'Path of Exile' Let Twitch Streamers Cut to Front of Long Server Lines

The launch of an expansion pack or DLC is supposed to be a happy occasion. Players get new content and developers get to see all their hard work go into the world. But the launch of Path of Exile: Ultimatum didn’t make anyone happy. Technical difficulties forced developer Grinding Gear Games to make people wait in a queue to log on but paid influencers got to skip the line which enraged everyone waiting to play. “The decision to allow any streamers to bypass the queue was clearly a mistake,” lead developer Chris Wilson said on Reddit.

Path of Exile is a Diablo-style RPG where players customize characters on a massive skill tree and, crucially, grind for better and better loot. Path of Exile: Ultimatum allows players to bet items they have and compete in trials. Those who win reap massive rewards but there’s a risk you’ll lose your stuff if you fail.

At the high end, players are competing for places on a leaderboard for rare loot. The faster a player got into Ultimatum and started moving up the leaderboard, the better position they’d be in to dominate the game for the rest of the month. Getting the better loot sooner would give anyone a clear edge in the game while the in-game economy settled post-expansion.

But, like with so many other popular games with online servers, players had a hard time logging on to Path of Exile the day its Ultimatum expansion released. Anyone who tried to play after the game launch was met with a queue to get in. “Immediately upon launch of the league, we could see that the queue was running incredibly slowly. At the rate that it was emptying, it'd be at least two hours to get everyone into the game,” Wilson said on Reddit.

According to Wilson, the issue had to do with migrating old characters to the new expansion. “It was a process that should have been running all week. Due to human error, this process was not run and hence the queue was unbearably slow to empty,” he said.

People waiting in line were already upset, but they got even more upset when they realized streamers were cutting the line and logging directly into the new expansion. “GGG letting streamers skip the queue is messed up,” a post that’s been upvoted 13,000 times on the Path of Exile subreddit said. “The big problem with this is GGG just made the race to 100 require being a successful twitch streamer,” another comment said.

According to Wilson, streamers got priority because GGG had paid them to advertise the game. “We had arranged to pay for two hours of streaming, and we ran right into a login queue that would take two hours to clear,” he said. “This was about as close as you could get to literally setting a big pile of money on fire.”

Wilson admitted that not every streamer they let cut the line was paid. “We also allowed some other streamers who weren't involved in the campaign to skip the queue too so that they weren't on the back foot,” he said. “The decision to allow any streamers to bypass the queue was clearly a mistake.”

Wilson apologized for the server issues and for skipping the streamers ahead. “This post has no intention of trying to convince you to be happy with these outcomes,” he said. “We simply want to provide you some insight about what happened.”

Path of Exiles servers are, by all accounts, running fine now.