“Streamer priority” didn’t help alleviate the community’s frustrations
Like any ardent Path of Exile can the player tell you now, yesterday suckedWe’re used to some server issues from day one, like all online-only player bases, but holy cow was an absolute mess yesterday. After a very slow moving player queue, Path of Exile finally let people in to disconnect five minutes later. Could be this would have been more bearable had it not been accompanied by rollbacks as well, clearing the last 1-3 minutes of progress from the board.
I must have passed level 13 about four times before finally giving up for the day. The Path of Exile Twitter account recognized these problems but offered little comfort to those expecting a solution, even updating late at night (on the East Coast of the US) to just mention that they no new information
Finally, the developers posted an official announcement detailing everything to the users. While they avoid getting too technical, they are good at explaining their behind-the-scenes moves that caused many of the problems. As of now, the servers seem to be mostly working fine, and the only real information they’ve mentioned is that other developers “be careful with the page sizes of your database, “whatever that means!
Server stability issues seem to be resolved 🤞 For our fellow developers, be careful with your database page sizes. Thanks to the entire community for their patience today. This was a tough one.
We hope you enjoy using Ultimatum!
– Path of Exile (@pathofexile) April 17, 2021
There is another problem that exacerbates this: certain streamers were given priority to skip the queue completely and jump straight into the game (when it was actually available). These streamers could not play when the servers were straight ahead, which they were quite often, but this dishonesty certainly upset a lot of community members.
The announcement explained that the developers had a paid ad with some streamers for two hours, so instead of wasting that money and just showing those streamers off with a smaller number of queues, Grinding Gear Games decided to prioritize those streamers. They also gave it to other streamers who were not part of the marketing campaign. This caused community members to get furious with streamers (crazy thing) and some streamers on really dig themselves into a hole, as seen here.
They apologized for this matter and admitted it was a mistake in their position, while promising never to do it again. Personally, I was fine with it because the streamers provide a service and I enjoy that service so I can even watch someone playing the game created a form of excitement. Plus they had the same issues as everyone else, they just didn’t have to wait like that, two minutes I had to wait in line. I understand the arguments that some “teams” of players get a head start on the economy, but I’m not at the level of the player to really care about that all in all.
The bottom line is that I can now finally get to Act 2 and hopefully experience very few crashes and rollbacks.
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