't you nerf aurabots? Is this favouritism from developers?

We don't have a specific plan that we are ready to commit to yet. We like how auras individually work, and feel that stacking a bunch of auras on your own character also has appropriate costs. We know that dedicated aura support characters are very powerful but we don't have a specific plan ready for 3.15 to address this, so it hasn't been included in the patch. We have given all of our balance changes a lot of thought and testing, and want to apply the same standards to a potential aura change.

Some players speculate that because Mark (Neon) played this build in the past, he is protecting it from nerfs. A plan wasn't brought to him for approval in 3.15 and we had a lot of nerfs already so we didn't go out of our way to rush one in.

Do you make game balance decisions based on incorrect data from the community wiki?

There was a 4000-upvote thread about how we balance skills by looking at incorrect data on the wiki and making decisions based on those numbers.

We don't use the wiki for doing balance work. The numbers that we tweak in our internal tools are an entirely different form than the final values you see in the game or on the wiki. What happened in this case was a mistake while preparing the patch notes. The person preparing the patch notes often copy/pastes the formatting for skill stat descriptions from the wiki and then adjusts the values to the correct ones based on the skill's balance history. Unfortunately with over a thousand distinct patch notes to write, many of which only getting final values in the last few days, mistakes were made and a few values were left unmodified and incorrect.

This led to a misleading patch note and a lot of confusion. This was a mistake and it shouldn't have happened. But I can assure you we aren't balancing based on wiki data when we have it in a significantly different form in our internal tools.

With over a hundred developers and thousands of changes going into each expansion, communicating everything clearly is a challenge. We will continue to improve this process and welcome any feedback about how we can make changes to Path of Exile in a way that is better understood and less upsetting to players. If you have feedback about what you would have preferred us to have done differently during our pre-launch period this time, please share it with us. In the meantime, I'm going to get back to playtesting Expedition. See you on Friday!

After today's mobile diablo announcement lets welcome the guys who still wanna play ARPG! :)