When I played Path Of Exile 2 at the Summer Games Fest, I fought a cave-dwelling boss who summoned hordes of horrible subterranean wildlife to swarm me. Luckily, I was spinning a Witch – perhaps POE2’s best beginner class – so I was able to summon an army of skeletons in response. A similar battle between horde and horde is underway at the creators of POE 2, Grinding Gear Games. The game launched in early access over the weekend and has already attracted so many players that the developers are urgently hiring additional staff to deal with the floods of support emails.
“We’ve had a huge amount of players log in since the launch of Path of Exile 2, which has been amazing!” reads an apologetic post from the Community Team on official forums. “Unfortunately, this huge influx of players also generates a huge number of support requests.
“Despite their best efforts, we are currently seeing turnaround times for new emails taking much longer than expected, with us typically struggling to get responses on the same day, if not the same time. We are currently hiring new support people to cope with the increased workload so that we can reduce the backlog as quickly as possible.”
The post asked people not to send follow-up emails to follow up on unanswered messages so as not to further disrupt the experience. They also encountered some technical issues with a “severely overloaded” ticket processing system, which resulted in some emails being incorrectly processed, causing additional delays. To put it in the context of my opening anecdote: it’s like you summoned a skeleton but you misread the instructions and now the skeleton has a pelvis for a head and you shamefully have to put your bony minion back together while your enemies stand around complaining about the loot drop tables .
Of course, I am speaking very seriously. Technical support staff are among the least praised of game development masters. They deserve better than to be thoughtlessly compared to the living dead by some asshole whose concept of “customer service” is “don’t actively and gleefully insult the reader’s intelligence.”
I’m a little dismayed that Grinding Gear had to augment staffing after launch – Path Of Exile 2 has always been popular. It is unclear whether the novel employees will be constant or full-time. Judging by the first patches of POE 2, at least for now there are no major technical issues to worry about.
