Path of Exile 2 developer Grinding Gear Games apologizes to players after its planned Path of Exile account migration caused disconnects and crashes. The change is being made to prepare for the launch of the much-anticipated sequel to one of the best ARPGs around, and allows the combination of multiple accounts across the free PC game and its console versions. Unfortunately, its initial rollout to the original PoE on Thursday November 14 quickly ran into issues, so it has been pushed back until after the weekend.
“Today at 9am New Zealand time (12pm PT / 3pm ET / 8pm GMT) we took down the realm for the deployment of the new account system,” the Path of Exile creator writes in a new message to the community. This downtime was expected to last four hours, but ended up taking five as “migration took longer to run than it did on our test hardware.” That was just the beginning of the issues for the free Steam game, however, as upon resuming service many players began reporting disconnects.
Unable to find a quick solution, GGG instead rolled back the patch. Due to the database migration process, however, this then took until 3pm NZT (that’s 6pm PT / 9pm / 2am GMT), meaning a total of six hours of downtime, with the Path of Exile website down for a further 90 minutes beyond that.
GGG explains that the crashes were caused by “a very simple flaw” where the game was counting the length of account names without taking into consideration the new numbers that have been added. These additional ‘discriminator’ values are a way for the new-look Path of Exile accounts to share the same username as one another, solving a common complaint when creating fresh profiles.
While the bug has now been resolved, GGG has decided to delay the update until Monday November 18 “to make sure that we have found all corner cases before we can be confident in deploying it again.” It adds, “This is not the level of service you should expect from Grinding Gear Games and we are very sorry for the extended downtime.”
Fortunately, GGG has intentionally left some clear space to allow this migration to take place before the Path of Exile 2 release date arrives, but if you’re looking for something to play in the meantime then try another of the best games like Diablo on PC.
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