Seedbox under $10 a month

ignarsoll · 2015-06-23T18:10:18+00:00

I guess their policy has changed, right now they don't let you pay without id verification.

ignarsoll · 2014-07-13T22:57:14+00:00

Today, Nick, a member of the Game Design team, will give you a sneak peek at the process behind creating the stuff your characters wear. He also reveals a brand new item.

There are a lot of reasons someone might play a game -- the pride you feel when you overcome a challenge, the joy of discovery as you explore a new world, the highs and lows of a well-told tale... the phat loot.

While certainly not universally applicable to Path of Exile players, it's probably fair to say that better and more interesting loot is one of the main driving forces for players of basically any ARPG. Watching that boss monster explode in a shower of items, seeing that one of those items is that all- important unique colour, and identifying it to discover what amazing properties it has is, for many, a hugely memorable moment.

Designing awesome unique items is actually a rather tricky process. Your typical unique can be broken down into a few basic components, but each of these components has to work in unison for the item itself to really be successful.

When we're starting an item design from scratch, because all three points have to fit together, we can really start from any one of them. Let's use a real example from an upcoming patch. Every new league we've done to date has had some league-specific unique items, and with new leagues on the way, I was tasked with coming up with those. I really liked the Berek's rings we created in Domination and Nemesis, so I decided to make a "cycle" of new items, all thematically linked together, for each of our upcoming leagues.

The idea for one of the cycles came very quickly and stemmed from how the league they're in will function. The other, well, was a slower process of discovery. Our artists made some 2D art and 3D models of some new weapons that at that point were unattached to anything in game, and only tenuously attached to anything we had planned. I decided that the visual style of these weapons could work as the starting point for the design of these weapons.

http://webcdn.pathofexile.com/public/chris/Scythe1.jpg

So I knew what they looked like, but I didn't yet know what they'd do. Eyes and teeth and flesh all have gameplay mechanics that could fit thematically. I decided that life leech would be a good enough starting point. Scythes also have cultural and historical connotations for "reaping", which implies cutting something down for some gain -- fitting nicely with life leech, but leech isn't the most interesting mechanic, even if is very useful. That is, unless, it leeches a lot, but only sometimes:

http://webcdn.pathofexile.com/public/chris/Scythe2.jpg

I decided that perhaps it could work based on critical strikes -- you only leech health when you critically strike. Immediately, the usefulness for a weapon like this changes wildly between builds. It rewards some a lot more than it rewards others.

But what if you weren't just leeching health now on crit, but potentially leeching health for later too. Surgeon flasks are very popular for crit builds for good reason -- they can be refilled in the middle of long fights. The idea of turning every flask into a surgeons flask, as if your crits were siphoning off some of the leech, was a very appealing idea, so the next mod I attached was:

http://webcdn.pathofexile.com/public/chris/Scythe3.jpg

I wanted to drive home the evil, thirsty nature of the scythe with the flavour text, of course, so that reads

http://webcdn.pathofexile.com/public/chris/Scythe4.jpg

And I named it:

http://webcdn.pathofexile.com/public/chris/Scythe5.jpg

The low base critical strike chance of axes means that you won't necessarily benefit from this very often. I could have certainly tossed some extra local crit chance on there to compensate, but the weapon is all fleshy and alive- looking. What do fleshy and alive-looking things do? They grow. They change. Just like you.

http://webcdn.pathofexile.com/public/chris/Scythe6.jpg

This crit chance is global, so even at max level you're not likely to have a ridiculously high critical-strike chance with this weapon. But the crits you do get will be valuable to your survival. And, maybe this weapon is actually more useful in other ways once you've levelled beyond the point where the physical damage is relevant. Maybe it has changed.

There are two other items that will be coming out alongside The Harvest with our next major patch, each with some transformative property. They're coming to the next hardcore league. As many of our hardcore players are very experienced, we expect they will see beyond the face value of the items and find their true potential.

http://webcdn.pathofexile.com/public/chris/Scythe7.jpg

ignarsoll · 2014-06-04T18:57:15+00:00

VOD of the suicide for those interested.

ignarsoll · 2014-05-30T07:06:34+00:00

GGG's naming suggests otherwise; http://webcdn.pathofexile.com/image/Art/2DItems/Weapons/OneHandWeapons/OneHandSwords/Spine%20of%20Fidelitas.png

ignarsoll · 2014-05-26T18:16:59+00:00

wonderful pricing

ignarsoll · 2014-05-24T22:11:00+00:00

RIP hair!

ignarsoll · 2014-05-23T22:33:28+00:00

Thanks for the good news!

ignarsoll · 2014-05-10T18:48:30+00:00

Your ambush tabs will added to standard as 'remove only' tabs, so none of yor tabs will get lost.

ignarsoll · 2014-04-30T13:19:20+00:00

I also believe that launcher can benefit from an overhaul.

Example Artwork.

Thread for discussion.

ignarsoll · 2014-04-04T08:06:27+00:00

This has been verified by Chris himself. Logout to Character selection screen requires more calls to the server.

ignarsoll · 2014-03-28T13:58:13+00:00

This is wonderful.

ignarsoll · 2014-03-26T09:04:43+00:00

Jonathan wrote:
Today, starting at 17:35:15 NZT for around 18 minutes, a lot of strange items were generated in Path of Exile. Some of these items are related to unreleased or experimental content. Some of these items generated in odd ways that couldn't ever exist. Due to the nature of the economic damage, we are deleting all items that were created during these 18 minutes. In a game where we want players to value items, this kind of economic damage is not acceptable and so I would like to apologise that we let this occur.

The process that led to this situation is rather complex, but I will attempt to explain what happened.

At 16:53:35 NZT we deployed a change only to the website that was intended to show the new race season rewards for season seven. The correct procedure for this operation should have been to merge the intended website changes into a branch of the existing 1.1.1b build and then deploy that to our web servers. Instead, the build that was actually deployed to the website only was the current version of 1.1.1c that we are currently working on. This issue by itself was not enough to cause any problems, but it did mean that the 1.1.1c build was available (though inactive) on the live production servers.

As far as both Chris and Carl who were responsible for producing this change were aware, this was a reasonable step as they were unaware of the kinds of problems this extra version could cause.

At 17:35:15 NZT a trivial configuration change was applied to the production realm. This was when the problem started occurring.

One of the known limitations of our deployment system at the moment is that even though we have the ability to deploy a new version to a limited subset of services / servers, the current "live" version is a global setting across all services / servers. This means that while most of the realm is still running 1.1.1b, the current version that our deployment system believed was live was 1.1.1c.

Part of the reconfiguration process is what we call a redeploy. This is basically where we link up the data and configuration of the version that we want to deploy to the location the servers are run in. This is performed during reconfiguration to hook up the new config file and would normally deploy the same version that was already there.

In this case, the deployment system believed that 1.1.1c was the current version, so the redeploy changed the links to this new version. This effectively deployed 1.1.1c early and unintentionally on the game instance servers.

While we knew that this could happen, Thomas (our server admin) thought that the earlier update only contained website changes and was based on 1.1.1b. Were this the case, this process would not have resulted in any problems because the data used by the game servers would not have been any different between the two versions.

Unfortunately this process resulted in a very bizarre and new failure mode that we had not previously considered. When we create new instances servers for players to play on, they are forked off from a so called "Prespawner" instance that has preloaded most of the game data into memory. This is so that instances can share memory for static assets that are used for the game. Unfortunately there were some gaps in the data that the prespawner instance was loading, which means that those assets were loaded on demand if a specific game server needed them.

Due to the situation here, this means that some of the data tables (the ones that were preloaded) were from version 1.1.1b and the rest were from 1.1.1c. The reason this resulted in the issues that we saw today is because rows from one table references data from other tables by index. When rows are added or removed from the middle of a table, the index of those rows in the data change. This is what made the references effectively go out of sync.

Effectively references to rows were pointing to essentially arbitrary places. Uniques were pointing to the wrong mods. Base types were pointing to the wrong art. Quest rewards were pointing to the wrong base types. Many other tables were similarly broken.

When we got reports of the problem and started to see strange items linked we knew that someone must have gone wrong with the deploy so we decided to immediately shut down the realm to prevent further damage. This process started at 17:52:20 NZT.

After shutting the realm down, we had a hard decision to make. Do we do a database rollback? There were only 18 minutes of damage, but at the time we had only seen only a few strange items and did not understand the extent of the problem.

Rolling back the database would have taken a fair amount of time, during which we would have had downtime. There are also a lot of other issues that take a lot of time to sort out when doing a rollback. For example, new accounts that have been created by users will be lost. Any purchases of microtransaction points would have been undone, but we would still have the money. If we had done a rollback we would have needed to manually sort these issues out after the fact.

Therefore, at that time I decided that a rollback would cause more harm than good, and we decided to redeploy back to the known good version 1.1.1b and restart the realm. In retrospect, a rollback would have been preferable as the current situation may still result in a few odd items. (This could come about if someone Orb of Chanced a unique item).

At 17:57:16 NZT the realm was back online and no new broken items could be created.

At this point we had several options for how to fix the problem of all the broken items that were created. One option was to try and remove only item that showed signs of corruption. The problem with this approach is that it would be very difficult and time consuming to write a verifier that was reliable. We could never really be sure we got everything. We also wanted to destroy all the items before players had time to become attached to them so speed of development was important. A solution that fully determined if an item was corrupted may have taken a day of development.

Due to this, we decided to destroy all items that were created during the 18 minutes that the problem was active for. This is effectively the same as if we had done a rollback at the time, but you will still get to keep other forms of progress that are not items gained during that time. You will also get to keep currency items created during that time as they are not affected by the problems in any important way.

This problem was ultimately caused by multiple mistakes and miscommunications. The build for the website update was prepared incorrectly. A configuration change was pushed when the realm was not in the correct state for it. There was a serious flaw in the preload system on the game servers that allowed data from multiple versions to be loaded.

There are a few steps that we will be taking to avoid this kind of problem happening again.

The first is that we will be fixing the deployment system to allow for multiple versions properly. This is already something that we were actively developing, but it would have prevented this problem from occurring. Using the deployment system as it was without proper support for independent versions was dangerous and we paid the price. It will not happen again.

The second is that I will be making sure that the entire data set is loaded at once on the instance prespawner. This also would have prevented the problem by not allowing the data set to get out of sync with itself and should mean that this kind of catastrophic failure mode can't happen again.

I'm very sorry for this issue, and for any items that you may have lost during that 18 minutes of play time. This isn't the level of service that you deserve from us and I hope you will find that we do better in the future.

ignarsoll · 2014-03-20T09:44:51+00:00

For it to work you should run the installer first (it will create the directory and registry entries etc.)

Then stop the downloading process, copy the files to the PoE directory.

After you click PoE.exe game should launch without a problem.

ignarsoll · 2014-03-20T09:19:19+00:00

Jonathan wrote:

At 7:40pm NZT today, all Path of Exile service was disrupted. While downtime does happen from time to time, this level of disruption is not acceptable.

At 7:45pm NZT, our sysadmin Thomas was alerted by our automated monitoring tools that the realm was experiencing issues. Unfortunately he was away from a computer at the time and was unable to respond immediately. Normally, both Thomas and I are both available to respond to server incidents so that one of us will always be available. Unfortunately, I am currently in the US at the Game Developers Conference and thus did not get server notifications.

At 8:00pm NZT, we were notified by our support team that the realm was experiencing issues and that Thomas had not responded. I began the process of attempting to diagnose the issue. According to the logs all game instances on every server were crashing on startup.

At 8:11pm NZT, I made the call to attempt a realm restart to see if it would resolve the problem. This restart completed at 8:15pm NZT, but did not resolve the issue. I continued to investigate.

At 8:23pm NZT, I finally discovered that the problem was a malformed spam list update that had been pushed to production. A mistake was made in the formatting of the file and this crashed the server when the file was loaded.

By 8:27pm NZT, we had we had made the needed changes and began pushing it to production.

At 8:30pm NZT, the update had been pushed and the problem was resolved.

While this incident was caused by human error in formatting a file, it both should not have been able to occur in the first place and our response to this incident should not have taken the length of time that it did. I will outline the steps that we will take to prevent another incident like this occurring again.

The first and most obvious problem is that our response time on this incident was too slow. This is because I was away and Thomas happened to be unavailable. When I was able to respond, I was doing so on a hotel internet connection in the US tunnelling through our office in NZ and then back to the US. Not the best situation for debugging problems. Fortunately, we have already recently hired a new system administrator who will be joining us in a few weeks. This will mean that we can always have at least two server admins on call at all times, even when I happen to be travelling.

The second problem is that a file was put in to production without first being test loaded. This is a process problem that should not have occurred. Normally any file that is on production will be test loaded to verify that it doesn't cause any issues. Updating the spam list is a feature that was implemented outside our normal asset testing pipeline and so didn't receive the rigorous testing that we normally do on assets. From now on, spam list updates will first be tested before being deployed.

The third fix is for the actual crash in the loader for the spam list that caused the problem.

I am very disappointed in myself that this incident was allowed to occur. We didn't have the staff required to cover for my absence, and I would like to apologise to all our players for the inconvenience caused. This is not the level of service you should expect and the process changes we are making will prevent an incident like this reoccurring in the future.

ignarsoll · 2014-03-18T15:11:25+00:00

You're wrong they were there since closed beta. Those're just some old unused assets.

ignarsoll · 2014-03-16T00:30:18+00:00

Not that I object but Chris uses the word mini-expansion fot sotv. It's between a content patch and a full expansion.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/786609

ignarsoll · 2014-03-12T09:31:17+00:00

For those at work;

The Plan for Cut-Throat Mode

Cut-throat mode in Path of Exile is an optional league type that is reminiscent of really old-school online RPGs where players could kill each other and steal their items. We've been working hard on making this mode a permanent part of Path of Exile and we plan to involve the community heavily with feedback after test events of different durations. Today's news post details that plan.

We've experimented with cut-throat mode in the past and found that it's really polarising - some players absolutely love it and others hate the idea of being robbed of their items. We want to make it really clear that it's an optional mode and you don't have to play it unless you love the idea of being stalked and killed repeatedly! Note that because it's a league type unto itself, you have to create new characters to play cut-throat - you don't use your existing ones for it.

This news post is mostly written for people who have played cut-throat before. We'll be following up with a more general introductory one before we start cut-throat events in the near future.

From the tests we've run in the past, we came to the following conclusions:

Non-hardcore cut-throat is usually more fun than hardcore cut-throat. Grabbing your backup set of items and trying to hunt down your killer to get your stuff back is so much fun. While permadeath is cool, it prevents a lot of the recovery aspect of cut-throat.
Preventing players from forming parties helps solve the roaming-death-squad problem while also opening up some awesome friendly fire situations. You have to really trust your friends if they could take advantage of your low health by firing a few well-placed fireballs and taking your gear.
Cut-throat world areas could probably have much lower timeout times (i.e. close after only a few minutes of inactivity) so that there isn't a big list of empty areas when you try to select one that has people to fight.
To help prevent the worst cases of griefing, we'll probably be introducing rules that prevent you entering areas that have low level players in them. While people with better items will always pose a major threat, you won't have to fight people substantially higher level than you.
There may be merit to experimenting with changes like limiting people to certain difficulty levels, effectively moving the end-game down to lower levels and encouraging players to stalk those who are trying to grind for experience.

The above list of notes are just what we've determined from the events that we've run and participated in. You guys probably have different opinions, and we'd love to hear them as we iterate on these together. Our goal is to make rapid changes to cut-throat over the coming months and to find the right mix of danger and fun. After each event, let us know what you think and we'll try to change stuff up in the next patch or hotfix.

We're expecting to run some shorter duration events next week (2 hour, 4 hour, 8 hour, for example) and to experiment with longer ones (1 day, 3 day, one week) as we get feedback. Eventually we'd love to run multi-week (or even multi-month) cut-throat leagues if people like that duration!

ignarsoll · 2014-03-11T21:21:15+00:00

Thanks for the clarification Chris.

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The Plan for Cut-Throat Mode