August 16 Progress Update

Last week, we passed a million American dollars of supporter packs sold (after credit card fees have been deducted). Thank you all very much for your generous contributions - it's helping the game in so many ways. Projects like this cost many millions of dollars, so while it's awesome that we have enough money to see the game through to Open Beta, the long-term future of the project benefits greatly from any additional money we can raise. Our team is currently at 18 people, though we'd love to expand it so that we can generate content at a faster rate.

At the moment, several people are working on producing and preparing the physical items that supporters will receive (t-shirts, posters and copies of the game DVD/soundtrack CD). We're trying to get these sent out as soon as possible, though it's looking like it'll take a few more weeks to receive the produced goods before we can ship them. I'll update with more exact dates once we hear back from our suppliers. It turns out that the logistics of preparing and shipping literally thousands of packages is a bit of an undertaking!

We recently added the top three twitch.tv Path of Exile livestreams to the bottom of the pathofexile.com front page. If you'd like your stream to be featured on this list, just set your game to Path of Exile and try to get a lot of people to watch you play! They're ranked in order of number of concurrent viewers. I've been visiting streams occasionally to answer questions, and I hope to find more time to do so in the future. I've had great voice conversations with Ash, Raijin, Kripparrian and Arioc so far. We're also occasionally giving keys to streamers so that they can do giveaways.

One of our priorities over the last few months has been to create and post interesting videos on our YouTube channel. Videos are a really good way of getting new players interested in the game and also allow us to show things to existing players in a very visual way. I've been really enjoying doing the Build of the Week series, as it helps draw attention to the amazing build variety that our community comes up with in the game. There are dozens more awesome builds that people have submitted that I hope to eventually feature in later videos. If you want to submit a build, this is the current thread. If you haven't yet seen the one-year retrospective video where we compare the current 0.9.11 build with last year's 0.9.0 build, I highly recommend it.

As the size of our Beta playerbase has grown, we've ramped up the number of weekend event leagues that we run. For a long time, we just ran a three hour hardcore ladder race, but a few weeks ago we added a one hour cut-throat one as well. This weekend we're offering two cut-throat events (one of them is at a time that hopefully suits European players), and a three-hour hardcore race that disallows partying. Please understand that we run these events on our own weekends, so it's difficult to pick times that are great for everyone. In the future, we intend to further ramp up the number of events that we hold (I'd expect it to hit 4 or 5 per week in the coming weeks, and even more once we enter Open Beta).

We also ran a successful two-week hardcore race a few weeks ago, to test the 0.9.11 balance. This was our alternative to doing a legacy migration, and we received substantial amounts of balance data from it. We are looking at running another similar league in the near future because people enjoyed that one. The new one may be one week long. I understand there has been demand for a "time-limited" league where you only get a certain number of hours per day (to favour people like me with jobs), but there are logistics issues to solve before we can do that.

From a development point of view, we've been working hard on the 0.9.12 patch. This patch focuses on many areas, including:

• Adding PvP, including arenas with simple matchmaking, and dueling. Teams of up to 6 on either side are supported.
• Rebalancing minions and fixing their bugs. Yes, the ability to have multiple sets of minions using multiple gems of the same type is a bug.
• New item hover art!
• Arrows are now real projectiles rather than faked long-range melee attacks. This means they can be dodged by running out of the way, as well as by the evasion roll.

We don't yet know when 0.9.12 will be deployed (or put on Alpha). My guess is that it's a few weeks away from being ready. I'll definitely post more information as soon as we know.

In addition to the work on 0.9.12, we've been pulling out as many fixes and features as we can and integrating them into 0.9.11 in the form of (almost daily) small patches. These allow us to fix problems faster, get feedback on changes earlier, and keep you guys on your toes with a stream of small changes between major patches. The latest of these patches, 0.9.11k, should be deployed within the next day.

We're aware of several client stability issues that can manifest in the form of either graphical glitches or a crash. We have never seen this happen in our office (despite it happening occasionally within the Beta community), so we're still gathering data that will let us fix it. This is a priority, but as with all things that require data collection and research, is taking some time to solve.

I'm extremely pleased with how the last few months have gone and am getting very excited about Open Beta. I can't wait for you guys to see Act Three.