Path of Exile 2's 0.2.0 patch notes seemingly make artful acknowledgement of one infamous cheater

Modified Apr 03, 2025 23:04 IST

poe2 patch notes elon musk — The patch notes spare none, not even the richest ascendancy (Image via Sportskeeda || GGG)

Hidden among the nerf galore in Path of Exile 2's 0.2.0 patch notes is a potential callback to a controversial cheater and his recent (and ongoing) saga. Most readers attuned to the PoE2 community might have figured out that this is Elon Musk. The patch notes — while talking about Tablets — make a likely reference to Elon Musk's highly-memed turn of phrase where he called modifiers, mechanics, and affixes "things."

The new and improved Precursor Tablets will now add "four times as many things" when the Tower is attempted with a T15 Waystone:

"Using higher tier Waystones in Towers also now increases the number of mechanics applied by Tablets. By Tier 15 the bonus is double, allowing a single Tablet to now add four times as many things as before."

In one of his Path of Exile 2 streams showing off his progress on the hardcore ladder, Elon Musk opened up the Atlas to explain a map with "...there are four things there." Coming from someone claiming to have entered the top-percentile delta of this game, the absurdity of this phrasing made it an instant community meme a few months ago.

The many memes that spawned from Elon Musk's infamous stream (Image via r/PathofExile2)

Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective.

This is the first-ever possible acknowledgment of the Elon saga from Path of Exile 2 developers

Elon Musk — after boasting of his pinnacle achievements in Path of Exile 2 — drew some suspicion from the playerbase. This included streamers like Quinn69, who were quick to call out how Elon feigned success on a boosted account.

There were instances during the tech billionaire's streams that showed his game-knowledge gap. He was highly inconsistent as a Lvl 95+ hardcore-grinder, who — in actuality — would have needed to play the game for hundreds of hours.

After a lot of scrutiny from the community, Elon Musk finally admitted to being piloted, claiming that it's "impossible to beat the players in Asia" without doing so.

Account piloting is a very murky area in any ARPG with a competitive leaderboard. No hardcore-ladder community looks at it kindly, and it also directly violates the TOS of these games. Despite this, GGG has elected to stay put from making any public statement about the matter.

Elon's account is still alive and well; the same cannot be said of fatalismftw (Image via GGG)

The likely nod to the community meme about Elon's "things" is still not the fair and just call to balance some could have hoped for. It's the first-ever possible acknowledgment of the whole matter from GGG, but Elon's PoE2 account remains unbanned.

At the time of writing, his piloted account Random9#2886 sits on the third spot on the HC Leaderboard, having reached the level cap on his latest hireling Invoker (albeit dead).

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About the author

Sambit Pal is an esports Journalist on Gaming and MMO at Sportskeeda. He has Master's degree in English Literature. In his spare time, he is an amateur sleuth trying to trace the Riven Mafia in Warframe, and a recovering Bethesda modding addict. He also secretly enjoys action Roguelites, a severe lack of gitting gud notwithstanding.

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Edited by Shraman Mitra