Next week we'll announce Path of Exile 3.5.0, our largest expansion this year. In the meantime, we have a smaller announcement to make today. Ever since the start of Path of Exile's development, we planned to add support for players to pay for the creation of a private league for them and their friends to play in. We're pleased to announce that we will start making these Private Leagues available for purchase next week. These leagues allow you to add mods that make Path of Exile more challenging for you and your friends.

We designed private leagues with the needs of two groups of players in mind. The first group is players who want a more challenging Path of Exile experience. The second is players who want to see how far they and their friends can get without outside influence from the rest of a league.

Private Leagues will be fun for content creators who want to create an entertaining stream or video by playing Path of Exile on obscenely difficult settings, potentially alongside members of their communities.

Philosophically, it's important to us that Private Leagues don't make the game easier. That's what special events like Flashback, Turmoil and Mayhem are for. We'll continue to run special events like these in the future.

Pricing

Private leagues cost 120 points to create. By default, they last 10 days and have 10 player slots.

• Additional blocks of 10 player slots can be purchased for 60 points.
• Additional blocks of 100 player slots can be purchased for 600 points.
• Additional blocks of 10 days can be purchased for 60 points.
• Additional blocks of 30 days can be purchased for 180 points.
• Additional mods that make the game more challenging can be added for free at league creation.

You can add additional player slots and days at any time once the league has started.

Currently you can't extend a league beyond two months in length, as the system is new and we are still experimenting with it.

League Difficulty Mods

During league creation, the following mods can be added at no additional cost:

Mods that separately increase Monster Damage, Life, Speed, Elemental Damage and Number of Projectiles: These mods often come in several tiers, and make monsters harder in various ways. You can add whichever combination of these various mods you desire to increase the challenge of monsters in the league.

Reduced Player Resistances: Having a blanket resistance penalty not only makes combat harder, but also increases the difficulty of finding a set of perfect gear that meets all your resistance needs.

No Stashes: This one's for the true masochists. Without the ability to store items for later, characters in a No Stashes league need to live off the land with constraints that make completing Path of Exile a lot more challenging. You can parent to an SSF league to disable trade, guaranteeing that your characters are fully self-sufficient.

No Magic or Rare Items Drop: In leagues of this type, you can only find normal and, at their usual drop rate, unique items, so you have to use every currency item you find to add mods to your gear. You'll find yourself actually using Orbs of Transmutation, running out of Essences and treasuring every Chaos Orb for its intended purpose. Trade values of currency items will likely be extremely different in leagues like this, due to opportunity cost.

No Vending: In a No Vending league, you can't buy items from or sell items to NPCs in town. You're still able to complete quest objectives, but can't rely on vendor recipes or NPC shops to gear up.

Famine: In Famine leagues, your life, mana, energy shield and flasks do not refill when you go to town. This can be added alongside other mods to create the ultimate live-off-the-land league.

We have plans for even more mods to add to this system, such as item durability (where item quality can become negative with use and the item is destroyed when it hits -20%).

Many of these existing mods can be designed to create leagues that are like the "ironman" modes that players enjoyed with old-school Action RPGs in the 90s. Adding durability, turning off vendors, flask refills and stashes lets you test yourself using only the items that Wraeclast serves up to you. Alternatively, you could add a pile of punitive monster mods and experience extremely tough combat in a fresh economy. With mods like these, even the existing campaign and low maps can be made extremely challenging for our best players.

Once a league has started, the mods cannot be changed. This is so that players who complete difficult objectives in the league can easily demonstrate that all the mods were present at the point that it was achieved.

Crowdfunding

When creating a league, you can choose to crowdfund the payment. Players invited to the league can contribute points towards the cost. Once the crowdfunding has completed, the league will be created. You can also crowdfund later additions of time or player slots in the same way.

Private Challenge Leagues

When you create a private league, you can choose to base it off any of the core permanent or challenge leagues that are currently running. It will gain all the properties of the league you based it off. If you parent your league to a challenge league, you will be able to do the challenges from that league in your private league.

Players in a private league are able to voluntarily migrate their characters (or their entire league state) out to the parent league, just like with regular SSF leagues. Because these private leagues only make the game harder, this presents no fairness issues to the economies that they are moving their characters into.

If the league is parented to the current challenge league and that challenge league ends, it loses its challenge league properties and becomes parented to regular Standard or Hardcore.

Trade API

Private leagues are exposed to the regular trade APIs and will be indexed by both community trade sites and www.pathofexile.com/trade.

More Details

For now, private leagues are a PC-only feature. We expect to launch them on Xbox One in the future once we have support for them there.

This post was a general overview, and doesn't go into a lot of granular detail about this system. If you have any questions, please reply with them and we'll try to answer them in an FAQ about Private Leagues on the day we release them. We're expecting it to be sometime next week.