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Path of Exile hits new high for concurrent players despite DDoS attack

Path of Exile's Delirium expansion has propelled the dungeon crawler to its highest concurrent player count to date, even with a DDoS attack that threatened to put a dent in those numbers.

Ozzie Mejia

March 15, 2020 7:05 PM

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Path of Exile is a game that continues to hit new peaks with each expansion's release. While many players are looking forward to the game's eventual sequel, there's still a lot of excitement to be found in the first game, which has just recently launched its Delirium expansion. Even before the console versions receive that expansion, Grinding Gear Games has a lot to celebrate, as Path of Exile hit a new high for concurrent players. What's especially remarkable is that it happened even in the face of a DDoS attack.

"This weekend we launched Path of Exile: Delirium and were really pleased that we reached a new peak in concurrent player numbers," reads the Path of Exile forums. "While there were some server issues that were exacerbated by a lengthy DDOS attack, things went relatively smoothly."

According to Grinding Gear Games co-founder Chris Wilson, Path of Exile hit 237,160 players at once over the course of the weekend. The team believes the numbers could have gone even higher, but there was a DDoS attack that struck around the time of Delirium's launch.

"Our previous record for most players online at once was around 224,000, at the Legion launch last year," Wilson told Shacknews. "This weekend was the launch of Delirium and we hit 237,160 players online at once. We feel that the final numbers would have been a little higher, but we were trying to withstand a heavy DDoS attack which knocked around 40 of our servers off the internet, reducing our capacity."

The good times will continue to roll for Path of Exile, as Delirium is scheduled to launch on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One this Wednesday, March 18 at 3PM PT. For more on Delirium, you can check out our preview.

And keep it on Shacknews for more on Path of Exile's future, as we continue to march to Path of Exile 2.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?