Path of Exile open beta hosted nearly 70,000 players over weekend

Grinding Gear's free-to-play ARPG Path of Exile entered open beta last week, and gamers eager for a top-down dungeon-crawling experience akin to Diablo II flooded the servers.

Grinding Gear's free-to-play ARPG Path of Exile entered open beta last week, and gamers eager for a top-down dungeon-crawling experience akin to Diablo II flooded the servers. 69,850 players, to be precise. In ayesterday (via PCGamesN), Grinding Gear Lead Designer Chris Wilson stated the deluge crashed Exile's account system and servers over the weekend, but the team quickly brought everything back online today with stability and bug fixes.

"We're getting absolutely crushed under the number of players trying out Path of Exile, and this has manifested as a server crash that has been occurring hourly today," Wilson wrote previously. "For those interested, player concurrency hit 69,850 players before it was high enough to take down the realm."

Grinding Gear also fixed a few pesky login bugs, including a rare and strange issue where players somehow could log into accounts owned by other players as the servers shuddered beneath the load. To keep character info stable, the studio simply switched off Exile's servers until it whipped up a fix.

The high turnout probably has something to do with the satisfying results of clicking a zombie's head into paste for shiniesor the web-like skill treethat ought to win some sort of award for its sheer size.