Today's Server Instability

GGG I love you!

These annoyances are a small price to pay for such an awesome game. Thanks GGG for all of your hard work! I'm sure you'll be receiving even more of my money in the future ;)

After playing so long in the labyrinths -open darkshrine and some meta error happen and i am sooo demotivated now about the lost time
first run :(

would be nice to use a portal in normal/cruel lab

Hopefully GGG takes a major lesson from this. Not that the lesson wasn't there BEFORE; Awakening was major there. But in short, they must remember that there is a DOWNSIDE to their free-to-play model: new players don't have an automatic investment in the game. (e.g, shelling out $50+ for a copy) So they need to focus on not one, but TWO things:

• Flashy new content to enamor and draw in new players. (GGG is very successful here)
• A solid core product to keep them there. (GGG is in danger of failing here)

Since launch and for the first couple years or so of the game, a lot of players got frustrated and left over time, stymying their efforts to rapidly build a massive player base. GGG succeeded, however, in bringing almost all of them back with Awakening, their third and biggest expansion.

What brought them back? No, it wasn't Jewels, it wasn't divination cards, or the changed mapping system. Hell, even Act 4 wasn't that big a deal for them. It was the elimination of Desync. For nearly every player who'd been around 2.0, that was by far the improvement that made the biggest difference to them. PoE went from being one of the least-reliably-playable games to one of the most-reliably-playable, in one fell swoop.

Hopefully, with the events of the past day, GGG will place a much-renewed, and MUCH-higher priority on not just making sure they have a constant influx of new content, but making sure the core product is every bit as slick and smooth to match how flashy the content is.

"

1337fun wrote:

Chris, numbers plz. Would like to know, what the actual record is.

Glad to see I'm not alone in this. As much as GGG prides themselves on their transparency, AND constantly keeps reminding us this was "record-breaking," it'd only make sense for them to tell us the stats for this launch: peak players, total unique accounts in the first 24 hours, number of NEW accounts...

What did it take to break records? 100k? 500k? A million?

"

Jumpito wrote:

why no rollback?

Becuase contrary to popular belief, "rollback crashes" actually don't exist.

Online games actually don't work that different from offline games, in that they must "save" data. If it fails to save before closing/crashing, anything done since the last save is lost.

Most of the game's saves occur whenever you change zone... Such as clicking either "respawn in town" or "respawn at checkpoint" when dying. (for death, I think it may auto-save right then, too)

"

Dos_Fafner wrote:

I have to be entirely honest, the GGG servers are pretty bad in general but I do not think this is, strictly speaking, just a server error. Internal patch testing must be at an all time low because I do not remember a more buggy release for POE and regardless of the blatant blame placed on the servers it's clear the new content is full of glitches and bugs. Did anyone else notice you couldn't target devourers last night?

Instead of spamming out new skills no one needs, please spend a little more time greasing the cogs and ironing out the kinks for these updates. It's impossible to tell friends "hey, come play POE they've got a lot of great new content!" when the game seems to have leaped years backwards in terms of glitches and bugs.

Yet another case where I agree wholeheartedly. I think GGG is caught up too much in making new flashy content that they can use to constantly promote the game, when they need to be devoting more of their resources to making sure the core product remains good.

And yes, I feel that GGG has started slacking on being thorough in testing their stuff. They even admitted that this was a case of something slipping through the cracks.

And as much as many players would like to blind themselves to the issues, it's clear that there was a huge list of major, game-breaking bugs that were ignored, that either contributed to the crash-spam, or at least made the rest of the time more miserable:

• Instances were failing to close when they should, eating more RAM then they should; this amplified how bad the player load was.
• Devourers were very untargettable.
• Town portals often failing to let players use them.
• Perandus chests would often keep spawning an infinite number of guardians.
• Numerous skills introduced game-breaking or crashing glitches.
• And of course, the services glitch that was the "straw that broke the camel's back" precipitating the entire day's crashes.

"

Demon_Knight83 wrote:

These annoyances are a small price to pay for such an awesome game.

The problem is that far from everyone agrees with you on that. Worse yet: a lot of the people who'd disagree are those who are brand-new to the game. There's a reason it's said that "First impressions are everything."

I wouldn't be surprised if half of the would-be newcomers to the game decided "wow, this sucks" on the first day, and left, to never come back. THAT is a botched launch, if just a single issue was the sole reason you failed to retain a large portion of the new players you worked so hard to draw in.

Of course, for existing players that have gone along, they know that they can just quit playing for a day or two, and come back when it's settled. But how's a new player expected to know what it's NORMALL like? "Just trust and believe me, man"? People don't like that.

GGG worked very hard, and spent a LOT of money (I'm estimating well over a million to a few million, which is tons for a company as small as they are) working on that expansion, with the chief goal being to draw new longtime players in. Having their big, costly shot fly off-target because of poor/lack of testing is just really, really bad.

Again, for GGG, their "Free to play" model has a downside. For players that bought Diablo 3? Blizzard already had their money... And because of that, the players would be more willing to wait it out in hopes of "it gets better."

With a free-to-play game, a new player has sunk zero money in, and has no investment to "protect." If their first impression is not what they like, they have every incentive to leave and never come back.

Last night I got booted twice from the maze then the last time I died, I think I was too tired anyway ;)

Hope you guys can sort the problems, PoE always keeps me coming back, it just has the depth and style that NO other arpg can muster in its wildest dreams.

Keep up the good work!

That's nice.

I like your way of communicating things, it's awesome.

"

BAD9eR wrote:

"

He is correct and went straight to the point. So long, I couldn't finish the damn thing between any of the server crashes. And since it is level 68 area... any drop there is a waste of time.

Boring, and no rewards...

the content should be its own reward ! get a reign on your sense of entitlement kids

Are you unable to read and understand a single sentence? "the content should be its own reward" is a strange answer to someone that told you that the content is boring. "boring" and "it's own reward" doesn't match that well, dont you think so?

"

Dos_Fafner wrote:

I gave up after the third crash as it is really annoying to try advancing when your progress is constantly impeded.. I also encountered a lot of sweet bugs that have never happened to me before including my personal favorite of not being able to use my own town portal in Lunaris (twice) with the super slick message of "Have not completed normal difficulty" - well obviously not why else would I run around Lunaris?

I have to be entirely honest, the GGG servers are pretty bad in general but I do not think this is, strictly speaking, just a server error. Internal patch testing must be at an all time low because I do not remember a more buggy release for POE and regardless of the blatant blame placed on the servers it's clear the new content is full of glitches and bugs. Did anyone else notice you couldn't target devourers last night?

Instead of spamming out new skills no one needs, please spend a little more time greasing the cogs and ironing out the kinks for these updates. It's impossible to tell friends "hey, come play POE they've got a lot of great new content!" when the game seems to have leaped years backwards in terms of glitches and bugs.

I really like the league. I did not get to experience Ascendancy much, as I got frustrated after only a few hours, but the league is challenging and fun. Great work and good luck sorting this out quickly.

This

Sadly sheeps are happy with almost nothing and just prefer spam "gg" "good work" and ignore real problems with servers since 2.1

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/492g23/is_the_labyrinth_tedious_as_hell_for_anyone_else/

Labyrinth for now is a huge fail with all the crash reports, the too hard difficulty, and the fact that every crash make players have to do it again and again since death isn't allowed ...

Thx guys/girls

"

Schn1tt3r wrote:

"broke our player number records for the first day of a Path of Exile release"

I call bullsh**t on that one. Server queues were so small compared to the real other releases.

Steamcharts confirm that yesterday broke all of PoE's previous records. Previous record was 32,228 while yesterday hit 37,266. I guess Steam isn't necessarily the whole story, but it's a strong indicator.