The Path of Exile is currently embroiled in a controversy sparked by the catastrophic launch of a new expansion and a backlash against preferential treatment of streamers.
The popular action role-playing game last night launched the Ultimatum expansion. Here, players risk objects for coveted rewards in increasingly difficult trials.
Here there is an element of competition, those who reach the highest maps expect to dominate the economy of the game in the next few months. These players would also win the lead in the fight for extremely valuable rewards for those who finish at the top of the ladder.
But Ultimatum suffered a disastrous launch that prevented people from playing. “This release was tough, to say the least,” lead developer Chris Wilson said in a post on the Path of Exile subreddit.
According to Wilson, immediately after the launch of the league, the queue began to run incredibly slowly – so slowly that it would take at least two hours to get everyone in the game. Why? There was a “human error” which meant that no major process of “prolonged migration” was performed, which made the queue “unbearably” slow to empty.
Grinding Gear Games completely disabled the migration, which solved the queue speed problem by about an hour, but at that point the “realm got scared” and abandoned most of the players, then continued to do so about every 10 minutes. of the day.
“It wasn’t good. Not at all,” Wilson said. “Apart from the catastrophic ruin of our launch day, it completely mystified us because we were so careful with the changes in the infrastructure of the land.”
This issue remains, although Grinding Gear Games is currently trying to resolve the issue.
“We will continue to work on this issue until the servers work perfectly,” Wilson said. “We know that the Land of Exile can cope with this task, it’s just a matter of guessing what subtle nonsense is causing the problem today.”
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Against this backdrop, Grinding Gear Games allowed streamers to bypass the slow queue, driving the wider Path of Exile community crazy.
Wilson provided an explanation for this, revealing that the developer paid some streamers to play Ultimatum for a few hours at launch, and if he couldn’t play due to server issues, “This was as close as you could get. it ends up literally burning a lot of money. “
“The story is that we recently did a properly paid influencer marketing and that involves arranging big streamers to present the Path of Exile to their audience, for money (they have #ad in titles),” Wilson explained.
“We agreed to pay for two hours of streaming and went straight into a queue that would take two hours to delete. This was as close as you could get to literally burning a lot of money. made the hasty decision to allow these streamers to bypass the queue. Most streamers did not ask for this and should not be blamed for what happened. We also allowed other streamers who were not involved in the campaign to queue. also so that it is not on its hind leg “.
Wilson acknowledged that the move was a “mistake.”
“The decision to allow any streamer to bypass the queue was clearly a mistake,” he said.
“Instead of giving the spectators something to watch while they waited, he offended all our players who were eager to enter the game and couldn’t, while they had to watch the others enjoying this freedom. It’s completely understandable that many players have been telling people that the beginning of the Path of Exile league is a level playing field for everyone and we need to make sure that this is the reality.
“We will not allow streamers to bypass the connection queue in the future. Instead, we will make sure that the queue works much better, so that it is a quick process for everyone and is always a fair ground. We will also plan future marketing campaigns with contingencies in mind to better address this type of situation in the future.
“It is completely understandable that many players are unhappy with the way it has gone on many fronts today. This post is not intended to convince you to be happy with these results. We just want to give you some information on what to do. it happened, why it happened and what we do about it in the future. We are very dissatisfied with that too. “
The Ultimatum expansion will be released for the console versions of Path of Exile on April 21st. Grinding Gear Games will hope to resolve all server issues by then.