Path of Exile News

Hideout Competition

If you enjoy creating hideouts or have an interesting concept you'd like to recreate in Path of Exile, be sure to participate in our new hideout competition! The winners will be rewarded with awesome prizes, including physical items and lots of hideout decorations for further creations!

[h2]Prize Pool[/h2]
[h3]Top Three Winners[/h3]

Custom avatar of a portion of the hideout
Hideout Competition Winner Forum Badge
Your choice of two Path of Exile T-shirts - (Chaos Orb, Shaper, Untainted Paradise or Solaris/Lunaris)
Signed Brutus Art Print
Foam Exalted Orb
Your choice of a Hideout from the list below
Your choice of an Armour Set from the list below
Hideout Decorations: Celestial Tree Decoration, Arcane Throne, Huntsman Building Supplies x2, Mystic Building Supplies Decoration x2, Black Statue x2, White Statue x2, Water Elemental Hideout Decoration x3, Fire Ball Pet, Ice Ball Pet, White Crystal Decoration x2, Harlequin Apparition Environment Decoration, Ringmaster Fireworks Environment Decoration x2, Lightning Swarm Pet x2, Falling Leaves Decoration x5, Wide Light Beam Decoration x5
Hideout Bundle: Black Building Supplies x2, White Building Supplies x2, Wasteland Sandstorm Decoration x2, Wild Wind Effect x2, Oriath Citizen Decoration, Light Swarm Pet x2

[h3]4th - 5th Place[/h3]

Your choice of one Path of Exile T-shirt - (Chaos Orb, Shaper, Untainted Paradise or Solaris/Lunaris)
Signed Brutus Art Print
Foam Exalted Orb
Your choice of an Armour Set from the list below
Hideout Decorations: Celestial Tree Decoration, Arcane Throne, Huntsman Building Supplies x2, Mystic Building Supplies Decoration x2, Black Statue x2, White Statue x2, Water Elemental Hideout Decoration x3, Fire Ball Pet, Ice Ball Pet, White Crystal Decoration x2, Harlequin Apparition Environment Decoration, Ringmaster Fireworks Environment Decoration x2, Lightning Swarm Pet x2, Falling Leaves Decoration x5, Wide Light Beam Decoration x5
Hideout Bundle: Black Building Supplies x2, White Building Supplies x2, Wasteland Sandstorm Decoration x2, Wild Wind Effect x2, Oriath Citizen Decoration, Light Swarm Pet x2

[h3]6th - 10th Place[/h3]

Your choice of one Path of Exile T-shirt - (Chaos Orb, Shaper, Untainted Paradise or Solaris/Lunaris)
Your choice of an Armour Set from the list below
Hideout Decorations: Mystic Building Supplies Decoration x2, White Statue x2, Ice Ball Pet, White Crystal Decoration x2, Wide Light Beam Decoration x5
Hideout Bundle: Black Building Supplies x2, White Building Supplies x2, Wasteland Sandstorm Decoration x2, Wild Wind Effect x2, Oriath Citizen Decoration, Light Swarm Pet x2

[h3]11th - 30th Place[/h3]

Hideout Bundle: Black Building Supplies x2, White Building Supplies x2, Wasteland Sandstorm Decoration x2, Wild Wind Effect x2, Oriath Citizen Decoration, Light Swarm Pet x2

Players who win a Hideout will be able to choose from the following list:

Players who win an Armour Set will be able to choose from the following list:
[h2]How to Enter[/h2]
Pick a clear theme and create a hideout that clearly represents it. Post screenshots or a video in reply to this thread to enter. To submit a screenshot, just upload it to an image hosting site like imgur.com, copy the address of the uploaded image and post it in this thread using IMG tags.
[h2]Guidelines[/h2]

Your hideout must be created after the release of the Heist expansion.
Hideouts that have previously been featured in the Hideout Showcase news series or submitted to the Hideout Showcase forum are not eligible for entry.
Your hideout must be your own work.
Your hideout must be safe to showcase (nothing lewd or offensive).
Submit your hideout from the account that the hideout is on. Please leave the hideout intact until the judging is complete, so that we can check it.
Multiple submissions are welcome and encouraged!

[h2]Competition Times[/h2]
The competition starts at the time of this post and will end on Monday the 16th of November at 9am (NZT). We'll announce the winners sometime in the days following this date. Winners will be chosen based on creativity and how well they've represented their chosen theme. To keep it fair, we will be selecting a mixture of hideouts with hideout decoration microtransactions and those without.

Best of luck to everyone! We can't wait to see what you create.

Community Racing Event This Weekend

Community Race Organizers Brittleknee and Rex are teaming up to host an Alternate Start Duos event this weekend. It takes place over two days, where Day One is centred around strategy and preparation, and Day Two is the Alternate Start race itself. Racers will compete from A10 Kitava until they defeat Awakener at Awakening Level 5.

Day One: October 23rd: 9:00PM (PDT) (countdown available here)
Day Two: October 24th: 9:00PM (PDT) (countdown available here)

This race is open to all Qualified Racers in the PoECR Discord. To join the discord and learn more about the Qualification process, click here.

[h3]Rules and Information[/h3]

Day One will begin with character creation.
Day One will end after five hours have elapsed.
Day One will be capped progression-wise before A10 Kitava.
Day One will be capped at 437 million experience. This is level 72, with approximately 10% completion towards level 73. If you go beyond this, you must regress back. Materials for Regressing will not be provided.
Day Two will begin with A10 Kitava at level ~ 72.
Day Two will end when five duos have defeated Awakener at Awakening Level 5.
You do not have to be in the boss Arena together unless you want to be.
Cull is permitted, but Ascendancies cannot be changed from initial Ascension.
If racers want to engage in normal Heist League content during race downtime, they will need to join the race under a racing account.
Profiles must be public for the account that racers are using in the event.
If an account is found to be online during downtime, if gear changes, or if XP changes, the duo will be disqualified.

[h3]Prize Pool[/h3]
A $1000 cash prize pool is provided by Rex.

1st: 40%
2nd: 25%
3rd: 20%
4th: 10%
5th: 5%

[h3]Click here to find out more information about the rules or if you'd like to contribute to the event.[/h3]

While this is not an officially supported event, we're pleased to encourage the community to run events and engage in the competitive side of Path of Exile! Good luck to everyone participating!

How We're Developing Our Next Expansion Differently

This year has been tough for our team and has thrown a lot of unexpected challenges at us. This has caused us to adjust how we're developing Path of Exile, which will affect what's happening with our December expansion. We want to let you know what to expect and this post covers that in more detail.

From Path of Exile's release in 2013 until late 2015, we struggled to grow the community and were getting worried as the game's popularity started to slowly decline. We tried releases of many different sizes and cadences, before eventually settling into a 13-week cycle with the launch of Talisman in December 2015. Since then, we have developed 19 leagues with this cadence and had a lot of success with it. Path of Exile grew exponentially and allowed us to put even more content into each expansion to meet the expectations of our growing community. Chris even presented a GDC Talk on this process, which was very well-received within the gamedev industry. He still receives mail every week from developers at other studios who feel that the talk was of great value for their teams. Things were going well and we thought we knew exactly what we were doing.

Then 2020 hit and exposed just how vulnerable our development process was to unexpected events. To some extent, we were lucky that a black swan event (such as a key team member leaving) hadn't caused similar disruption to our schedule before this. We want to preface this by saying that the government-mandated lockdowns were not the root cause of the issues, but they had a significant impact and added to an already high-pressure situation. Due to the way we've been developing expansions, we had almost no wiggle room to manage the additional overheads of lockdown. Even under normal circumstances, some expansions were coming in quite close to the wire. There is a reasonable chance that we may experience another lockdown, or some other unforeseen event that adds extra pressure and we need to create a development plan that has enough breathing room to allow that to happen. After two lockdowns, we delayed Heist's release by a week and it was still not enough to mitigate the combination of constrained resources and ambitious development scope, as Heist was by far the highest-content league in PoE's history. (Adding to this pressure, our country's borders are closed which means our international hiring is frozen for the foreseeable future).

Which leads to the next issue - regardless of how difficult pandemic pressures make development, it's genuinely hard to scope out how long a Path of Exile expansion will take to develop. Some systems that appear easy to create end up taking several iterations to get right. Conversely, some things that felt like they'd be really hard just come together quickly and work the first time. Usually these over- and under-estimates average out during the development of an expansion, but sometimes you get ones that are developed a lot faster (Legion) or slower (Delve) than usual. If you categorise Path of Exile releases into the "good" and "bad" ones, you see a clear pattern of times when development took less (or more) time than expected. This shows that correct scoping and risk mitigation is critical to ensuring a good Path of Exile launch.

Another important topic to discuss is that of Feature Creep. This is when the featureset of a piece of software gradually increases over time as developers think of more cool stuff to add, eventually causing production problems. This is a somewhat common problem in software development (for example, there's a boss in Diablo II called Creeping Feature as a nod to this, over 20 years ago). While Feature Creep sounds like a terrible thing, it can often be great for making a game feel special. A lot of the stuff that makes Path of Exile special was added because a developer thought of something cool and worked hard to squeeze it in a specific release. While Feature Creep can wreak havoc on a schedule (and hence the overall quality of an expansion at launch), it's also important to make sure that developers have a way to still add those special touches that make the game feel like it has endless stuff to discover. We feel that this is best done in the planning phase rather than late in development when such changes can affect the quality of release.

Late in Heist's development cycle, we had a serious internal discussion about how we could restructure our development process so that subsequent expansions are less risky. This discussion resulted in an experiment that we decided to carry out for the next three month cycle.

We have defined a very specific scope for December's 3.13 expansion. It contains everything that a large Path of Exile expansion needs, but no more. Chris is personally handling the production of this expansion to make sure that no work creeps in that isn't in the planned scope. The schedule that we will hopefully achieve with this approach will likely have everything quite playable and ready for gameplay iteration before our marketing deadline, and in a very stable and polished state by the time it is released.

The positive consequences of this experiment are clear: if it succeeds, we'll be able to deliver 3.13 on-time, with a strong stable launch, plenty of gameplay iteration and solid testing of features. If this experiment works as we expect it to, we'll be able to continue using it for future expansions which will allow us to continue with our 13-week expansion cycle, which we strongly feel is best for the continued growth and long-term health of Path of Exile in the period before Path of Exile 2 is released.

This experiment comes with some side effects, however. You'll definitely notice that the patch notes are much, much shorter than they usually are. That's because we're focusing on getting the most important changes done, and doing them well. We're aiming to try to fit the patch notes on just a few pages, if we can manage it. This does mean that we have had to be careful to pick our battles though - the balance changes we are doing have been carefully chosen to have the largest impact and fix real problems. It's also likely that we'll front-load the announcement to have more of the expansion's contents revealed at once, reducing the number of small teasers we post in the weeks following announcement.

Our goal is that 3.13 takes 50% of the overall development hours of Heist (which means going from a situation with overtime to a situation with testing time), and yet feels like a large December expansion. If you're interested, it's an Atlas expansion (like War or Conquerors) with an in-area combat league and a few other bits and pieces. We'll also be announcing it in a slightly different way than we usually do. Stay tuned!

Winners of the Awakener Kill Event

Earlier this week we concluded the Awakener Kill event, arranged with the support of Zizaran and Shopify. More than 200 players have defeated Awakener at the highest Awakening Level! Check out the winners of the event below:

Winners of the Awakener Kill Event, PC Heist HC SSF (cash prize provided by Zizaran and Shopify)

First Awakener Kill ($11000) - Darkee
Second Place ($6000) - PoEDan79
Third Place ($3000) - AlkaizerX
Fourth - Fifteenth Place ($750) - zyphxyz, orionbip, Karvarousku, Nixielol, NicParry, Fightgarr, KuschelKatze, Steelmage, Oskarmln, BigPomelo, sss111, RealLifePleb
First Atziri Kill in the Apex of Sacrifice ($750) - Darkee
First Uber Atziri Kill ($2500) - PoEDan79
First Shaper Kill ($1500) - zyphxyz
First Elder Kill ($750) - Karvarousku
First Uber Elder Kill ($2500) - Darkee
Deepest Delve (1112 depth, $3000) - Oskarmln

Winners of the Awakener Kill Event, Xbox One Heist SSF - 12 months Game Pass Ultimate Subscription

UpstairsList90
Marcelo Leibniz
ImperfectGnat55
TatamiKuo
Classius
HopeeK
Ace Phoenyx II

Winners of the Awakener Kill Event, PlayStation 4 Heist SSF - 12 months PlayStation Plus Subscription

o_0__MaHaN__0_o
PhantomSky22
TTlemon654
kzl_91

Winners of the Awakener Kill Event, PlayStation 4 Heist SSF - 12 months PlayStation Now Subscription

heeshi_
cammoflauge5
Shade_AU
Condroblasto

Randomly-drawn Microtransaction Prizes (weighted by the amount of Awakener kills)
We have randomly selected 670 accounts across all realms (PC and Consoles) who will receive random microtransaction prizes from the list. We will distribute these prizes very soon and will send a confirmation in a private message on the forum.

Congratulations to the winners! Thank you to everyone who has challenged themselves by participating in this event!

3.12.4b Patch Notes Preview

We've been working on a new update with a number of bug fixes and improvements to the Heist league. We're planning to deploy the 3.12.4b patch within a few days. We've prepared a preview of its patch notes so you know what to expect. Check them out in this news post.

Note that the patch notes below may be changed prior to release of the 3.12.4b update.

Reward Room Chests in Heists and Grand Heists can now contain Unique Contracts.
Traps in Heist encounters no longer activate during the Imminent Lockdown period. They will now only activate when Lockdown begins.
You can now use the Instance Manager to create or join Rogue Harbour areas.
Improved the location accuracy of Heist Patrol minimap icons.
It is no longer possible to change your Hideout by talking to Helena in a map. This is to prevent unintentionally losing access to the map that you are currently in.
Fixed a bug that could prevent The Twins encounter from being completed.
Fixed a bug where Heist Brooch modifiers which could duplicate rewards were not functioning correctly.
Fixed a bug where Blight and Metamorph Reward Room chests could contain no items in level 68 areas.
Fixed a bug where an Agility job could not be completed if multiple Rogue Allies attempted to complete the job at the same time.
Fixed a bug where an Agility job could not be completed due to the Rogue Ally not using a vent to travel beyond the Heist door.
Fixed a bug which could prevent a Rogue Ally from completing a Job if they had an undetonated Demolition bomb elsewhere in the area.
Fixed a bug which could cause players to get stuck in Heist doors.
Fixed a bug where Lever guards could be killed by sources other than a Rogue Ally.
Fixed a bug which could cause Rogue Allies to run backwards.
Fixed a bug introduced in 3.12.4 where the "Knockback direction is reversed" modifier on Empire's Grasp unique gloves didn't work.
Fixed a bug where curses reflected back to you from Shackles of the Wretched unique gloves didn't affect you.
Fixed a bug where the Unseen Strike skill granted by The Hidden Blade unique dagger could trigger in town areas.
Fixed a bug where items could drop in an inaccessible location in Burial Chambers Map.
Fixed a bug causing Scorching Ray in the Tukohama encounter to be invisible if you had left the area and returned.
Fixed a bug causing the visual height of Flame Wall to be inconsistent at varying elevation levels.
Fixed a bug where Chimera Armour Set and Redeemer Armour Set looked different than when initially released.
Fixed a bug causing Dragon Portal Effect, Blue Dragon Portal Effect and Devourer Portal Effect to be larger than intended in non-map areas.
Fixed a client crash that could occur when closing Path of Exile after changing your Renderer setting.