Back when I played Path Of Exile 2 at Summer Games Fest, I fought a cave-dwelling boss who summoned hordes of grotty subterranean wildlife to swamp me. Fortunately, I was rolling a Witch – perhaps the best beginner POE2 class – so I could summon an army of skeletons in response. A similar horde vs horde encounter is underway at POE 2 developers Grinding Gear Games. The game launched in early access over the weekend, and has already drawn so many players that the developers are emergency-hiring additional staff to cope with the waves of support emails.
“We’ve had a massive amount of players logging into Path of Exile 2 since launch, which has been amazing to see!” reads an apologetic Community Team post on the official forums. “Unfortunately, such a huge influx of players also generates an enormous amount of support requests.
“Despite their best efforts, we’re currently looking at turn around times that are much longer than expected on new emails, where we’d usually be aiming for responses within the same day, if not the same hour. We are currently hiring new people for support to be able to handle the increased load so that we can decrease the backlog as soon as possible.”
The post requests that people not send follow-up emails to check on unanswered messages, so as not to clog the workings even further. They’ve also run into some technical troubles with the “severely overloaded” ticket processing system, which have caused some emails to be incorrectly processed, creating additional delays. To put this in the context of my opening anecdote: it’s like when you summon a skeleton but you read the instructions wrong and now the skeleton has a pelvis for a head, and you have to shame-facedly reassemble your bony minion while your enemies stand around, moaning about the loot drop tables.
I’m being very frivolous, of course. Tech support staff are among the least-sung champions of game development. They deserve better than to be absent-mindedly compared to the walking dead by some asshole whose idea of “customer service” is “don’t actively and gleefully insult the reader’s intelligence”.
I’m a little aghast that Grinding Gear have had to staff up after launch – Path Of Exile 2 was always going to be popular. It’s not clear whether the new hires are temporary or full-time. Going by the first POE 2 patches, there are, at least, no major technical problems to worry about for the moment.