Path Of Exile's First Attempt To Prep Databases For Microtransaction Sharing Between Games Failed, But The Team Knows Why

Two weeks ago, Grinding Gear Games delayed the early access launch of Path of Exile 2 to December 6th. Ironically, the reason for the delay had nothing to do with the ARPG's sequel or any of its gameplay. The decision came down to an issue with migrating databases from the original Path of Exile to make sure players were able to use all of the microtransaction purchases they had made in the follow-up title.

Yesterday, U.S. time, GGG attempted to migrate those databases. The patch was expected to take about 4 hours and was solely designed to support this sharing of microtransaction items and to support cross play between all platforms in Path of Exile 2. That maintenance was then extended and eventually the team had to roll the patch back...which also ended up taking longer than expected. In short, the game and website were down for about 7 hours.

That's not great news. However, what is good news is that the team has located the issue and is being super transparent about what happened. Apparently, the issue came down to a constant assigned to the length of an account name. Names that exceeded this limit caused issues. While this shouldn't have crashed things by itself, it did take place in a part of the migration's code that was expected to be exception free. That compounded the problem.

GGG will be trying again this coming Monday. Whether this results in a slight additional delay to the early access of Path of Exile 2 remains to be seen. Even if it did, I would only expect it to be by a few days.