For a long time, if you saw a positive comment about Path of Exile, it was often accompanied by a reply in which someone would bring up desync. “It became the thing where, if there was a good Reddit thread about Path of Exile, half the users were loving it and the other half were saying, ‘I quit because of desync’,” Wilson says. “It was a game-killing problem from that point of view.” Even as the game grew in size and strength, the team worried that one day, the albatross around their necks would sink them POE currency trade .

“That problem plagued us for years,” Wilson says. “The way to solve it involved a lot of math, months of work, and a whole team. Thankfully it’s a thing of the past—I haven’t seen a player mention the word in more than a year.”

Grinding Gear finally banished desync with the release of Path of Exile 2.0.0 in 2015. Now Wilson worries about how often he sees players complain about clunky combat animations. “It’s true that we have a complete redo of all that stuff coming, but again, it’s a long-term project slated for next year,” he says. While running a live game, there’s no plateau the studio can climb to that truly allows them rest. The grind never ends.

That fact is reflected in the rigorous update cadence the studio has devised for the game. “Prior to 2015, and this isn’t something I’ve talked about a lot publicly, but our releases were not growing the overall community,” Wilson says. “We released the game and each of the expansions we released did OK, and sometimes went up and sometimes went down. The money was great, and it was awesome to have made a successful game. But at the same time, it wasn’t growing.”

Grinding Gear’s angel investors, who had helped fund the game, weren’t applying any pressure. And so it became a question for the studio itself to answer—did they want to try and be the next League of Legends cheap POE currency , and how would they achieve that if they did?