Who needs a duel arena when you can deliberately send other people’s frame rates into the abyss?
Normally, as a Summoner inPath of Exile 2, you roam around with a manageable group of maybe 10 to 15 skeletons. For the well-known streamer Empyriangaming and his five teammates, however, that was far too few.
So they sat down, did some calculations, and tweaked their builds until they brought the resource cost for each individual minion down to single digits. Combined with maximally stacked resources, this resulted inenormous recruitment potential.
An image every few seconds
The group quickly realized there was a small catch to the idea: As soon as Empyriangaming alone summoned 255 skeletons, performance completely tanked. The game ran like a stop-motion film, while the servers took seconds just to process his inputs.
Of course, that didn’t stop the group of six from taking things to the extreme. They joined forces and collectively summonedmore than 2,000 skeletons at onceonto the screen, and performance completely crashed. A simple dodge roll took a full minute to actually be executed on the screen.
The Trap Snaps Shut
Instead of abandoning the attempt, the players quickly moved the experiment to their own hideout—and built a devious trap. Empyriangaming placed the rare and extremely coveted item Magebloodin the Trade Shop for the ridiculous price of just one Divine Orb.
Of course, it didn’t take more than a few seconds for the first bargain hunters to take the bait. As soon as the invited buyers entered the streamer’s hideout to close the deal, they were met with total PC failure.
The unsuspecting players’ computers immediately gave out under the load of 2,000 rendered skeletons; frame rates plummeted completely, and the players were stuck in endless lag—while the group had a field day in voice chat.
Strictly speaking, this doesn’t actually violate the rules, but it was still painful for the victims’ graphics cards. It remains to be seen whether the developers at Grinding Gear Games will soon step in with a strict minion cap.
