During the launch of its new expansion Ultimatum Path of Exile’s servers had some issues over the weekend, leaving players with waiting times to get in that could sometimes add up in hours. Unless you were a streamer paid to broadcast the game, in which case you came right in.
Fans who kept waiting quickly found out and were rightly pissed off, to the point where lead developer Chris Wilson had to make a long statement on the game’s subreddit, which read:
So while this was all going on, we managed to do a pretty big faux pas too and infuriate the entire community by allowing streamers to bypass that really slow queue we mentioned. The backstory is that we’ve been doing some pretty paid influencer marketing recently, and that means making sure big streamers show Path of Exile to their audience, for money (they have #ad in their titles). We agreed to pay for two hours of streaming, and we ran into a login queue that took two hours to clear. This was about as close as you could get to literally setting a big pile of money on fire. So we made the hasty decision to let those streamers bypass the queue. Most streamers have not asked for this and should not be held responsible for what happened. We also let some other streamers who weren’t involved in the campaign skip the queue so that they don’t fall behind.
The decision to let streamers bypass the queue was clearly a mistake. Rather than offering viewers something to watch while they waited, it insulted all of our players who were eager to get in the game and were incapable, while instead having to watch others enjoy that freedom. Understandably, many players were not happy about this. We tell people that the start of the Path of Exile competition is a level playing field for everyone, and we really need to make sure this is the reality. We will not allow streamers to bypass the login queue in the future. Instead, we’ll make the queue work much better so it’s a fast process for everyone and a fair playing field at all times. We will also plan future marketing campaigns in view of contingencies to better deal with these types of situations in the future.
Understandably, many players are unhappy with how things have gone on various fronts today. This post is not intended to convince you to be happy with these results. We just want to give you some insight into what happened, why it happened, and what we’re going to do about it in the future. We are also very unhappy with it.
It’s nice that they don’t do this again, but it’s stupid that this has even been brought up as an idea, let alone the green lighted up and executed.
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