During the launch of its new expansion Ultimatum, Path of exile the servers had some issues over the weekend, leaving players with time to enter, sometimes stretched out for hours. Unless you were a paid streamer to stream the game, in which case you entered directly.
Standby fans quickly learned about this and were rightly upset to the point where lead developer Chris Wilson had to issue a lengthy statement on the subreddit of the game, which read:
So while all this was going on, we managed to take a pretty big faux pas and infuriate the whole community, allowing the streamers to get around that very slow queue we mentioned. The story behind it is that we recently did a properly paid influencer marketing and this involves arranging large streamers to present the Path of Exile to their audience, for money (they have #ad in titles). 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 setting fire to a lot of money. So, I made the hasty decision to allow these streamers to bypass the queue. Most streamers did not ask for this and should not be to blame for what happened. We also allowed other streamers who were not involved in the campaign to jump in line, so that they would not be on their hind legs.
The decision to allow any streamer to bypass the queue was clearly a mistake. Instead of giving the spectators something to watch while they waited, he offended all our players who were eager to enter the game and could not, while they had to watch the others enjoying this freedom. It is completely understandable that many players were dissatisfied with this. We tell 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 in view of unforeseen situations to better deal with this type of situation in the future.
It is completely understandable that many players are dissatisfied with the way he has crossed several fronts today. This post has no intention of trying to convince you to be happy with these results. We simply want to give you some information about what happened, why it happened and what we will do about it in the future. We are very dissatisfied with that as well.
It’s nice that I’m not doing this again, but it’s bad that this was brought as an idea, not to mention the green light and executed.
READ MORE:
.
G / O Media may receive a commission