Show us your interesting characters and be featured on our YouTube channel!

June 16: Video #1
June 23: Video #2
June 30: Video #3
July 6: Video #4
July 14: Video #5
July 22: Video #6

We're going to start a series of small YouTube videos where we play for five minutes on characters that players have submitted. We'll comment on what makes the character's build special, and hopefully fit in some behind the scenes discussion of whether we intended the skills to be abused in that specific way.

Our intention with this series is to provide some extra entertainment for the community and to help encourage players to create interesting builds so that they can be featured by us. Don't worry about it slowing down our development speed - we already play your characters in the evenings and weekends to learn about the metagame :P

Please submit the name of any character on your account that you'd like to see featured. A quick explanation of what makes its build special would be appreciated. We'll pick from them pretty arbitrarily (looking for really interesting builds that do things in unusual ways). Depending on the number of submissions, there's no guarantee that you'll be featured but thanks very much for the time spent submitting it.

We have copies of everyone's characters on our local servers here in the office. They are backed up from the Beta servers at 2am New Zealand time, so make sure that the character was in the state that you want to demonstrate at the last backup.

Also, we're looking for name suggestions for the YouTube series. It'll run on our existing "grindinggear" YouTube channel. Obvious names like "Nerf This" are already in use by popular webcomics and such :P

Edit: Please spread the word among the other players who don't read the forum often :)

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Alegor wrote:

How about 'legacy' chars?

That's a good question. Sure, go for it.

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Dreggon wrote:

Oh boy, I'd love to see you playing my level 60-ish Iron Man witch. 1 health, no energy shield, Chaos only.

I can't see a character on your account like that at the moment :(

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

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Chris wrote:

We have copies of everyone's characters on our local servers here in the office.

Acknowledging this makes me feel a bit weird. Does that mean you guys can play...with 'me' anytime you want? Oh weird...and strangely cool. But mostly weird.

Yeah, each day the backup is restored to one of our testing realms (we have several for different purposes). Because we don't know the passwords on players' accounts, they are overwritten on the internal realm with a default password so that we can access them.

All of our changes are tested with real player characters at the appropriate levels before they're deployed. We learnt the hard way to not bother fabricating our own characters to test with - we can never get the items quite right. Using a gauntlet of real characters really helps us make sure that it's roughly balanced correctly.

Occasionally we find out interesting things. For example, a long time ago (when the game was a lot easier), a player commented that the game was too hard with one of their characters. When I investigated by playing on a copy of that character, I found that he was using white gear and had a stash full of currency items that could easily have made his lethality and survivability twice as high with little economic cost. We were able to see that he valued hoarding his currency more than being able to progress through the game :)

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

This is a GREAT idea. I can't wait to see what fun builds people have been cooking.

As for series name, I'm really partial to the idea of 'Path of Exile' also alluding to the many different paths we take on the Skilldrasil (skill passive 'tree') to build our characters. Maybe something along those lines. My ideas would be too clever and punny, though. Just throwing the idea out there.

I'll put it on the list - we need more suggestions from other people too :)

Thanks for the link in your signature - it's like 2000 little ads all over the forum for this thread :)

We've posted the first episode here! Here's a thread to discuss it, which includes a link to the video.

Please keep the nominations coming! Thanks :D

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Xendran wrote:

@Chris : Do builds that use known exploits like aura gem swapping count as able to participate :P

Sure

Also, if anyone has a good Discharge character, let me know.

Video #2!

This week demonstrates zriL's melee witch. There are so many interesting characters to chose from each week!

Here's video #3! Thanks, CrackingSkull!

I'm really enjoying going through your builds, guys. There will be more to come - but keep submitting if you have new ones that I haven't seen yet. I'm selecting from both new and old.

Next week I want to do something super complicated. Any recommendations?

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dieslave wrote:

Where is #6? Chris, are you too busy getting 9.11 ready? I hope so! :)

Managed to do both and also ran a ladder race today ;)

Here's video #6.

We'll be making a new thread for submitting 0.9.11 builds once the patch is live tomorrow.