Private League Overview - New Feature In Patch 0.2.0h

Expected to land in mid May, patch 0.2.0h is bringing private leagues, a feature from Path of Exile 1, into the sequel.

Private leagues are primarily a social feature, similar to guilds but with less permanence. Also, like creating or expanding a guild, they are a paid-only service. The pricing structure for POE2 isn't confirmed yet, but in POE1, they cost 6 MTX points (about USD 0.6) per player plus a small setup cost. They run 10 days by default but usually get run for longer (which adds a small cost).

Private leagues allow you to create a fresh start economy that neither characters nor existing stockpiled wealth transfers into - everyone starts fresh - but unlike a GGG-organised fresh league start, ONLY players that are invited into the league can play in it.

They are popular with three main groups in POE1. The partial implementation in POE2 doesn't offer anything for the second group... but that is coming in the future.

• Highly competitive players looking to have competitions on a game-enforced level playing field.
• Groups (or individuals) looking to play the base game but with extra mods to add difficulty. (In POE1, this includes modifiers like 'Monsters act 20% faster' , 'monster skills fire +2 projectiles' and 'Players have -40% to all resistances'. There's no protection against making a league that's too hard for anyone to ever complete.)
• Guilds or other social groups looking to play with each other, but nobody outside their group.

If you aren't interested in these use cases, you can entirely ignore that private leagues exist.

Private leagues are landing into POE2 in a less feature complete state than they are in POE1.

Difficulty mods are not available yet.

This is the main use case for private leagues.

A guild, external community or even a group that have met in game can organise a 'start over from nothing' environment nobody else can play in.

These private league economies don't have many of the premium Omens like the Omen of Whittling and so mirror tier crafting is much less of an economic factor than it is in the normal game.

As a result, a player that gets one or two of these precious Omens will feel less pressure to sell them, and be more likely to... simply use them.

The same applies to other scarce crafting resources such as Omen of Sinistral Annulment.

This forms a halfway house between solo self found play and a full trade league.

Is this better or worse? That's a matter of personal opinion, just as the SSF versus trade question is.

Former Path of Exile 1 streamer ThisIsBadger (who now works in sound design at Grinding Gear Games) established an event called BPL, Badger Private League, that continues in POE1 as a large community-run event. It may come to POE2 in the future.

It takes an interesting spin on the private league system, inviting around a thousand players and dividing them into 3-4 teams, then having these teams race to complete various objectives including hunting down almost every unique item in the game.

Other popular group events include 'Group Self Found' events where all players in the league agree to share resources.

For small race events, cheating isn't really an issue. But if the event gets medium size or large, and especially if real prizes are involved... it becomes one.

Private leagues provide strong protection (at a price) against external assistance, and also allow notifications to go out to all (logged in) players when certain milestones are met.

For this reason, most competitive race events will take place inside private leagues unless GGG hosts the event.

It's likely that difficulty mods will be added to POE2 private leagues in the near future. These are always opt-in, but let players that feel they have mastered the base game take on an extra challenge.