“It turned to hard mode immediately,” Wilson says. “Because now we’re expected to run a full-on games-as-a-service thing. Nowadays, we have dozens of people that handle all that stuff to make it seamless. But it’s tricky to decide to expand before you need it, because that feels like wasting money at the time POE currency trade .”

Staffing up wasn’t a simple process. With a lack of experienced developers in the local area to pull from, Grinding Gear would have to make time to train new hires—time it no longer had. “There were a lot of sleepless nights and learning the hard way,” Wilson says, “as you do when the servers just keep crashing.”

Real-time strategising
The exhaustion is still audible in Wilson’s voice when he talks about that period in Path of Exile’s history. His life felt a little like an RTS—how could he spend his limited resources in order to save Grinding Gear HQ from being overwhelmed? If the team didn’t develop the game fast enough, the players would leave. If it crashed too often, the players would leave. If support couldn’t reply to customer tickets fast enough, or there was a community disaster the team didn’t address, the players would leave.

“Trying to tackle all the problems at once, with constrained resources, and also still sleep when there’s an eight hour period where we’re not able to solve those problems? It’s an interesting physiological challenge,” Wilson says.

Eventually Grinding Gear’s enemy had a name: desync. When the studio had built Path of Exile, it had plumped for a predictive networking model. Every time you attacked an enemy or moved an item, the game checked in with the server to make sure you weren’t cheating. And in the meantime, your PC assumed the check had worked—allowing you to hack and slash as if you were enjoying a single-player game, with no lag. This step was particularly important in the early years of the game, when servers were further behind than Grinding Gear would have liked, leading to slower checks.

The problem arose when your PC drifted out of sync with reality as the server saw it—leaving you unable to trust what you were seeing on your monitor. Advanced players in particular were constantly out of sync in ways that endangered their characters as they zipped back and forth across the screen POE currency for sale .