PoE2 bugs pay off, and nobody gets punished

Nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds, and not a single line of code. On September 8, GhazzyTV published a video titled « Why These Bugs Are RUINING Path of Exile 2 right now. » The title promises an inventory of PoE2 bugs. The real subject lies elsewhere: what Grinding Gear Games does to players who exploit them deliberately. Which is, according to him, nothing.

This is one opinion, from a creator followed by 166,000 people who has covered Path of Exile for years. We picked it up because his argument about PoE2 bugs can be checked point by point, and we checked it. On one point, he’s wrong.

PoE2 bugs pile up, a single question on the forum

Ten hotfixes in four days for Forbidden Rites’ PoE2 bugs, and a thread that fits in one line. The ninth, posted by Alexander_GGG on September 7 at 8:26 AM, simply states: « Fixed 4 client crashes. » Nothing about an exploit. Nothing about a Trial. Yet it’s under this very thread that the discussion went off the rails.

Two replies, less than three hours apart. Xystre#4581 posts at 9:18 AM: « good thing it’s still on beta right? » Then Silenterror#5117, at 12:08 PM, on the same official forum thread: « Thanks and please make sure, you ban everyone that abused the portal bug. o/ ».

A portal bug, then. No one explains it in this thread. GhazzyTV says he learned about it through his stream chat: an Ascendancy flaw supposedly granting infinite portals in the Trials, exploited to farm Divine Orbs, the game’s high-end currency, and resell them. He mentions streamers who allegedly posted guides about it, using the word « apparently » himself. No direct source, no link.

We read the patch notes for hotfixes 8, 9 and 10, the latter posted by Adam_GGG on September 8 at 5:03 AM. None of them mention an exploit, a Trial of Chaos, portals, or an Ascendancy. This point remains an unconfirmed rumor, and we treat it as such. The pace is detailed in our hotfix count. What the PoE2 bugs reveal, according to Ghazzy, isn’t their number. It’s what Grinding Gear Games does, or doesn’t do, when a player chooses to exploit one.

Once, exploiting a bug used to cost something

This isn’t the first time PoE2 bugs have paid off handsomely for those who exploit them. But the studio once had a simple rule, applied for years on Path of Exile. Stumbling on a bug by chance and using it once or twice carried no penalty. Spending time on it, methodically trying to profit from it, changed everything. The player got a warning, then a ban of a few weeks, sometimes lasting until the end of the current league. Never permanent.

He traces this doctrine back to a talk by Chris Wilson, co-founder of Path of Exile, which he recalls, without being certain, from a GDC conference. What is established, however, is this: in early January 2026, Wilson published a roughly twenty-minute video addressed to developers, devoted entirely to economic integrity in online role-playing games. The site Massively Overpowered covered it on January 7, written by Chris Neal.

His definition fits in one sentence: « the ability for players to fairly earn progress and items through in-game actions on a level playing field without outside influence or cheating. » He recommends a scorched earth policy against cheaters, tools for customer support to catch false reports, and refusing paid items that grant an advantage.

Wilson also owns up to a personal mistake there. He had let partnered streamers skip the queue during a major release. His words: « I didn’t consider the economic advantage this would give those streamers, » before adding: « We were rightly called out on this, and I instantly realized the mistake I had made. »

This old rule had a concrete merit. It made silence costly and reporting free. A player who kept a bug to themselves risked their season; one who reported it risked nothing. The math tipped the right way without anyone having to watch anyone else. It’s this mechanism, more than any punishment, that Ghazzy describes as the real safeguard against PoE2 bugs that resurface every league. A detail that carries weight: Chris Wilson has left Grinding Gear Games. The person who formulated the doctrine no longer works where it should apply.

The Temple ruined the director’s Christmas, not the exploiters’ season

One case comes up more than any other whenever PoE2 bugs are mentioned: the Temple affair. It happened at the worst possible time. Over the end-of-year holidays, Grinding Gear Games keeps only a skeleton crew in the office, just enough to keep the servers running. No one to communicate, no one to make a call. The exploit ran unchecked, at scale. Players locked a character inside the campaign and reset a zone on repeat, chaining rooms that boosted each other until the Temple turned into a currency machine, the game’s trading currency. When the teams came back, the hotfix landed. Those who had exploited the bug had already cashed in.

Source GamesRadar+, June 13, 2026, article by Jordan Gerblick: Mark Roberts revisits the Temple and stands by nerfing it mid-season.

Mark Roberts, co-director of Path of Exile 2, discussed the episode with GamesRadar+, in an article by Jordan Gerblick published on June 13, 2026. « The Temple ruined Christmas for me, » he says. He adds: « I don’t care if it’s a mid-league nerf, I’ve lost all sympathy for that bloody temple and everyone running it. » The studio eventually nerfed it mid-season, a decision it usually avoids.

One thing is missing from this story. We found no announcement of any sanction against the players who drained the Temple. An annoyed developer is not a developer who punishes, and public irritation is no substitute for a written rule. That’s exactly what Ghazzy calls out. With no visible consequence, the message sent to the community fits in one line: find a bug, keep quiet, and cash in while it lasts.

Last Epoch took the opposite path

Another game ran into the same problem and handled it differently. Last Epoch offers two ways to play: the Merchant’s Guild, where players trade their loot, and Circle of Fortune, geared toward solo or group loot. During the early seasons, players amassed hundreds of millions of gold pieces through bugs. For Ghazzy, the punishment wasn’t enough. The habit of exploiting early and often took hold, and the trade league was ruined two seasons in a row. Some players switched to Circle of Fortune, others quit outright. He himself says he will never play the trade league in Last Epoch again.

The story is more nuanced than the video suggests. Eleventh Hour Games, the studio behind Last Epoch, did in fact ban players. PC Gamer reported it on April 7, 2024, in an article by Jody Macgregor. The studio wrote: « abusing an exploit, ruining the game for all players is not acceptable, and that doing so should result in a ban ». Players caught illegitimately generating gold were punished, and trading for real money, whether buying or selling, carries a permanent account ban.

The difference matters. Ghazzy’s complaint is then about how effective the punishment was, not about its absence. Yet it’s the absence he holds against Grinding Gear Games. Comparing the two studios weakens his case instead of strengthening it: a studio that punishes poorly and a studio that says nothing don’t send the same signal to players.

Still, Path of Exile 2 doesn’t offer Last Epoch’s way out. Players are either in the shared economy, where most of them are, or fully self-found, a considerably more demanding experience that isn’t for everyone. Anyone bothered by PoE2 bugs has no refuge faction to fall back on, only the choice to play a lot harder. It’s in this context that Ghazzy calls for a return to the old practices: « Personally, I would like them to change this and go back to what they did before ». In the meantime, the league goes on, and the builds it has produced are played within this shared economy.

Early Access doesn’t rewrite the rule for launch day

Ghazzy anticipates the objection: the game is in Early Access, bugs are normal, every league is just a test. He accepts that, then counters that Grinding Gear Games treats its league launches like those of an already-released game.

The real problem, in his view, lies in precedent. What the studio tolerates today will become the rule after version 1.0. Getting tougher later will anger the community, since GGG will have spent two years suggesting that exploiting a bug costs nothing. The first sanction will cause an uproar. He believes it should happen anyway.

The PoE2 bugs debate didn’t start with this video. On the official forum of Path of Exile, in the thread devoted to Chris Wilson’s remarks, a player wrote as early as January 3, 2026 that this economic integrity already seemed compromised to him, and that the studio wasn’t handling the problem any better after Wilson’s departure than before. Eight months before GhazzyTV.

Ghazzy also addresses an argument circulating in the community: that everything depended on the Temple, without which there was no currency to earn. False, he says. Path of Exile isolates rewards by content type. The Temple didn’t drop Abyss crafting materials; since everyone was farming the Temple, demand for those materials outstripped supply, making the Abyss very profitable. He wants a return to the firmness of the Wilson era.

We’re following Forbidden Rites day by day, including our opening-night plan. Our take: Ghazzy is right in principle and half wrong on the example, since Last Epoch did hand out bans. What Grinding Gear Games is missing isn’t necessarily a ban. It’s a public statement on what awaits anyone who exploits a bug on purpose. There will be more PoE2 bugs, it comes with the job. A studio that stays silent leaves every player to guess the rule. And those who guess fast are the ones who profit most.