A Path Of Exile 2 patch was meant to turn on the loot tap but it started deleting players' skills instead

Demon-swarmed fantasy ARPG Path Of Exile 2 got a patch today that should have, in theory, increased the rarity of loot dropped for players across all parts of the game. Instead, the game began deleting their Skill Gems - the extremely important stones that players use to perform all manner of attacks, spells, and defensive magicks. The developers quickly shut down the servers and rolled back the game, leading to a five-hour outage and a bunch of players who are now even more annoyed than they have been in recent weeks. And trust me, that is annoyed.

The intended changes meant to land in today's update would've turned on the loot faucet significantly. It was a response, said the developers, to player gripes about item drops feeling very stingy in certain scenarios, like when you bash your way through a unique boss fight only to watch as it drops a normal and boring item worth very little to you or anyone. The hope with this update was that such disappointment would now happen a lot less.

"Over the last two weeks we have done a major rework to item drops in order to try and address these issues," said developers Grinding Gear Games in an update post. "These changes significantly improve the effect that Item Rarity has on the quality of the items you receive. Overall you should see significantly better items when killing more challenging content."

The changes were broad and promising. They added "drop protection" to powerful bosses so they would always drop a rare item. Some higher tier items would now drop up to five times as often. And the rarity of items found in strongboxes, magic chests, and rare chests would be "drastically increased" (although the chance of the latter two chest types spawning would be lowered). The full notes explain a lot of other increases and bumps to item rarity - so go look at those if you're curious.

It all seemed like a positive change to Path Of Exile 2 players who have been grumbling about the state of the game since the divisive Dawn Of The Hunt update last month, which sowed frustration by slowing combat down and making it harder to blast away crowds of monsters. This loot offering could have been just the thing to bolster player morale. Until the update was applied, at which point all glitch-hell seems to have broken loose.

"Today we experienced around 5 hours of realm downtime for Path of Exile 2," said the developers in a post explaining what happened. "After deploying [the update] we had reports of people's Skill Gems being deleted on login. We immediately shut the realm down to prevent further damage to people's skills and attempted to roll back the database."

That rollback procedure itself became sticky, and in the end the shutdown lasted much longer than anyone would have liked. The reason Skill Gems started going poof is basically down to a database snafu: the gems were supposed to be "marked as being unable to be changed", an adjustment that evidently went badly wrong.

"There are multiple ways in which this kind of problem is normally caught," said the devs, "but they all failed in this case."

The game is now back up and running as normal. Meanwhile, the loot-loosening patch, as it was originally intended, will be rolled out in a fixed state later today, say Grinding Gear Games, who seem pretty contrite about the whole thing.

"Obviously this incident is unacceptable, and we would like to apologise for all the inconvenience caused. This isn't an acceptable level of service. We will be making improvements in response to this incident and hopefully will not suffer such a long downtime again."