Path of Exile How Scourge's Launch Went

Over the weekend, we launched Path of Exile: Scourge and were thrilled by the number of people who joined us for launch day. In fact, we reached 254,570 peak player concurrency which is 96% of our previous highest record!

The actual deployment was fairly smooth. We had one issue in the first hour where our regional routers were crashing occasionally when routing chat packets containing linked items. Each of these crashes would disconnect about 10% of players. We temporarily disabled chat, which mitigated the issue, and were then able to restore chat functionality without item linking.

Item linking functionality will be restored in our next realm-restart patch, which also fixes another problem that is causing rarer partial-realm crashes (one so far). If all goes well, we expect to deploy this today at around 10pm PDT.

We are closely monitoring all feedback and will communicate about any patches and improvements later this week. We are planning to make the transformation progress bar on Scourged items visible at a glance on the Crucibles Panel without having to hover over each item. We are also reviewing whether to make the Blood Crucible's resource bar more obvious when it's full (currently there's an effect and a sound but they may be too easy to miss). We've also noted reports of a small number of balance changes that were missed in the patch notes, most notably changes to Veiled Modifiers relating to bows and changes to armour-based shields. Once we've reviewed these, we'll share the patch notes for these changes so that they're clearer.

Later this week, we'll launch Path of Exile: Scourge on Xbox and PlayStation at Oct 27, 2021 4:00PM PDT. Downtime will begin for deployment at approximately Oct 27, 2021 12:00PM PDT.

Later this week on October 28th (PDT) we're teaming up with Twitch Rivals to host another Path of Exile: Royale tournament! This time around, competitors will compete alone, but we've added a unique twist. Towards the end of the match, surviving players may encounter a brutal but rewarding boss fight, which could have significant strategic implications for how they play the match. Twitch Drops will be enabled for viewers and there is $30,000 on the line for contestants alongside a slew of Path of Exile's best cosmetic effects. Tune in at 11am (PDT) at twitch.tv/twitchrivals to check out the action live!

Over the weekend, we also launched the Atlantis Mystery Box which contains 36 new ocean-themed microtransactions. 

Thanks so much to everyone who joined us for Scourge! We can't wait to see the items you krangle during this league.