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Path of Exile open beta demand overloads Grinding Gear Games’ servers

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A downed website meant I wasn’t even able to register for an account for Path of Exile’s new beta this weekend – a sign that testing for Grinding Gear Games’ MMO action RPG was either going very well indeed, or indeed, well, very poorly. Turns out it was mostly the former. The game’s servers are up and running at full capacity again today, with a few major bug fixes to boot.

Lead developer Chris Wilson wrote yesterday that Path of Exile was getting “absolutely crushed” by nearly 70,000 concurrent players, and consequently the game’s servers were crashing on an hourly basis.

More disconcertingly, a very rare bug was causing players to accidentally access others’ accounts via crashed login servers. In almost all cases, says Wilson, the players logged out again “without disturbing anything”. Nevertheless, Grinding Gear Games sensibly decided to turn off PoE’s lights until bug fixes had been issued and some semblance of stability had been regained.

The game is now back online, and Wilson and co. are keeping a “very close eye” on those pesky servers.

“Thanks again for your patience, and sorry about these launch issues,” apologised Wilson. “It’s amazing to see such high demand for the game.”

He added: “I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone for their patience with these problems. We’re making big progress each day towards handling more and more players, so it’ll be very stable soon.”

What’s all the fuss about, eh? That’s what you’re asking. Well, there are reasons that Tim crowned PoE one of his five PC games that deserve to rule 2013. Follow the link to hear them. Can any of you who’ve been lucky enough to get into the game think of any others?

Thanks tomagilicious1 for the submission.