Grinding Gear Games has put out a video message to players of Path of Exile 1 to discuss the future of the game and their mismanagement of the situation at hand.

To kick things off, time management was not GGG's best quality when it comes to resources being split between Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2. The launch of Path of Exile 2 was monumental and they realized towards the end of the private phase of development that the endgame in PoE 2 still needed a lot of work. Because the 3.26 league in PoE 1 was so far away at the time, GGG felt they would be able to move developers off PoE 1 and onto PoE 2. The original goal was to move developers off for 3 months, since the 3.26 update was 7 months away, and then they would be able to go back and get a new league out with time to spare.

This, obviously, did not happen. The 3.25 Settlers League ended up being extended through the release of PoE 2. The launch of PoE 2, which was also delayed by a few weeks, was a "huge circus", so this plan allowed them to have more time to get working on 3.26. Unfortunately, that didn't really pan out.

They still intend to keep their promise of giving Path of Exile 1 expansions.

After the Christmas break, the team decided that their priority was to fix major issues with Path of Exile 2. The game needs to be stable and have good balance so that the hundreds of thousands of players could have a good experience. Because of this, Grinding Gear Games has confirmed that 3.26 will not be worked on for Path of Exile 1 until the 0.2.0 patch ships for Path of Exile 2 and is then supported for a few weeks. 

Luckily, they are starting to work on pre-production on PoE 1 's 3.26 patch with anyone that isn't needed on PoE 2 to fix issues. No exact timeline has been confirmed, but any resources is certainly better than none! Overconfidence drove the problems that we see today but GGG is committing to figuring out how to deal with 2 games at once and 3.26 is already planned so now they just need to get to work on delivering the content.

Check out the full message to Path of Exile 1 players down below.