When I played Path Of Exile 2 at Summer Games Fest, I fought a cave boss who summoned hordes of seedy subterranean wildlife to swarm me. Luckily, I had rolled a Witch – perhaps the best POE2 beginner class – so I was able to summon an army of skeletons in response. A similar Horde vs. Horde encounter is underway at POE 2 developers Grinding Gear Games. The game was released 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 flood of support emails.

“Since the release of Path of Exile 2, a lot of players have signed up with us, which has been amazing to see!” reads an apologetic post from the community team in the official forums. “Unfortunately, such a large influx of players also leads to an enormous amount of support requests.”

“Despite their best efforts, we are currently expecting turnaround times for new emails to be much longer than expected, where we would normally aim for responses within the same day, if not the same hour. We are currently recruiting new staff. “We are asking people for support to cope with the increased workload so that we can reduce the backlog as quickly as possible.”

The post asks not to send follow-up emails to check for unanswered messages so as not to further clog workflows. There were also some technical issues with the “severely overloaded” ticket processing system, which resulted in some emails not being processed properly, causing additional delays. To put this into the context of my opening anecdote, it’s like summoning a skeleton but reading the instructions wrong and the skeleton now has a pelvis for a head and you’re embarrassed to have to reassemble your bony minion while the enemies stand around and moaned about the booty drop tables.

Of course I’m very careless. Technical support staff are some of the most unheralded champions of game development. They deserve better than to be absentmindedly compared to the walking dead by an asshole whose idea of ​​”customer service” is “not actively and spitefully insulting the reader’s intelligence.”

I’m a little dismayed that Grinding Gear had to increase staff after release – Path Of Exile 2 has always been popular. It is not clear whether the new hires are temporary or full-time employees. After the initial POE 2 patches, there are no major technical issues to worry about, at least for now.