Welcome to the latest Path of Exile: The Exiled Tribune and another great week to be part of a great ARPG. We had a chance for a bit of a post-mortem with Grinding Gear about the recent 2.6.0 patch and have a wrap up of the week's news.
A Post Mortem Look at 2.6.0 with Chris Wilson
Chris Wilson: It went incredibly well! We could see from website activity a few days before the launch that it was going to be a big start, but we didn't predict the +40% player numbers that arrived. We certainly had to scurry to get some more servers online at the last minute.
Players are enjoying the Legacy league so far. It gives them a chance to mix-and-match their favourite mechanics from the past, and is quite "gifty" in the rewards it offers. The players seem to like the chance to ramp up game difficulty in a semi-controllable way to reap additional rewards.
MMORPG: Give us a few observations you've made about players, items, etc. Have you found areas that need a bit of work?
CW: It's fascinating to look at the relationship between players and valuable items. There's a little bit of a "pulling the ladder up behind me" mentality where players want it to be plausible for them to acquire the best items, but then they want those items to be difficult to acquire once they have done so themselves. We saw an example of a user complaining that it was too hard to six-link an item, followed by him then saying it was too easy and too many other people were also achieving it.
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There was an interesting event this week where the players on reddit decided that a certain valuable Legacy item was not able to drop (based on them not seeing one so far that league), but within hours of that post, one was found. They suspected that we turned it on in response to the post (which wasn't true, though we do alter drop rates over time and it may have been tweaked during the week).
MMORPG: How is the new Self-Found mode going? Are players doing better / worse than you expected? Is there a lot of participation?
CW: It's going better than I personally expected! We provided it as an alternative mode for some people to use, but uptake has been really good. About one in eight newly created characters was made in SSF mode when I last checked. It's harmless to choose to do so, because you can easily move the character back to the regular trading mode at will.
MMORPG: How goes progress to the expansion? Are you on track for release?
CW: The team are working hard on the expansion and progress is going well. There's a lot to finish, and while we haven't announced a specific release date yet, we believe we'll hit the "middle of this year" estimate that we mentioned. There's going to be a Beta, so a lot of content has to be ready for then.
MMORPG: You posted streamer guides -- how many streamers would you say publishe PoE videos each week? Does there seem to be a theme to many of them?
CW: We have an active community of streamers (some of whom are quite prolific) who create a lot of Path of Exile content. Their videos range from guides explaining certain builds, to funny moments they captured while playing the game. Some of the content creators put a lot of effort into creating videos like parodies of our trailers.
A Good Week to be an Exile
This was another great week in Path of Exile's history. Here are some of the high points:
- A smooth, successful Legacy Challenge Leauge launch - 80,000 concurrent players took part over the first weekend of LCL with a peak of 112,800. Those are some serious numbers! In addition, players found most of the announced items that had been buffed and not just a few others that we not announced prior to 2.6.0. Did you find one?
- 2.6.0D Patch Notes - The latest patch was released late last week that brought a big round of bug squashing into the game. For such a large update, 2.6.0 produced a relatively small number of serious issues as this recent patch shows. It's a pretty small list overall.
- Streamer Guides & Highlights - As Chris spoke about above, the PoE streaming community is a vibrant one that produces a lot of great work. Guides, play throughs, even humorous "revamped" trailers. To help those who may be interested in trying their own hands at becoming a Path of Exile YouTube sensation, the team put up a number of guides including how to make a build guide, how to start strong in 2.6.0 and others.
- New Microtransactions - Legacy Hat, Standard Brimmed Hat, Hooded Cloak, Fiery Eyes Helmet Attachment & Bandana Helmet Effect are now available.
