“Streamer Priority” did nothing to alleviate frustrations in the community
As any avid Path of Exile gamer can say by now, yesterday sucked. We are used to some server problems on the first day, as is the case with all online gamers, but the sacred cow was an absolute mess yesterday. After a very slow player queue, Path of Exile finally let people in, only to be disconnected five minutes later. Perhaps this would have been more tolerable had it not been for rollbacks either, which essentially wiped the last 1-3 minutes of progress off the board.
I must have reached level 13 about four times before finally giving up for the day. The Path of Exile Twitter account recognized these issues but offered little comfort to those expecting a solution and even updated them late at night (on the US east coast) only to mention they have no new information .
Eventually, the developers released an official announcement detailing everything to users. Although they avoid getting too technical, they are good at explaining their behind-the-scenes moves that have caused a lot of problems. As of now, the servers appear to be mostly fine, and the only real information they have mentioned is that other developers are “careful about the page sizes of your database,” whatever that means!
The server stability problems appear to have been resolved. 🤞 For our colleagues, be careful about the page sizes of your database. Thank you to the entire community for their patience today. That was a tough question.
We hope you enjoy ultimatum!
– Path of Exile (@pathofexile) April 17, 2021
There was another problem that made this worse: certain streamers were given priority to skip the queue entirely and jump straight into the game (if it was actually available). These streamers couldn’t play when the servers were directly busy, which they did quite often, but this injustice has certainly annoyed many community members.
The announcement stated that the developers had a paid advertisement with some streamers for two hours. Instead of wasting that money and just showing these streamers a dwindling queue number, Grinding Gear Games decided to give these streamers priority. They also gave it to other streamers who weren’t part of the marketing campaign. This resulted in community members getting mad at streamers (a stupid thing) and some streamers really digging their way into a hole, as seen here.
They apologized for this problem and admitted it as a mistake in their post while vowing never to do it again. Personally, I was okay with this because the streamers offer a service and I enjoy that service. Even the chance to watch someone play was some kind of excitement. Plus, they had the same problems as everyone else, they just didn’t have to wait, two minutes I had to wait in line. I understand the argument that some “teams” of players have an edge in business, but I’m not at the player level who really care, all in all.
Bottom line is, now I can finally move on to Act 2 and hopefully will see very few crashes and rollbacks.
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