Earlier this week, Path of Exile studio Grinding Gear Games announced that it was planning a fresh patch with important changes to account management ahead of Path of Exile 2’s early access, starting with changing how account names work to use four-digit discriminators at the end of each account name. The plan was also to allow specialized sub-accounts for individual platforms, so if you play POE on both console and PC, you’ll have two separate sub-accounts under the main account to manage. This doesn’t mean that all microtransactions will be merged, however, as PlayStation purchases have to exist off in their own little silo.
Unfortunately, the rollout yesterday didn’t quite go as planned, as Grinding Gear quickly made clear.
“Today we tried and failed to deploy 3.25.2,” the studio explained. First the migration tool took longer to run than expected, dragging downtime onward; then, once the servers finally returned, players with plagued with disconnections. GGG rolled the patch back – but that turned out to be another nightmare because of the database migrations already deployed, so that kept the game and website offline even longer. The good news here is that the devs did finally figure out the problem.
“After investigation we have discovered that the crashes were caused by a very simple flaw. The constant that represents the length of an account name used in the account session was still accidentally using an old value, before we added the discriminator. If a player logged in with an account name longer than 27 characters then it would result in an exception being thrown when trying to copy the account name into the account session. This on its own should not have resulted in the master crashing, but this occurred in an area of the code base that was designed to be exception free, which resulted in the entire process crashing. The bug itself is already fixed, and we have also changed the code to be more resistant to exceptions occurring.”
That said, the re-deploy has been delayed until Monday, giving GGG more time for additional QA so this (or something like it) doesn’t happen again.
“This is not the level of service you should expect from Grinding Gear Games and we are very sorry for the extended downtime,” the studio says.
