Grinding Gear Games says it's sorry for the slow response times to Path of Exile 2 customer support requests, but it's dealing with an absolute avalanche of them—roughly 545,000 email requests since the game launched in November, far more than it was prepared to deal with.
"In the lead up to the launch of Path of Exile 2’s early access we began to ramp up our customer support team," Grinding Gear wrote in a Steam update. "It quickly became evident that our efforts were not nearly enough and we have since doubled the size of the team, and we are still hiring more.
"The support team is responsible for not only the emails and private messages, but also the in-game chat and forum moderation. All of these have been approximately 10 times busier than our previous busiest time."
- Path of Exile 2 may have sold too well, so beware queues: 'We really didn't expect to have more than a million people online at the same time'
- Path of Exile 2 players are finally getting into the game: 'What we are doing right now is letting in players in batches so that we can make sure to monitor the backend and not overload it'
It's not the worst problem in the world for Grinding Gear to have: Path of Exile 2 could have zero customer support requests pending because nobody's playing it, for instance, which would be a far more dire outcome for all involved. As it is, PoE2 is still putting up major concurrent player numbers—a peak of more than 290,000 over the past 24 hours, enviable by just about any measure—and with numbers like that, there are bound to be a lot of people asking for help.
And hey, it happens. Larian boss Swen Vincke said he expected a peak of 100,000 concurrent players when Baldur's Gate 3 went into full release in 2023, for instance, and that proved to be a massive underestimation.
The good news is that Grinding Gear has managed to reduce that mountain of customer service requests to roughly 75,000 pending, a more manageable but still sizable hill to climb. If you're one of the people waiting for a response to a support request, the studio recommends you do not send another email about it, as doing so will move you to the back of the queue, effectively starting your wait all over again.
"We really appreciate everyone's patience while the Support Team has been working hard to get through the requests we receive and can assure you that we are bolstering the Support Staff member numbers to ensure more timely responses in the future," Grinding Gear wrote. "You deserve better customer service than we’ve been able to provide despite the best efforts from our team and for this we are sorry."
And yes, Grinding Gear is in fact hiring for its support department—if you'd like to apply (noting that it's an in-office position in Henderson, New Zealand, so quite a commute for most of us) you can drop 'em a line at contact@grindinggear.com.
