It doesn't take much reading of the official forums or subreddit to realise that a group of Path of Exile players are angry about a number of topics and feel that we haven't given solid answers about how we're going to address these issues. We will explain as many of these topics as we can in the
Q&A that is currently scheduled for later this week. However, one thing that the Q&A doesn't address is how we got here. I wanted to personally post an explanation of what has been going on behind the scenes at Grinding Gear Games that led to this state.
Synthesis was more work than we expected. It was developed over the Christmas holiday, and its gameplay prototype came in very late. We didn't have a lot of time to iterate on it before release or to make drastic changes that it potentially needed. While our improvements after its launch have helped a lot and many players are enjoying it, we fully acknowledge that it is not our best league and is not up to the quality standards that Path of Exile players should expect from us. It will not be merged into the core game in 3.7.0. Maybe we can do something with it in the future, but we have no current plans.
When we reveal 3.7.0 in three weeks, you'll see that its league has a focus on repeatable fun, and the combat revamp has a lot of focus on improving the fundamentals of Path of Exile's gameplay. In order to do this, we have had our heads down, focusing on getting 3.7.0 to be ready as early as we can within its development cycle.
But that's not all we need to work on. There are a large number of critical projects going on at the same time. For a start, our 4.0.0 mega-expansion is taking a huge amount of the company's time. We see this upgrade as critical because the next generation of Action RPGs is coming and we have to be ready. Not proactively keeping up with competitors is how companies die. We don't see the huge time investment in 4.0.0 as optional at all.
