Current Development Priorities

Content Update 2.3.1
The team have been hard at work making many small improvements to 2.3.0. While we've merged a lot of these into a series of over ten 2.3.0x patches (and hotfixes without patch notes so far), the bulk of non-urgent changes are in a large 2.3.1 update that will go out together.

We don't have final patch notes ready, but the growing list of fixes so far includes many reported bugs with Prophecy, small performance issues, visual bugs and a few longer-term issues that players will be keen to see fixed. It also introduces new 3d art for several unique items.

2.3.1 is currently scheduled for deployment mid-next-week.

2.3.0h Patch
There's a patch going out (hopefully) tonight that fixes the issue where some characters were not able to enter the Endgame Labyrinth, despite having completed its Trials on other characters in that league.

Performance
There are a number of ongoing ways that we're working on improving performance! I wanted to briefly write about a few that are happening right now or in 2.3.1.

We are experimenting with compressing game assets further to make them faster to load. Our results so far indicate that we can probably cut load times by another 25 or 30% or so. This also has the side-effect of reducing the impact of any periods of stuttering that occur due to background loading, as there would be far less to load! This change won't be in 2.3.1, but will hopefully be in a patch coming to you soon.

In 2.3.1, we've found and fixed various places where things weren't preloaded correctly and were loaded during combat, which caused stuttering. Now these will be correctly loaded when you enter the area, giving you a smoother experience in-game.

Thanks to the detailed results of some users on reddit last week, we have identified that the problems some users were having with our asynchronous background preloading technology relate to thread contention on their machines. One of our performance programmers is working to resolve this so that everyone can enjoy the background preloading without any performance hiccups.

In the meantime, if you experience stuttering in the first 20-60 seconds of an area, please try running the game with "--noasync" added to your command-line parameters (without the quotes). This is a temporary solution until we have it working perfectly. I should stress that for the vast majority of users, the new system works really well, so only add this if you actually have problems!

We also have changes coming in 2.3.1 that reduce the number of filesystem seeks that Path of Exile has to do to load various types of assets. This mostly improves load speed/stuttering on platter-based hard drives (rather than SSDs), but they're also the type of drives that need the most improvement at the moment.

We are committed to improving performance in large and measurable steps with each update.

Perandus to Standard Master Migration
A few users were affected by a problem when we migrated Perandus Masters to Standard at the end of the last leagues. Most users received the correct master reputation/favour in Standard, but some users did not. To address this, two things are being done:
We're planning to run a process that restores any crafting benches, totem poles or microtransactions that have gone missing. This will affect the entire userbase, so if you're missing one for some reason, you'll get it back. These are placed in hideout tabs or the microtransaction stash depending on what was restored.
We're restoring master experience from Perandus for anyone who didn't keep a higher level master. Favour will be restored in a similar way for people who missed out.

Other potential issues related to missing hideout decorations are being investigated. In most cases, if you recreate your hideout, it should restore all decorations correctly.

Networking Issues
The good news on this front is that the problems that plagued us during the first half of the Perandus league are a thing of the past and we haven't had any further issues like those. These were a combination of a bad route at our host and one physical server that we feel was haunted. Upon swapping away from that machine and making sure that alternate routes were used, we haven't had any further issues of that type.

We have, however, noticed some user concerns about networking in the last week. We've investigated these and found two specific causes so far:
Our ISP had two issues recently that affected networking for some users. They needed to do emergency maintenance on a router, which caused packet loss on some PoE connections. They also had a fibre connection break somewhere, so additional traffic on the remaining connection caused some disconnections for Amsterdam and Washington D.C. users. When these happened we contacted them for information, but there was nothing we could do ourselves other than wait for them to fix the issues.
Various West-coast US ISPs that our players use had some significant stability issues recently. When we've seen reports of these, we've forwarded them along in a hope that it'll help them find and resolve the issues.

Crash During Loading Screens
While we've made great headway on most issues reported in 2.3.0, the crash that some players get while loading into areas (often associated with the text "Unable to deserialise packet with pid X") is one that we have completely failed to reproduce in our office environment. We've tried it on a wide range of hardware, destination servers, operating systems and with developers of different star signs, but it has never happened for us. From what we can see from reports, the players it does happen to get it quite a lot. Could someone who is very tech savvy and gets this particular issue a lot please email me at chris@grindinggear.com so that we can get to the bottom of it? Thanks!

Prophecy
Update 2.3.1 contains many small improvements to the Prophecy leagues, including bug fixes to most reported problems.

Some players have found it difficult to find certain rare monsters required for the Prophecies that reward you with Unique items. We're going to add specific places where the hardest-to-find ones outside of maps will spawn occasionally. Keep an eye out!

It's also great to see people working out the tricks regarding how to manage and cycle their prophecies in clever ways. The seal prices and availability at different levels have been carefully chosen so that there are rewarding ways to either achieve or skip through your Prophecies looking for specific ones that benefit you.

What's Next?
As you know, we have a 13-week schedule of releases. The next release is an unannounced expansion with version number 2.4.0. While half our team is busy with the issues described above, the other half are feverously working on new content. We'll reveal more information about this expansion over the coming months!

I should probably put it on the record that 2.4.0 doesn't contain an additional act. What it contains, however, is a secret that we look forward to revealing!