Path of Exile: Gamer angry about favoring streamers

Path of Exile

Who are games published for? This question can be asked if one looks at the start of the ultimatum league of the actually quite popular Hack 'n Slays Path of Exile.

Streamer preference leads to violent annoyance

Zum The start of the much anticipated new league from Path of Exile (buy now) resulted in massive server problems. As annoying as that is and as much as you wish that this would not happen when a new update was started, this wasn't the biggest annoyance the developers had to deal with. Because while regular players had to queue for hours in order to finally get started, streamers and Youtubers were allowed to simply skip them and start right away. A solution made things even worse, with players getting kicked out of the action RPG every 10 minutes.

"Aside from ruining our launch day catastrophically, we were completely confused about being with the Changes to the realm infrastructure were so careful, "writes lead developer Chris Wilson. "We thoroughly tested them in-house, subjected them to a peer code review, subjected them to an alpha test and carried out large-scale load tests up to higher player capacities than we had on the launch day."

Nevertheless, it showed Community especially annoyed by the fact that streamers seemed to be able to play without any problems. Some of the better known Twitch and Youtube personalities got paid to play the Ultimatum League at launch, which worked fine. The regular players, on the other hand, looked into the tube. According to Grinding Gear Games, it was a quick decision to ensure the streamers were able to honor their contract and stream the Path of Exile Ultimatum League.

Since there was a lot of criticism for it, Chris Wilson came forward and tried to smooth things over: "It annoyed all of our players who wanted to get into the game and couldn't while instead, they had to watch others enjoy this freedom, "he explains. "It is totally understandable that a lot of players were unhappy about this. We tell people that the Path of Exile league starts are a fair playing field for everyone and we have to actually make sure that is the reality. We'll be streaming it in In the future, no longer allow people to bypass the login queue. "

By now, most of the problems with the Path of Exile Ultimatum League should have been resolved. Nevertheless, there remains a bland aftertaste and the question of how much value the regular players of a game are compared to streamers.

Source: PCGamesN

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Path Of Exile Studio Let Paid Streamers Skip Server Queue, Apologizes

Path of Exile 2 is on the way, but development also continues on the original game. Its latest expansion, Ultimatum, launched this week, and things didn't go as planned. It was a bit of a mess, to put it mildly, with players stuck waiting in server queues and unable to play. However, the problems were amplified because of Grinding Gear Games' decision to let paid streamers skip the lines and start playing right away. It appears the studio will not be making such a mistake again.

As spotted by Eurogamer, Path of Exile producer Chris Wilson explained on a Reddit thread that the Ultimatum Challenge League, which is a risk/reward trial players are essentially competing against each other in, was letting players in far too slowly. 'Human error' resulted in the normal trickle migration process not being run, and players continued being dumped out of the realm until an eventual fix was made several hours later.

But why was this Path of Exile situation different than the server issues that plagued a game like Outriders, for instance? Well, because not everyone was affected. Paid streamers who Grinding Gear Games has brought on board for the launch were allowed in immediately, as they were supposed to stream for two hours. Not being allowed to play was, the team thought at the time, out of the question.

'This was about as close as you could get to literally setting a big pile of money on fire,' Wilson said. 'So we made the hasty decision to allow those streamers to bypass the queue.'

As you can imagine, hyping players up for new content via influencers isn't too effective when you're also essentially mocking their lack of ability to play. The studio won't be doing these sorts of preferential-treatment workarounds in the future and stressed that 'most' streamers did not actually ask for them to do this.

Giving some players a chance to get ahead of everyone else certainly doesn't seem like the right move, regardless of whether you had paid them. However, based on Wilson's comments, it seems the studio has learned a very valuable lesson in public goodwill and likely won't make the same mistake again.

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