It's the start of 2019 here in New Zealand. In addition to wishing the entire community a Happy New Year, we wanted to post our annual retrospective on 2018. Once again, we're proud to announce that we've had the best year to date for both Path of Exile and Grinding Gear Games. Looking ahead, 2019 is already full of plans and ideas that we can't wait to introduce to you. In the meantime, let's take a look back on this year.

In 2018:

• We launched four significant expansions: Bestiary, Incursion, Delve and Betrayal.
• We set a record number of players online (188,970 on our server alone).
• There were 21% more hours played of Path of Exile on our international realm in 2018 than 2017.
• Around 4.5 million players played Path of Exile on our international realm this year.
• We expanded from 105 to 122 in-house staff members.
• We announced that Path of Exile is coming to PlayStation 4.
• We watched many players destroy their items in the Sacrificial Chamber.
• We became PATH OF EXILE: ROYALE for a day.
• We started some conspiracies.
• We deployed more than 85 updates/patches to our realm.
• We posted 416 news articles - an average of 8 posts per week.
• Introduced attack-in-place and instant casting!
• We were acquired by Tencent.
• We added 23 new voice actors!
• Bex joined Twitter. Not only did she finally do a face reveal, she promptly started using the account to harass the community.
• Raiz became known as Sunderboi.
• We hit a new record in viewer numbers on Twitch.
• We revamped the Ascendancy Classes, dozens of skills and the Hideout system.
• We reworked the entire Masters system
• We celebrated the five-year anniversary of our official launch.
• We hosted an epic talent competition.
• We introduced Private Leagues.

Thank you for being part of this amazing year with us!