Path of Exile announces Private Leagues for Patch 3.5

A major new announcement for Path of Exile players is coming with patch 3.5.0, with that patch, POE is getting private Challenge Leagues.

Yes, you read that right, Grinding Gear Games is bringing what are essentially private servers to Path of Exile.

Next week we’ll announce Path of Exile 3.5.0, our largest expansion this year. In the meantime, we have a smaller announcement to make today. Ever since the start of Path of Exile’s development, we planned to add support for players to pay for the creation of a private league for them and their friends to play in. We’re pleased to announce that we will start making these Private Leagues available for purchase next week. These leagues allow you to add mods that make Path of Exile more challenging for you and your friends.

GGG plans to allow these private instances to allow for players to test new features, create entertainment content like Machinima, or even to just play Path of Exile with their friends. The servers themselves are of limited use, both in terms of player count and how long they last. So don’t expect these to be a full replacement for playing the ARPG with the entire community.

Gameplay will also be somewhat unique, and even features levels of customization. When you create a private league, you can choose to base it off any of the core permanent or challenge leagues that are currently running. It will gain all the properties of the league you based it off of. These Private Leagues will also be integrated with the trade API for the full game. These Leagues are also limited to two months in length, but that may change in the future. But the really interesting and appealing part comes in when you start tinkering with League mechanics.

The mod pools are actually really interesting, and show that GGG may even be using this idea as a testing bed for future League ideas, which is pretty cool. Players who create one of these leagues can disable Item Stashes, increase enemy stats, and even affect drop rates and loot tables for some items. So if you’re wanting a super-difficult League for you and your friends to theorycraft competitive builds with, this is one way of doing it.

When a Private League ends, players can migrate all progress to the main League it was based on. GGG isn’t concerned with upsetting the economy or balance as these Private Leagues are inherently much harder to progress in, especially when custom mods are thrown into the mix.

The pricing for these Leagues is Points, the same currency you pay for all the POE microtransactions with. And one cool thing for these Private Leagues is that players can pay toward the cost as a group. So each player who joins the League can contribute points to keep the thing going. Here’s the full price breakdown:

Private leagues cost 120 points to create. By default, they last 10 days and have 10 player slots.

• Additional blocks of 10 player slots can be purchased for 60 points.
• Additional blocks of 100 player slots can be purchased for 600 points.
• Additional blocks of 10 days can be purchased for 60 points.
• Additional blocks of 30 days can be purchased for 180 points.
• Additional mods that make the game more challenging can be added for free at league creation.

You can add additional player slots and days at any time once the league has started.

On other Path of Exile 3.5 news, the game is also apparently bringing a full rework of the Master system in-game. More details on that next week with the full 3.5 patch announcement. POE is also launching on the PS4 in December.

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