If the colorful changes, weak loot options, and real money auction house of Diablo III left a foul taste in your mouth, Path of Exile was there waiting to welcome you last year. The free-to-play action RPG in many ways is much more like Diablo II than its own sequel, and sticking to that frame of design has paid off for Grinding Gear Games.

Path of Exile launched back in October, and since that time, the devs have held a number of events and continued to improve the game through new content additions. In a pair of recent updates to the Path of Exile website, the team reflected on the successes of 2013, citing 87 patches, 1,000 race events, a concurrent user peak of over 70,000, 3.7 million registered users, and other statistics. But Grinding Gear Games isn’t resting on their previous year’s accomplishments. Their first major update of 2014, 1.0.5, is scheduled to deploy on Thursday, January 9th, 2014, adding a new unique items, new achievements, additional vendor recipes, several balance tweaks, more items to the in-game store, and a new support gem as part of the game’s “Enhancements/Empower series.”

Sources: Path of Exile 2013 Recap, Update 1.0.5