Build data · Guide 07 of 08 · PoE 1 and PoE 2
You built something good, you went to look it up, and it is not there. The reflex is to assume a bug. It almost never is. The rank cap decides who gets sampled, and in Path of Exile 2 that cap is only a thousand characters deep.
Build overviews are assembled from the official ladder, and the ladder does not return everyone. It returns a fixed window from the top: roughly 15,000 entries in Path of Exile, around 1,000 in Path of Exile 2. Ranked below that line, your character is not hidden or filtered out. It was never sent.
That accounts for most cases. The rest come down to five things you can actually check in about two minutes: the wrong view, an untracked league type, profile privacy, snapshot timing, or being listed under a label you did not expect.
Grinding Gear Games publishes the ladder through its developer API, and that API has a hard ceiling on how deep anyone can read. Requests past the limit return nothing at all. Every tracker, tool and spreadsheet reading that ladder inherits exactly the same window, which is why no site can show you a character the game will not hand over.
Ladder depth, the two games drawn to the same scale
Both bars use the same scale, so the second one is not a design flourish. The Path of Exile 2 window really is about a fifteenth the size, which is why players who appeared in build data for years find themselves invisible in the newer game. Limits per the official API reference.
Set against the number of people actually playing either game at any moment, both windows are slivers. The ladder was built to answer "who is at the top", not "who is playing". Build overviews inherit that purpose whether or not they advertise it, which is the single most important thing to hold onto when reading popularity figures.
Five questions, most of which you can answer without leaving this page. It ends on the specific cause and what to do about it, including the cases where the honest answer is that there is nothing to do.
Nothing is submitted anywhere. This runs entirely in your browser.
Ranked by how often each one turns out to be the answer rather than by how interesting it is. The first two account for the large majority of reports.
The ladder hands over a fixed number of entries from rank one downward. Everyone past that point is not returned to anyone. In Path of Exile the window is deep enough that a reasonably levelled character often makes it. In Path of Exile 2, a thousand entries is a genuinely elite slice, and the overwhelming majority of active characters sit outside it permanently.
This is not a tracker choosing to exclude you. It is the game deciding what to publish. No setting, no account link and no support ticket changes it.
What to do: nothing, other than reading the data with the right expectation. The overview describes the top of the ladder, not the playerbase, so treat it as a reference for what high-ranked players ran, not as a census you should appear in.Path of Exile and Path of Exile 2 are tracked as entirely separate datasets, and inside each one every league is separate again. Standard, Hardcore, the current challenge league and its hardcore variant each have their own ladder and their own overview.
The default view is rarely the one you want. A character in the current league will simply not exist in a Standard view, and vice versa, with no message explaining the absence.
What to do: set the game first, then the exact league, then search. Doing it in that order is also the first step in using the builds section properly.Reading a character's gear, gems and passive tree depends on that information being publicly visible on your Path of Exile account. If character visibility is switched off in your privacy settings, the detail a build overview needs cannot be read, even when your name appears on the ladder itself.
This produces a confusing halfway state: you are demonstrably ranked, but your build is nowhere.
What to do: check the privacy section of your account settings on the official Path of Exile site and make characters public, then allow time for the next snapshot to pick them up.A build overview is a photograph, not a live feed. Characters are read in batches on a schedule, so a rank you earned an hour ago, a respec you just finished, or a fresh league-start character may all be too recent to appear.
The same lag runs the other way. A character you deleted or completely rebuilt can keep showing its old form until the next read.
What to do: wait, then check again later in the day. If it is still absent after a full day, the cause is one of the others on this list.Private leagues run their own ladders and are generally outside what public tools read. Solo Self-Found and Ruthless are separate ladders as well, and coverage of them varies by tool rather than being guaranteed.
Event and race leagues are their own case again: they exist briefly, rank separately, and often disappear from tracking once they end.
What to do: confirm which ladder your character actually sits on. If the league type is not offered in the view's league list at all, that is your answer.Dying in hardcore does not delete the character, it migrates it to the corresponding standard league. The hardcore ladder drops it, and the character reappears somewhere you were not looking.
What to do: search the standard league for that game instead. The character is usually intact, just relocated, and its rank starts over in its new home.Nobody tells the tracker what your build is. It is inferred from your gem setup, which is straightforward for a single main link and much less so for weapon swaps, triggers, totems, minions or a Vaal gem sitting beside its base version.
Filed under the wrong main skill, you vanish from the filter you searched with and quietly pad a different one. Active filters do the same thing: a level floor or a keystone filter can exclude you from a list you would otherwise be in.
What to do: clear every filter and search your character name directly. If that finds you, the issue was the filter, not the listing. See how ladder filters change the results.Being clear about this saves a lot of frustration. Some of these causes are settings. Some are the shape of the data itself, and no amount of effort moves them.
Worth checking
Not worth your time
If you want a structured version of these checks, the character listing eligibility checker walks the same logic, and the character listing guide covers how listing works in general.
Here is the part most people skip. Not being listed costs you nothing, because the overview was never a scoreboard you needed to be on. It is a reference for what a specific, small, unusually well-funded group of players happened to be running when the snapshot was taken.
You get every bit of its value as a reader. Open three characters running your skill, take only what all three share, and treat the rest as somebody's budget rather than a requirement. Export one and check it against your own build in Path of Building, matching the configuration on both sides before you compare a single damage number, as covered in the Path of Building guide.
None of that requires your character to be visible to anyone. The people in that list are not better players than you by virtue of appearing in it. They are, mostly, the ones who had time and currency to climb far enough for the API to notice, which is one of the reasons expensive builds dominate rankings.
No, and it is not a matter of policy. Build data is assembled from what the official ladder returns, and the ladder does not return characters below its rank cap to anyone. There is no list a tracker could add you to.
The windows are very different sizes. Path of Exile publishes roughly 15,000 ladder entries, Path of Exile 2 around 1,000. A rank that comfortably made the cut in the first game can be far outside it in the second, with no change in how well you played.
Usually privacy. Ranking is published by the game, but reading your gear, gems and passive tree depends on your characters being publicly visible on your account. With that switched off, the rank exists and the build detail does not.
Hours rather than minutes, since characters are read in scheduled batches rather than continuously. If a full day has passed and you are certain you are inside the rank cap, the cause is something other than timing.
They run on separate ladders, and coverage varies by tool rather than being guaranteed. If the league does not appear in the view's league list, it is not being tracked there. Private leagues are generally outside public tracking entirely.
To the corresponding standard league, which is where you should search for it. The hardcore ladder drops it on death, and it starts fresh in the ladder it moved into.
Main skill is inferred from your gem setup, not declared by you. Weapon swaps, trigger setups, totems, minions and Vaal gems all confuse that inference. The character is listed correctly, the label on it is a best guess.
Why the same character can be present in one view and gone from the next.
FoundationsWhat counts as one character, and which characters never enter the count.
BackgroundWhere the numbers come from, and what gets filtered out before you see them.
Also useful: build rankings, common mistakes, the glossary, frequently asked questions, and the game hubs for Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2.
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