We can't believe it, but we made it through 2020! Happy New Year, Exiles! As is tradition, we're taking a moment to look back on the year that has just concluded.

• We launched three expansions: Delirium, Harvest and Heist. Our fourth one was developed during 2020 but its release was pushed from December to January. We developed much of Harvest and Heist from home[www.pathofexile.com] during the country-wide lockdown.
  
• We've been continuing to work on Path of Exile 2 and Path of Exile Mobile. There will be lots more news on these projects in 2021.
  
• Despite our borders being closed due to COVID, we expanded from 147 to 149 in-house staff members.
  
• We deployed more than 90 updates/patches to our realm.
  
• We posted 347 news articles - an average of 6.7 posts per week.
  
• We set a record number of players online (237,160 on our server alone).
  
• Around 7.5 million different players played Path of Exile on our international realm.
  
• There were 17% more hours played of Path of Exile on our international realm in 2020 than 2019.
  
• Path of Exile won the 2020 BAFTA Award for Evolving Game[www.pathofexile.com].
  
• We released our Vulkan renderer.
  
• We released Path of Exile in the Epic Games Store, and a Beta of the macOS version.
  
• We improved the Steam patching process alongside the general patching process.
  
• We introduced Stash Folders and the Stash Tab Affinities system.
  
• We ran three official events, including Mayhem, Endless Delve and Flashback (which is still running and will end in a few days).
  
• We finally got around to requesting our Silver Play Button[web.poecdn.com] from YouTube!

Thank you for being part of this unusual year with us. We could not do this without you! We are very excited for the year ahead and most imminently - our 3.13.0 expansion which will be announced at the end of next week. Be sure to tune into the livestream at www.twitch.tv/pathofexile at 8am NZ time on January 7th. See you there, Exiles!

On January 7 at 11am (PST), we will announce Path of Exile's 3.13.0 expansion which includes new end-game content, a new challenge league, new skills, items and more. Alongside our regular announcement page, we'll be revealing in-depth details of this expansion via an exclusive livestream at {LINK REMOVED}http://www.twitch.tv/pathofexile. This post contains all the information you need to know before it starts.

Before we jump in, make sure you check out the teaser video for 3.13.0!



The livestream will start on January 7 at 11am PST. We'll showcase the official expansion trailer followed by a deep dive into the expansion's new content and features.

On the livestream, we will reveal almost everything* the expansion has to offer in quite a lot of depth. For example, for new gems, we'll show each one in action alongside its tooltip with an explanation of its mechanics.

*For the sake of brevity, we won't discuss every single balance change, but you'll certainly get a good idea of the direction of the changes. The patch notes the following week will contain the full details.

Players have often asked for a look at the type of material that we cover on expansion press tours with journalists, so we're quite interested to see what you think of us presenting the new expansion to you directly in this way.

Following the deep dive, Ziggy will join Chris Wilson for a Q&A with questions from the chat.

Tune in at {LINK REMOVED}http://www.twitch.tv/pathofexile to watch the reveal live. We'll also post standalone videos on YouTube. Our announcement page will unlock once information has been revealed in the livestream. Streamers are also welcome to restream the livestream and enjoy it alongside their viewers

Yes, Twitch Drops will be enabled for any channel streaming in the Path of Exile category during the duration of the livestream. We'll reveal more details about how that will work and which rewards will be up for grabs.

Yes, we'll have our regular announcement page that showcases everything revealed, links to journalist coverage, and videos up on YouTube alongside the livestream.

The livestream will be presented in English. The individual videos will have translated subtitles on YouTube and much of the English text in the video content will be translated. These will go live at around the same time as the subjects are presented in the livestream so you shouldn't have to wait too much longer to get access to this information.

The live Q&A portion likely won't have subtitles once it's on YouTube but we'll create a news post within a few days that includes a written summary of the information discussed.

As usual, we'll also have a fully-translated announcement page in Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, German, French, Thai and Korean.

We can't wait to share with you what we've been working so hard on.

With our announcement of the 3.13.0 endgame expansion on the horizon, today we thought we'd take a look at past endgame expansions, and give you a narrative developer's reflections on the lore of each Atlas-focused expansion. This post is written from the point of view of Nick, our senior Narrative Designer.

The first true endgame overhaul since the introduction of Maps during Path of Exile's beta, Atlas of Worlds was intended to provide a visible framework and very high-level goal for player's to pursue. Atlas of Worlds introduced the Shaper as an adversary, and turned the Forsaken Master Zana into your ally and guide for this storyline.

This expansion was relatively light on narrative and contained the 'twist' that the Shaper was Zana's father all along. It introduced the "Shaper Quotes" read out by the Shaper himself as you entered new maps for the first time. It was a reasonable foundation for a story, but with only 7 little memory fragments and a few little updates from Zana, it did not contain much other than the core mapping experience to keep players moving forward. The Shaper was also strictly endgame content, with only occasional appearances on the way to the final encounter.

One thing I liked a lot about Atlas of Worlds was the 'random' nature of finding the memory fragments. They felt a little more special as something you stumbled across than as something presented at the end of a boss encounter.

This took the successful parts of the Atlas of Worlds and built on them, introducing the Elder as a new foe, and positioned the Elder and the Shaper as opposing forces. War for the Atlas changed the Shaper's origin somewhat, and revealed his relationship to Zana much earlier, giving the player (and Zana!) a larger emotional handle to grab hold of.

The Elder and the Shaper each had their own 'influence' on the Atlas, which allowed them to be much more present than in the Atlas of Worlds. We took careful steps to introduce the Shaper in increments, positioning him as an entity to be wary of, then introduced the Elder as something even the Shaper is afraid of.

Slightly counterintuitively, you were able to fight and defeat the Elder much earlier than the Shaper, though you were unable to seal the Elder away until you'd completed Zana's storyline and reached very high tier maps.

Of our three major endgame expansions, I would argue this was the most narratively complete, but it had the advantage of using the Atlas of Worlds as its foundation, letting the players wrap their heads around the Shaper for a good long while before the Elder was introduced. It had 15 different memory fragments to find and more Zana guidance. We also later introduced the 'Uber Elder' fight, in which the player witnesses the Elder defeating the Shaper and whisking him into his own realm.

Our most recent Atlas expansion at the end of 2019, accepted the sealing of the Elder and the defeat of the Shaper as canon, but was handled by a different group of Exiles than yourself. The Elderslayers were hired by Zana to do exactly what players had done in the War for the Atlas, but in the Conquerors of the Atlas, the player instead witnessed the effects of long-term exposure to the Atlas (and the Elder in particular) on these Exiles.

Conquerors introduced the NPC Kirac, as well as 5 characters to pursue through the Atlas incrementally -- Baran, Veritania, Drox, Al-Hezmin and Sirus. Each had a series of story glyphs to help fill in their back-stories and motivations, but due to the lengthy structure of mapping to reach Sirus, as well as some time constraints, Sirus seemed to more or less come out of nowhere.

I quite like the themes explored in Conquerors, but it lacks the clarity of the War for the Atlas, and having the story glyphs appear in such a systematic way feels a little too sterile to me (and they are easy to miss!). The Conquerors as foes are also more mundane than the Elder and Shaper, which makes their presence feel less threatening, even despite their more regular appearances and dangerous effects on the map.

With the above in mind, in 3.13.0 we're looking to achieve a few goals:

We want to reintroduce some of the ominousness that came with the eldritch feel of the Shaper and Elder. We also want to inject more story into regular mapping with an element of unpredictability.

We also want to address some of the omissions and gaps in the Conquerors of the Atlas storyline, and build upon what was already there. Although it's important to note that the new storyline exists in addition to and parallel to the existing Atlas content.

Finally, we want to provide narrative hooks for the future. This means some questions will remain unanswered for a little while, but if you're a fan of speculating, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Make sure you check out the announcement at 11am January 7th (PST) at {LINK REMOVED}http://www.twitch.tv/pathofexile

: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page [url=https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/238960/announcements/detail/2949260380215759226]here[/url].

This post is written by Nick, our senior Narrative Designer.

A few days before every major release, there's Patch Notes Day. For the uninitiated, Patch Notes Day is approximately as exciting as Christmas and your birthday combined, if you knew all you were getting was a list of data (but you were, like, really into data). The patch notes are a culmination of the previous months of work across GGG's many employees, distilled into a few hundred sentences, belying the amount of labour and love that has gone into each update. But even the patch notes themselves have to be made by someone.

That someone is me, and the work that goes into each major patch's patch notes is substantial. Today I'm going to take you through the process from start to finish, to give you a behind-the-scenes look at the process involved here.

Contrary to popular belief, patch notes are not automatically generated. Nor is it really feasible to have people working on a program write their own patch notes. Instead, everyone works as normal, creating monster models or tweaking skill balance or cutting exalt drop rates in half, and as they 'commit' their work to our version control system (adding it to the huge collection of game files) they ideally write a little note explaining what they've done. Every single thing someone does while working on Path of Exile is submitted to the big repository of files alongside such a note, and can be viewed in our version control software.

Before I can start writing the patch notes, I have to go through all of these commits and pull out the relevant ones -- things that noticeably change existing content or add new features that the players will want to know about. We have four main repositories, and in a typical quarterly PoE update there are approximately twenty thousand commits between them (at least). I take the relevant commit notes and start listing them in a document in their raw form. It can take a few days just to go through all those commits. Once I'm done, I have a stiff drink and grit my teeth for the next step.

The people who work at GGG are very smart and skilled and I like them a lot. They are absolutely god-awful at writing commit notes, however. I don't blame them -- typically they don't need to think about the commit notes. A lot of people's work does not get patch-noted simply due to the nature of what they're working on (such as a new microtransaction, or incremental performance, graphical, or audio improvements). So 98% of the time, it doesn't matter that their commit notes are nonsense. But it's my job to make sure that their nonsense is either not relevant, or becomes non-nonsense. Sense.

We have a system for tracking all the work that needs to be done, and commits are usually linked to that system. So I look at the commits I've pulled out, find the 'issue' (the master work-tracker for that piece of work) and go through all the commits and comments on that thread to figure out what the heck a commit note like "Tweaked the damage" actually means.

Often it'll be for something the players haven't seen yet, so it goes into the irrelevant category. Sometimes it's for something important, like an existing player skill or boss fight, and I'll have to figure out what changed and how, and write that as a patch note.

Note that not everyone is terrible at writing commit notes, and the game designers have gotten a lot better since I started threatening to karate-chop their necks due to lack of detail. Luckily, they don't realise I am extremely feeble and my hands are marshmallow-soft. Thanks guys!

Sometimes, however, the content of the commit is no clearer even with the information in the issue. This particularly happens for pernicious bugs. For that, I have to actually talk to the person who worked on it and get them to explain what they were fixing or changing.

This whole step takes a long while, and is often happening in tandem with the other steps below. I also get bored easily, so this is the step where I will write silly jokes into patch notes to keep myself amused. It doesn't work.

Even the best commit notes rarely contain the specifics players want to know about. So every patch I figure out which skills, items, mods and whatever else has changed and go through them one-by-one in-game to jot down the starting and new values. This is the step I dread the most, particularly because it is very easy to miss something like a mana cost change at gem level 1, and also because balance changes are frequently ongoing, so anything I note down may change the next day.

This is not helped by the fact that what many things are called in-game are not what they're called in our game files, and sometimes there are things in our game files that have the name of other things in-game. For example, if I try to spawn the Vulnerability curse gem, I will get the Despair curse gem. So, often I have to solve a little puzzle before I can unlock the "reward" of Balance Information.

By the time we publish our patch notes, they're typically somewhere between 7000 and 14000 words long, and almost certainly riddled with typos, errors and out-of-date information. Thankfully, we have a QA team who have had to manually check all these changes, and a team of translators who have to read all these patch notes for the sake of translation anyway.

Typically a few lovely people from QA will make their way through, looking for obvious errors and omissions, and leave notes for me to correct. Meanwhile, our wonderful translators are carefully going through each note and turning it into something their audience can read. Did you know our patch notes are translated into eight different languages? Our translators are also exceptionally good at checking names, spacing, capitalisation and whatever else of our myriad game terms, and leave plenty of notes for me to go through and fix up.

Before we can publish out patch notes, they need to be formatted. On Patch Note Day, our Community Manager Natalia spends a few hours doing this, because she's a masochist. The end result is really nice, though, so, thanks Natalia! Also, Web Developer Rieko recently made a tool to help with formatting, as well as posting massive lists of data like mod changes. Thanks Rieko!

Meanwhile, Community Director Bex ("Director", so fancy!) spends the day posting teasers, memes and generally trying to keep the community appeased, like a monkey dancing for scraps in a bazaar, except the scraps are upvotes (Bex is still a monkey).

Once all the formatting is done, we try to publish all the languages simultaneously and sit back and relax.

Just kidding!

Because of the sheer volume of changes in each patch (and definitely not because of any amount of ineptitude on my part), we usually miss a few things, and players (and other developers!) are more than happy to tell us. So, often the rest of Patch Note Day is spent receiving messages from people who tell me all the things I've missed, and then me telling Natalia all the things she needs to update.

Writing patch notes, like breaking a bone, or eating too much mexican food, is traumatic. Not long after each major patch's notes are published, I forget how terrible the last few weeks of combing through commits was, and continue to work on other things, blissfully ignorant of the next looming Patch Notes Day on the horizon.

From start to finish, the major patch notes for each expansion takes something around 80 hours to collate, write and publish, not including the other people involved. I've been doing them since patch 3.0.0, which means I have spent half a working year just doing patch notes.

So there you have it. Now you know what goes into the patch notes. Now, you too, are cursed.

I know there is one burning question that remains unanswered: PATCHNOTESWHEN?

January 12 PST. That is patchnoteswhen.

The Heist Flashback Event[www.pathofexile.com] is in full swing! The event ends in a week, at 10am on January 4th PST, so you have a whole week left to enjoy it. For this news post we've selected more Flashback highlights captured by our community (click here[www.pathofexile.com] to check out the selection of highlights we published last week).

Watch the highlights here[www.pathofexile.com]

On behalf of everyone at Grinding Gear Games, we'd like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and happy holidays! In the festive spirit, we're offering everyone a free Twilight Mystery Box!

To redeem a free Twilight Mystery Box all you need to do is to open the in-game shop! The Mystery Box will be automatically added to your account. Please note that visiting the shop on the website does not trigger the free box - it must be accessed from inside the game client.

To receive a free Twilight Mystery Box, your account has to have been created prior to today. It's only possible to get one box per account. The offer is available for PC, PS4 and Xbox One!

The free mystery box will stop being available at 3am on January 8th (PST). Check out the contents of the Twilight Mystery Box in the trailer below.



We hope you're having a great holiday!

Hotfix 1.06 is now available!

Dum Dum will no longer go missing from Totentanz entrance during Second Conflict.

Removed the 8 MB save file size limit. Note: this won't fix save files corrupted before the update.

Seasons Greetings, Champions!

The next two weeks are going to be packed with various in-game goodies to fill you with joy during the holiday season. While you're staying safe and playing Paladins over the break, here's all the details on our event to come.

Begins December 24th at 4 AM EST and ends December 26th at 4 AM EST

• 2X Champion XP
  
• Holiday Cheer Avatar

Begins December 26th at 4 AM EST and ends December 28th at 4 AM EST

• 2X Champion XP
  
• First Fruits Avatar

Begins December 28th at 4 AM EST and ends December 31th at 12 AM EST

• Play any 2 (non-bot) games of the same mode 2 times in a row
  
• Earn 20 Crystals per day
  
  • (5 per mode: Onslaught, Team Deathmatch, Siege, & Ranked)

Begins December 31th at 4 AM EST and ends January 4th at 4 AM EST

• 3X Battle Pass XP
  
• Ruckus' New Year Avatar

Let's ring in 2021 together in the Realm!

Happy Holidays!

As you know, we'll be announcing our new expansion on January 7th (PST). At that time we'll be introducing a new set of 3.13 League Supporter Packs, which means the Harvest Supporter Packs will leave the store forever.

There are two pairs of Harvest Supporter Packs available in the store, the Malice and the Benevolence. Each of the two pairs is designed in its own style and has different contents, so you can choose whichever one you prefer (or both). You can upgrade from the smaller one in a pair to the larger one. All of the microtransactions from the Supporter Packs are exclusive and will not appear in the store again.



If you're interested in getting one of the Harvest Supporter Packs but you're not sure you'll be able to do so in time, we'd recommend setting up a payment plan which can reserve a pack for you for up to three months after the commencement of your plan. Just email us in advance at support@grindinggear.com, we'll be happy to help you!



The Harvest Supporter Packs on consoles will be replaced with the new ones alongside the launch of our next expansion. The Heist Supporter Packs will remain in the store for all platforms until the announcement of 3.14 expansion.

Thank you so much for your support!

The three-week Heist Flashback, the third event of this holiday period, has started this weekend and we're happy to see that players are having a lot of fun playing it. While you're taking a short break, check out the Flashback highlights we've selected for today {LINK REMOVED}here.

The seasonal winter microtransactions are now available in the store for a limited time! A selection of five snowy cosmetic effects, including a helmet, pets and hideout decorations will help to set a festive mood for upcoming holidays!

The Demonic Arctic Reindeer Pet, Yeti Mask, Polar Bear Cub, Snowman Hideout Decoration and this year's special Ice Sculpture Hideout Decoration will only be available in the store until January 8th (NZT) and won't return until the next December/January holiday period! Check them out in the videos below or by pressing 'M' in game.







If you're looking to get some points, consider checking out our new {LINK REMOVED}Core Supporter Packs. Thank you so much for your support!

The holidays are continuing this week in Paladins!

We know 2020 hasn't been the best year for celebrations so we're going to keep giving on the gift that keeps on giving in Paladins as much as we can coming this week and going until the end of the year!

Christmas & Kwanzaa Celebrations!

• We have not only an all new avatar for Christmas you will be able to get this week (if you recall from our Vora's Pact Update Notes[www.paladins.com]) but we will be giving out a special XP bonus too. Keep focused on our social for a blog going over these and the end of the year fun we have.

Chest Sales

• We have more chest sales each day than we normally do. Many will be marked down from 33% to even 40% this week. Keep an eye out all week for these!

We'll see you in the Realm!
(Happy Holidays!)

***Rotates every Wednesday at 4AM ET***

• Atlas
  
• Lian
  
• Skye
  
• Furia

We're continuing our series of interviews with community streamers by publishing an interview with KittenCatNoodle who is well-known not only as a streamer but also as a creator of Path of Exile lore videos.

Hey! Thanks for the opportunity! I'm KittenCatNoodle, but I go by Noodle. The name's a pun for the "whole kit and kaboodle," the KittenCatNoodle. I grew up on Nintendo games, mostly every Zelda game, particularly Majora's Mask. I'm a big fan of great stories in games, like Witcher, Divinity, and of course Path of Exile. I grew up in Washington State, now in Oregon, just living the dream as a nerdy cat lady who gets to play video games all day.

I've been streaming for just over 4 years now! Which is pretty crazy. I got into it because I had an IRL friend who would stream. I didn't even know what it was, but I went over to hang out one time and play games, and she asked if I would mind if she streamed. It was super fun, I loved the interaction, and a few months later I decided I wanted to try it! I started out with retro games and some crafts. I really like giving public speeches. I've always wanted to do Ted talks. I'm weird like that. Streaming was this exciting combination of video games, which I was already doing in my spare time, and getting to "perform" and meet people.

My stream is mostly about community interaction. I'm always happy to answer questions about the lore, builds, anything really. I like to make weird builds and push the limits of off-meta skills and items through the content, but while I'm doing that my primary focus is on having fun and chatting with people. I feel like we've built a really fun and supportive community there. In fact, two of my good friends who hung out in my streams, {LINK REMOVED}AphelionPoE and {LINK REMOVED}Arkaynan, are now streaming PoE as well!

I start my stream at 5pm PST, usually 3 to 5 days a week, almost always Monday through Wednesday. I do work part time on top of streaming, as well as making the videos, so my schedule is a little crazy. You won't catch me on Thursdays. That's about as sure as I can be with my schedule!

The first 2 years of my stream, I played the game like most people do - I got through the content. I would sometimes read bits of dialogue and catch things that seemed weird, so I'd ask chat, "What's up with that?" And they would yell at me to actually read the lore and do a full "lore playthrough" of the game. I did, and I was super interested in learning more. There were so many crazy story beats and ties that I hadn't noticed or put together before taking the time to slow down and actually read all the dialogue and environmental lore.

I tried to look up videos about the lore and realized there weren't many, and they weren't as in depth as I'd want. When I nerd out on something, I go full throttle. I want to know every bit of information I can about good stories. I feel like the world of PoE is so large, that trying to condense the whole "story" into one video just doesn't do it justice. I decided to start my own series, for my own interest, and to fill this void I'd found.

That really depends on the video! Now I have a lot of footage I can pull from, but if I have to get new footage for a video, it can take a lot longer. I'd say I usually put about 10-20 hours into conceptualizing and writing the script, and then editing the video can be anywhere from 15-40 additional hours. So I guess it's anywhere from 30-80 hours. If there's in game dialogue or flavor text I'm directly referencing, that's easy to put together. It's the parts with conjecture or explanation that I have to wrack my brain to find footage for!

Well, the first videos were pretty self-explanatory, going through all the story acts. After that, I tackled leagues or people that I was most interested in. But there's times when I want to cover a topic, Synthesis league in particular, that I don't have footage for and can't find enough stuff to reference from. I would say the most challenging part is finding topics that I can research enough about to feel like I can retell it in a compelling way but also have enough reference to make an actual video!

Also, there are so many interconnected bits and pieces in the lore. For example, Act 3 has its own story, but is also a huge lore dump. You learn more about the Purity Rebellion, and all the major characters, and how that led to the most recent cataclysm. Then you start thinking about the Fall of the Vaal and that cataclysm, and the connections between Malachai and Doryani. Then you want to think about the connection between virtue gems, the Beast, and our own journey through the game. But then, who is Grigor? And now you want to talk about the Ezomytes. Creating linear story threads and deciding what to include in a video, when there are so many interesting tangents I could go on, can be difficult. I have to edit myself a lot so that I'm compiling a cohesive story that logically builds on itself without giving into the temptation to explain every connection to other lore. My videos still end up being long!

When I started streaming, a friend got me into Diablo 3. It was pretty fun; I hadn't actually played many ARPGs before that. I actually found a reddit thread about free to play computer games, and someone suggested Path of Exile saying it was "like Diablo 3." I was like, alright, let's try that! So I tried it out and actually got raided by CuteDog, so I had a lot of people watching me struggle through my first playthrough. It was pretty hilarious. I always like to go in blind for games, but Path of Exile was an extra challenge in that regard. My first Dominus fight, I had no idea there was a second phase. Chat was so good about not spoiling it either. I'm just sitting there looting, while demon bug Dominus rises in the background. I was horrified! It was a struggle, but I actually enjoy that. And as soon as I realized how open the build creation was, I was hooked. That was actually a month after I started streaming, so in November 2016.

Definitely the build creation. Almost every game, if you choose a character class, you're given guard rails on how you can advance. Let's say you're a Witch. Ok, you can be ice, fire, or necrotic. And once you choose that, here are the 5 skills you can do. Realizing that this was a game where I could make any combination I wanted was so liberating. You want to be an unarmed melee Witch and punch things? Go for it. No guarantee it will work, but you can try to make it work, and that's what I want to do. I love looking for weird or unconventional interactions between items, skills, and the passive tree, and making something that feels new. The constant updating and balancing of skills, Ascendancies, and items means there's almost unlimited potential builds to be created!

Being featured on Build of the Week was probably one of the most exciting moments. Especially because Bex peppered in some hilarious references to RuPaul's Drag Race, and it really made me feel like I had been seen and appreciated! Miss…Vanjie! I know that's the kiss of death for a build's functionality, but it was a peak for me, in that I had made a good "new" build and senpai noticed me. Granted, I think many people saw the patch notes for Incursion league and also made the connection that buffed Arc and new trap supports would be insane. I also made a build that threw traps that made totems that flame dashed. For some reason that one didn't make it to Build of the Week…but I got it all the way to maps. Definitely stalled out by yellow maps.

Then recently being acknowledged on the first {LINK REMOVED}"answering your lore questions" post was exciting, because lore has definitely been my focus recently! I've always wanted to find a niche in PoE. Since I don't always go for "meta" builds, being the "god tier" gamer wasn't really something I wanted. I've hit some milestones along those lines: got a Demi in Turmoil November 2017, and I've gotten to level 100, but I really wanted to find something unique that I could contribute, and that fit my style. I think the lore videos have done that, and having GGG recognize my work really solidified that I've found my niche.

I streamed full time for a few years, but it's a bit unstable for my taste, so I do it part time now to take off the pressure for me or people watching the stream to support. Before streaming, I worked at Microsoft and then Amazon, so basically the stereotypical "tech person in Seattle" jobs. I got to work with HoloLens at Microsoft, which was awesome. I presented HoloLens to potential developers before the product was released, and also wrote all the scripts for the presentations. My main presentation was our collaboration with NASA, taking pictures from the Curiosity Rover and making a mixed reality recreation of the Mars journey so far. Then I worked at Amazon corporate, no holograms involved, sadly. I started streaming while working at Amazon. Currently I do contract work on the side, helping build websites, software, I even edited a book recently. Generally, my work has focused on organization, writing, and presentation, which I think manifested into streaming and creating lore videos.

The first thing I'd advise is, if you just play video games for fun and to relax, you don't want to do streaming as a "career." To be successful, you have to be consistent, you have to be proactive, you have to find something unique, and you have to be positive. For me, that last one was the hardest part. I have pretty constant anxiety, and the pressure of seeming happy when I wasn't in a good mental place was tough. People watching would be worried, because I have an expressive face, and that just makes everything tough. You're providing a product, in a lot of ways. If you're not having fun, it's hard for people watching you to have fun.

The other thing is, unless you get really big, it's not going to be reliable. Some months I would make a lot, and I'd be so excited. Other months I wouldn't even make enough to cover rent. The fluctuation of streaming, especially if you're specialized in playing one game, is hard. It was hard for me not to take less successful months personally, like, why am I not making enough money? What more can I do to make money? And I also hate asking people for money. It felt like it got to the point where I'm just relying on the same people to support me, and I didn't want people to feel pressured or like they "had" to give me money. Honestly, in my opinion, twitch doesn't do enough to support streamers financially. Subs give you emotes, so that's some incentive to support. But there's not much incentive to get bits, and supporting streamers directly with donations is obviously the best for the streamer. But the ad money from twitch, and the incentives for subscribers, just isn't enough.

Listen: if you want to stream, do it for fun. If you want to make it a career, do it when you have the time to absolutely focus on being consistent, and make sure you have a plan for how you're going to stand out. You'll also need to network, but genuinely. Hang out in other streams. Figure out what about THAT stream makes you want to come back, or support them. Try to separate your personal worth from your success in streaming if you do decide to try full time. It wasn't for me. I love streaming, and I wanted to keep it fun, for me and for my community. I'm always so grateful for the support I receive, and I've still got an amazing community that's here for me, but the pressure of being positive and being online "all the time" was too much. Most streamers aren't going to make even minimum wage for the number of hours they put into their work. It's a lot of behind the scenes work too. Try it out, but there's no strict path to success, and even when you've reached "success," it's a turbulent ride.

Yeah! It's been so much fun. It was piebypie's idea, and we wanted to bring a new perspective to PoE podcasts. I think we all bring something unique. At first, I wasn't sure if I should be on it. I struggle with thinking I have valuable things to say and add, but I guess now that I have taken a deep dive into lore, I can definitely add to the discussion in a way others might not know about. I was already friends with everyone on the podcast, me and pie even got to hang out at a Twitchcon! I think our relaxed vibe, chemistry, and different specialties in the game makes the podcast super enjoyable and different. I'm really glad I decided to do it. Some of our highlights are definitely the various rants we've had to each other, it's just a blast. I still get nervous before every podcast though!

I already mentioned {LINK REMOVED}AphelionPoE and {LINK REMOVED}Arkaynan, but other streamers that I watch are {LINK REMOVED}Sefearion, {LINK REMOVED}Nizmat, {LINK REMOVED}Amycat, {LINK REMOVED}SuitSizeSmall, {LINK REMOVED}Octavian, {LINK REMOVED}PerrythePig, and {LINK REMOVED}Mairian. Of course, I've got to give a shoutout to my Baited Expectations crew {LINK REMOVED}piebypie, {LINK REMOVED}Brittleknee, and {LINK REMOVED}Velyna. I don't really think of them as "up and coming" so much as "fun PoE communities I hang out in."

I used to be really into drawing, so I've been making some silly paint doodles for some of my friends which has been fun. I also have a D&D campaign going, maybe going to be 2 soon, so that's fun. I used to make perlers, little plastic beads you put on peg boards and iron together, and actually made a few PoE flasks out of them. Had to stop doing that because my cat, Sunday, is a plastic fiend and would walk all over them or try to eat the beads.

I've always been a performative introvert. What that means is, I love giving performances--I like presentations, acting, singing, the like. But I do get drained from social situations, and my normal pace is pretty relaxed and low energy. I'm the kind of person who doesn't have much to say about what's going on in my life, but you ask me what I think about Game of Thrones season 8, and I will go off for hours about all the ways the story should have ended, all the plots and character arcs were dropped, what they did to my boy Bran… Anything that I'm passionate about, I can talk about, and I love sharing knowledge with people. I think the best way to live is to always be curious, and to never stop learning.

For me, streaming was this perfect balance between controlled social situations and getting to interact with people who were as passionate about a subject as I am. In my normal life, I like to find people who are also nerdy and inquisitive, and that can be harder to find IRL. But streaming is this perfect platform where you can say, "I'm interested in this particular subject or game" and then find an entire community who you can chat with. It's helped me be confident in my own interests, things that some might think are too niche or goofy, like build creation and lore. I grew up feeling that enjoying video games wasn't cool, especially as a girl. I realized when I started streaming that I hadn't even told any of my college friends that I liked playing video games, which is absurd, considering I was basically addicted to WoW in college.

Streaming helped me become confident when meeting new people about what I like. If they don't like it, that's totally fine! And it's also helped with my imposter syndrome, where it's hard to feel like anything good you do is actually your own creation. Now I can definitely say, look at this video I made. Isn't that cool? I mean, I spent hours decoding the Harvest release of Harbinger items, and I LOVED it. Absolutely loved it. Felt like a detective. And now through streaming there's a bunch of people who can help confirm that, hey, that nerdy thing you like? I like that too.

The most important thing to know is that Arakaali and Sin had a very steamy relationship in her Temple for years. Ok, there's maybe one other thing. I think the most important thing people should hear is that it's a game. Sure, it's a game where you can be super competitive. It's a game that you need to study to really understand the mechanics if you want to push the hardest content or create the best builds. But how YOU like to play the game is completely valid, because it's about having fun.

When I first started streaming I had a lot of people tell me that I should play HC, because no one wants to watch people playing SC. While I totally respect people who play HC, it makes me mad. I seriously have no chill when a character I've worked hard to create dies. Especially since I like to make my own builds, I want to be able to test it against all the content and see if my creation succeeds. About 75% of the time, the build can get through all the basic content. 50% can get through all the content, but maybe specialize in clearing or bossing specifically, and the other 25% are absolute banger builds. And that's what brings me joy in PoE: figuring out this new or weird build that is able to smash through the content. If you don't like creating builds, and want to play a meta character that will get you through everything in HC, awesome. If you want to struggle your way through the game on a meme build, awesome. If you like SSF, awesome. It's a game. Play it how you want!

I'm working on some other videos, going to dive into some older content like Breach or the Pale Council. I'm helping some other people with lore-based projects, so look out for those; Mairian is creating a PoE Advent calendar, and DadBodGaming is going to make a jeopardy-like PoE game for charity soon. Other than that, my big project is getting Sunday some buttons that will speak words when pressed so she can start communicating with me. Have you seen Billi speaks? That's definitely my most pressing project right now.

Thanks so much for the interview! If you'd like to follow KittenCatNoodle, you can do so on {LINK REMOVED}Twitch, YouTube and Twitter.