Happy New Year! A 2019 retrospective

Happy New Year! but only to Chris.

It was this year I got into this game. Best decision ever. You guys have a happy new year as well! Looking forward to more amazing experiences with you all.

Wow 7.3 posts per week (on average)! Love it! Thats what communication looks like <3

Congrats guys, it just keeps getting better and better! Happy New Year!

Thanks GGG for your amazing work and making this game so great.

"

Natalia_GGG wrote:

• We partnered with Kakao to launch Path of Exile in South Korea.
  
• We released Path of Exile on PlayStation 4.
  
• We set a record number of players online (224,000 on our server alone).
  
• There were 30% more hours played of Path of Exile on our international realm in 2019 than 2018.

The latter two most certainly have the former two to thank for it. In terms of player-count, PoE suffered its slowest launch (with Blight) that it's had since 3.0 came out in 2017.

While the exact cause wasn't 100% pinpointed then, in retrospect... The slump in players wasn't from any fault of the game's own: Blight was, at worst, a decent league, and performance issues weren't as much of a deterrent as thought.

Rather, the real culprit was the most unfortunate timing, as the league launched VERY close to not just one, but TWO hotly-anticipated events, that players had been waiting YEARS for: the launch of WoW Classic, as well as Destiny 2 arriving on Steam. (and going free-to-play!)

In light of that, perhaps it's remarkable how steadfast he game's playerbase is that only half of them left.

Even besides them "saving" the numbers for 2019 (I'm positive that without them, the one-two sucker punches of WoWC and D2 would've made 2019's numbers worse than 2018) the Korean and PS4 communities have been a welcome addition to the greater PoE community.

"

Natalia_GGG wrote:

• We deployed more than 45 updates/patches to our realm.

Given that 18 of them were rapidly-pushed patches to the launch of Conquerors of the Atlas, (which still has a number of bugs affecting playability!) this number's kind of a dubious honor. Hopefully this does serve as the wakeup call to GGG to make the changes needed so that "bugs on release" becomes a DOWNWARD trend rather than UPWARD.

"

thep10xer wrote:

They dont want PTR , being able to preview the content will take away from the "shine" and new feeling come league start

...Which is funny, because they apparently had none of those qualms regarding a PTR for 2.0 (Awakening) and 3.0, (Fall of Oriath) and in fact used easy, teasing access to the new content as a means to sell more supporter packs. (or, for 3.0, even just selling naked beta keys) And yes, the 2.0 beta included ALL of Act 4, divination cards, passive jewels, as well as the new map system. (including the then-new T15 maps, Abyss/Caldera and Colosseum) The only things really missing was that the Belly of the Beast/Harvest tileset maps (Phantasmagoria, Malformation, Core) were absent until actually partly into Warbands/Tempest league.

Keep in mind that if they want to keep some of the special encounters under-wraps, this still lets them test a LOT of other mechanical stuff. Things like the Atlas rework (and hence how it'd work with map tabs) could've been done there first, and caught a LOT of bugs.

And yes, they can use this to push packs, by simply limiting PTR access to those with a currently-sold supporter pack.

Each league has been buggier than the one before, and it's clearly becoming untenable for an increasing number of players.

nice work GGG

Happy new year to the community and all of you awesome GGG staff :)

To Chris I just have one thing to say: ExileCon 2, when?

all to inflate your ego but where's the good thing when some of your players know the state of your constate cycle of alpha/beta?