Join The Club
Path of Exile 2's player trading economy crumbled in its last season the moment word got out about a clever technique that would net you so much loot you could become an in-game millionaire in a few days. It was so catastrophic that developer Grinding Gear Games had to interrupt its holiday break to fix it.
This was the season the "temple" was introduced to the game, giving players the ability to create their own dungeons by connecting various rooms together on a big grid. The system was mostly meant to be a way to fight a new boss and find temple-exclusive loot, but players quickly figured out how to make it the most lucrative system in the game for all loot.
Part of the strategy involved locking a character in the campaign and repeatedly resetting a level to gradually grow your temple into a money-making machine. By linking specific synergistic rooms together in an endless snake, you could avoid having them deleted after running the dungeon and guarantee heaps of valuable loot—way more than you're intended to get anywhere else in the game.
PoE 2's co-director Mark Roberts said having to deploy emergency patches to fix some of this "ruined Christmas for me" in a recent interview. "We now—because of this bloody temple—have way more active stats for checking how many items are dropping in certain instances," he added.
Roberts said this moments before another developer showed him what players were doing with the temple that same day. "It says, 'TEMPLE SHENANIGANS T1 ISSUE AFTER INTERVIEW' in capital letters," he said looking just off-screen. A few hours after the interview, a patch went out to address a temple strategy that, while far less egregious than the first one, still threatened to destroy the economy.
"I don't care if it's a mid-league nerf, I've lost all sympathy for that bloody temple and everyone running it," Roberts said. "No, I'm being extreme, I don't want to actually just make it bad, but it's left some trauma."
Typically, the developers try not to touch anything major a few weeks into a league, but the temple exploits were too severe to ignore. PoE 2 is technically an early access game, but most people treat it like they would PoE 1 and expect GGG to be on top of balancing it so nothing sours the experience for them.
Making as much in-game wealth as you can ends up being the primary goal of PoE 2 players who wish to upgrade their builds with the most powerful items. You can always opt out of having to play the economy game with the solo self-found mode (no multiplayer allowed), but then some of the rarest items won't be feasible to get within a single league.
I wonder if this debacle will convince GGG to avoid ever dropping a new league right before the holidays. Players are always searching for ways to break the game and they're certainly not going to respect that you're on vacation. It seems like someone has to be on-call to stop whatever absurdly powerful exploit they inevitably find.
