Ultimatum Launch: Server Issues and Streamer Priority

The streamer priority makes sense from a business perspective and I think it is the best way to go with launches. Why not poll everyone who bought a supporter pack in the past and ask them what they thought of the whole streamer debacle.

This is so funny.
No vacation from work for the leaguestart.
Had to drive and pick up the partner from a party yesterday evening (picked up at 23.00 cet) took me a good 180 minutes in total.
I queued before i left and yes I was slow (around 7k mark) but felt this will be cool when i get home again.
Hmm, problems.. so i went to bed instead (good call)
Had some good hours of sleep, but problems was the same and now we have premium queues and more drama? [Removed by Support]
Today i gave up this game as I know it.
[Removed by Support]

"

Mythabril wrote:

ULTIMATUM: Are you going to keep playing or are you calling it quits? The choice is yours!

wasn't a hard choice, after seeing chris just talking words he can't backup:
i quit and stop supporting this company. i may support again in the future, but there is a LOT of trust they have to regain now. nothing they can regain in a league or two.

Thank you for being honest and transparent! I really appreciate this post and everything yall did. I knew you would figure it out quickly, and having everything running smoothly in less than 24hrs just reinforced my feelings about this dev company. Might buy the other supporter pack now, honestly. It's always the angry ones who scream the loudest, while most players are happy doing something else while servers are down (hopefully most people could find something else to do on a Friday night!) or busy playing now that they're up! Love you GGG.

I find it rather "interesting" how GGG are reading all these complaints and requests to restart the leagues for the past 20 hours (even the reddit post with over 3k upvotes) but they haven't responded to it even once with an official statement on the matter as if they just don't F care or it's not a real thing.

Everyone who was demoralized by this league start that immediately tainted the whole experience on a hyped fresh start on many different levels of f****d up... Screw those people, right? Clearly they're not important. Clearly they never helped you get anywhere?

As long as the sellout advertisers on twitch are satisfied and sign up for your paid promotions - it's fine. This disaster of a launch? Nah, not a major problem to the competitive integrity of a fresh league and a fair playing field that we always kept putting out there as the idea behind these leagues and our advertisement?


I remember when there was a server restart several years ago after about 30 minutes of login issues. It wasn't nowhere as bad as this but yet you decided to give everyone a fair start, right? Why is it not the case now? You won't come out and say it, will you?


This is not GGG that I remember, this is Tencent. You'd rather bribe some streamers out of another dimension that never heard about your game to come and advertise it for you rather than taking care of players who been here all along.

I bought a pack few days ago and GGG won't even let me refund it... I publicized their answer to me on these forums - a moderator immediately deleted it. Transparency, right?

This is how far we've come people. Disgraceful really.

Good message. I won't be returning to the league but it looks like they made the right choices.

A full restart of the league would crush their players numbers. They can't do that. Since there are no races it doesn't really matter.

While it is true that success is measured in many different ways, what has been successfully accomplished here is counter-intuitive.

-Negate the core function of the ladder-based league
-Monopolize the community driven economy

Stewarding the integrity of the competitive environment and the community economy is an ethical due diligence responsibility of any developer professing to offer those key features in their product.

My biggest problem is, I really don't buy this "We are sorry that this is being addressed so late in the day - we have been giving the server issues absolute priority and haven't had time until now to write up this explanation." This is a technical problem, how does throwing all the non-technical people at it get it solved faster? Even if the non-technical people are all meaningfully contributing, you really can't spare anyone to come out and state the obvious, that you are allowing streamers to bypass the queue and why you're doing it? Instead we are all left twisting in the wind, turning potentially a small mistake into a festering wound.

Rather than not having time to address it, it seems more like a calculated decision to wait to address it. Wait and hope the problem gets solved, or the community settles down. Wait and write a calculated response with a little profanity because people love that. Maybe you thought that addressing the issue in the first hour or three would undoubtedly involve justifiable calls for resetting the league and if that happened so early in the league it would be harder for you to argue otherwise. If you committed to resetting you might lose valuable testers (that's us, the crazy players that love this game so much that we log in and dc and wait in a queue 50 times, often seeing our characters rolled back) that are helping to reproduce the issue so you can fix it.

It's really disappointing. Server issues are understandable, every game deals with them sometimes on launches, we've been there before. I can understand making the mistake to allow streamers a priority, obviously it was a mistake but in the heat of the moment it happens. What I can't understand is how no one could be spared to talk to us about that mistake while we are having an absolutely miserable time trying to play (test?) the game.

The amount of time it took for any acknowledgement of the streamer priority fiasco has left a horrible taste in my mouth. Even when logging into the game after the issues were fixed, I just feel frustrated and disappointed, and it has sapped most of my excitement about this league. While I would love to see it reset, enough time has elapsed that it seems a foregone conclusion that it's not happening, how convenient. I really have no idea if I will bother playing this league at all at this point, which given how excited I was about it is pretty disappointing.

When I eventually got fed up playing the login simulator last night, I did wonder what kind of solution could appease everyone (people who want a reset, and people who don't). The only thing I came up with was creating a new slightly juiced league that lasts a few days, and when it ends transfers characters to the 3 month leagues created yesterday. So people that wanted a reset could play Hardcore Ultimatum Juiced and after a few days all those characters would carry over to Hardcore Ultimatum. This could help the people that want a reset and the people that don't find a middle ground, perhaps it is not technically feasible though.

I guess now I'll just sit back and see what you guys have to say about this whole experience, and hope it manages to reduce this lingering resentment.

I find it rather "interesting" how GGG are reading all these complaints and requests to restart the leagues for the past 20 hours (even the reddit post with over 3k upvotes) but they haven't responded to it even once with an official statement on the matter as if they just don't F care or it's not a real thing.

Everyone who was demoralized by this league start that immediately tainted the whole experience on a hyped fresh start on many different levels of f****d up... Screw those people, right? Clearly they're not important. Clearly they never helped you get anywhere?

As long as the sellout advertisers on twitch are satisfied and sign up for your paid promotions - it's fine. This disaster of a launch? Nah, not a major problem to the competitive integrity of a fresh league and a fair playing field that we always kept putting out there as the idea behind these leagues and our advertisement?


I remember when there was a server restart several years ago after about 30 minutes of login issues. It wasn't nowhere as bad as this but yet you decided to give everyone a fair do-over, right? Why is it not the case now? You won't come out and say it, will you?


This is not GGG that I remember, this is Tencent. You'd rather bribe some streamers out of another dimension that never heard about your game to come and advertise it for you rather than taking care of players who been here all along.

I bought a pack few days ago and GGG won't even let me refund it... I publicized their answer to me on these forums - a moderator immediately deleted it. Transparency, right?

This is how far we've come people. Disgraceful really.

>The decision to allow any streamers to bypass the queue was clearly a mistake. Instead of offering viewers something to watch while they waited, it offended all of our players who were eager to get into the game and weren't able to, while instead having to watch others enjoy that freedom. It's completely understandable that many players were unhappy about this. We tell people that Path of Exile league starts are a fair playing field for everyone, and we need to actually make sure that is the reality.

I side with reddit 99% of the time but I think they really went full retard on this problem. League starts are where GGG gets most of their money and probably new players, they needed to have players playing on Twitch no matter what. Each league there are probably what, 500 people that are competitive racers? Out of 150,000k+ players. They can get over it