Server stress tests and security.

We have been stress testing the servers with load-testing bots. So far it's looking good!

Hi, I am the lead programmer on Path of Exile.

The purpose of doing a closed beta is so that we can scale our servers slowly. As we control exactly how many accounts get into beta, we can make sure that the servers have reached our performance goals before adding more players.

That said, before we let players in we want to establish reasonable confidence that we can scale to the level of users that we need to deal with. The way we have been doing this is with load testing bots.

By the end of closed beta, we are confident that we will be able to scale to meet the demand for Path of Exile.

We take security very seriously. First and foremost we must make sure that item economy is legitimate and we have taken great pains during the development of Path of Exile to make sure that this is the case.

The key to good security is defence in depth. In addition to carefully auditing all the code related to item manipulation, the databases that store the items are isolated from the servers that the players connect to. Every item has a unique identifier, so that if a dupe happens, one item will annihilate the other upon saving to the database. These, along with other measures should ensure that the item economy is secure.

However, nobody is perfect, and because of this we have been using a very good game hacker to attempt to find exploits in our servers.