Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was a bit of a wild ride, but I feel like I need to do some filling in of details for any readers who are not aggressively online and part of the Path of Exile community. Zizaran is essentially the gold standard for what a Path of Exile content creator can be. He is active in the community and known as one of the go to places for well crafted and easy to follow guides. Additionally he has a good rapport with Grinding Gear Games and has partnered with them to run a series of event called The Gauntlet where the rules of the game are changed to make an extremely brutal hardcore rule set environment that serves as a very short event league. He stays away from various community drama posts and just keeps his head down doing his thing and supporting the community in his own way. He is not exactly known for hyperbole and when he does come down hard on something… there is good reason.
Yesterday he hosted an interview with Jonathan Rogers and Mark Roberts of Grinding Gear Games. Note… this was something that was arranged well ahead of the launch of the Dawn of the Hunt league and in theory would normally be a victory lap to talk about all of the good things about it. However given the overwhelming anger and frustration from the community about the changes that went in with 0.2.0 and the current state of the game… this put Zizaran in the unique position of having a platform to discuss those frustrations. Legitimately I do not think there is anyone else in the community who could have played this role, because no one really has the institutional clout to create a scenario where they are both trusted by the players and trusted by the developers.
One of the frustrations that I have heard time and time again from the community is the question… who was this built for? We got a pretty clear answer. Note this is me attempting to clean it up a bit because there were an aggressive number of “ums” and “likes”, and repeated false starts to statements in the YouTube transcript. However here is something that Jonathan said during the interview that really just hit me the wrong way.
Every night I go home and play… I like do test runs of everything right, and if we made it so that there wasn’t any challenge for me in act one, I wouldn’t play the game anymore. But that isn’t helping anyone, right? I need to keep playing the game every night to actually enjoy myself It’s like if I’m not enjoying myself, then it’s like how can I even develop the game correctly? So on some level, it has to be fun for me, and I know that if you get to the point of having everything just be trivial, it’s like, well okay, why am I even playing this anymore? So there has to be some level of challenge.Jonathan Rogers – Grinding Gear Games
So essentially… we are playing an aggressively tedious game because that is the way that Jonathan likes it? That is probably not fair, but it certain comes off that way. The beginning of the interview was deeply combative with one moment happening where Jonathan was trying to talk over Ziz and answer a question different than the one he was asking… with Ziz having to ask if he could please finish what he was saying. Jonathan apologized at the end of the interview for the way he was behaving, and I think that Mark stepped in to de-escalate things pretty well which allowed for some genuine and meaningful conversation to happen. I genuinely do not feel like if it were anyone other than Zizaran sitting across the interview from them… they would not have taken things quite so seriously. In a previous interview with Ghazzy and Darth Microtransaction, there were a few moments where it felt like Jonathan was straight up shutting down lines of conversation and presenting an impassible wall.
What is probably most impressive about this whole situation is that it has led to direct intervention. This morning I woke up to find that over night another post was made to the Path of Exile forums. Essentially it is outlining some direct changes that they will be implementing this week, and some other changes that they are investigating to determine the correct fix. Does this resolve all of the problems? Absolutely not. However, it does start the process of remedying what went wrong with 0.2.0. After listening to the discussion I do feel like a lot of the problems with this league have been in the “unintended consequences” column or from simply trying to fly a bit too close to the sun. We did not get any patch notes until the day before the league dropped, and even then it was missing details and some of the details that were included were just frankly incorrect. I feel like they set a deadline… and then did not have time to get everything locked down before they pushed the release out the door, creating a bunch of unforced errors in the process.
What has not done them any favors with the fans… is the fact that their release squashed the already scheduled launch window for Last Epoch Season 2 on April 2nd. Eleventh Hour Games did the best thing for them and rescheduled it for next week… but especially given the fact that Dawn of the Hunt was not ready for release… it is only adding to the frustrations. Given the broken state of the Path of Exile II, I can only imagine that Last Epoch is going to have one of its most active season launches yet. I really hope for their sake that the servers are nice and stable and that there are no economy breaking bugs this time around. Talkative Tri had an interview with EHG yesterday and some of the things that are coming in this season seem freaking amazing, and are direct answers to some of the minor squabbles I have had with the game.
So another piece that is coming up as part of this discussion is a bit of information that I assumed was common knowledge… but is apparently not. There has been a pretty regular refrain from Reddit wishing for Chris Wilson to come back and save the game. Thing is… from at least January of this year he has had no involvement with Grinding Gear Games. The incorporation documents on the New Zealand Companies Office was updated to remove Chris Wilson. In late 2024, Tencent acquired the last 20% of Grinding Gear Games making them a solely owned subsidiary and my guess is that Chris’s exit timeline happened around that point. I think he probably stuck around for the launch of Path of Exile II, to do some press for the game if needed, but almost everything for the last year involved Jonathan Rogers and Mark Roberts doing the heavy listing. I think the very last “Hi, I’m Chris Wilson, From Grinding Gear Games” that we got was during the Settlers of Kalguur league announcement. However even during that content reveal it was mostly Mark that did the bulk of the work.
One of the details that came out surrounding Grinding Gear Games stomping on the release of Last Epoch Season 2, is the statement that they had to launch now and that there was no way around it. In one of those situations of timing never being worse… yesterday the Dawn of the Hunt Mystery Box trailer came out as well. For those who have not been around Path of Exile, these are loot boxes that show up a few days after the launch of a new league and feature a bunch of microtransactions with no chance of getting exact duplicates, so if you spend enough money you are ultimately going to get everything eventually. What makes them better than normal loot boxes however, is at the start of the next league they all go up on the shop as individual purchases meaning that there isn’t much reason to ever chase the gacha highs.
My personal guess is that the “must launch” part of this ties to needing the financial income that a loot box series brings, and needing to be able to guarantee those earnings in the second quarter of 2025. I am uncertain what fiscal year scheme that Grinding Gear Games uses, but it is pretty common for Fiscal years to run July 1st to July 1st so that the financial close does not take place over the extremely fraught Christmas/New Years holiday weekends. In theory it might simply be that they needed to realize the profits from this loot box during this fiscal year in order to meet some arbitrary goals set forth by Tencent. Whatever the case… it sucks because they clearly were not ready and did not test things enough to push Dawn of the Hunt out the door. We are already seeing significant fall off in the player numbers, and potentially any remedies that they have made to this bad launch are not really going to make much of a difference at this point. The steam numbers show a fall off around 100k concurrent players in only a few days.
Anyways… I am personally still plugging away. I have gotten enough strength through the tree and gear to finally swap over to a Giant’s Blood build allowing me to pick up the additional defenses of a shield. I shopped around and spent my single solitary exalted orb on a shield with 40% block and roughly 500 armor. Yesterday I wrapped up Act 5 and am nearing the halfway point for Act 6. So in theory within the next few days I should be venturing forth into maps. I had my first waystone drop this morning when I popped in for a bit to record some screenshots, that I did not end up using today. Sometimes blog posts develop a mind of their own, and this one was more about the larger Path of Exile II situation.
At the end of the day I want to thank Zizaran for seemingly getting through to Grinding Gear Games yesterday. It is my greatest hope that we continue to see improvements and that maybe by the time 0.3.0 happens we will not have a massive regression in the enjoyment of the game.
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