Now that I posted my opinion about special treatment for streamers in general it’s time to analyze the situation that caused all the uproar recently and apply my vision to it.
My general vision was in previous post, now it’s more about one particular situation…
Launch of new PoE league was bad, for a couple of days people were getting disconnects and ending up in queues and it sucks, really does, devs fucked up sure. Streamers got a way to circumvent the queues and it makes sense, because they make content, watching queue screen for hours is not a great content.
You can say “who cares, their problem, life isn’t fair”, but devs care, they want people who follow the hype of new league to watch actual gameplay instead of joining menu screen and leaving after 10 minutes of nothing happening thinking that game is trash. Even people from my community who play said “well some random Joe joining game a bit faster won’t change anything for me, but being able to watch streamers play while in queue is better than watching them sit in queue too”. Not to mention some streamers got paid by devs to stream it, those who aren’t regular PoE streamers, imagine paying for banner spot in some great area and then putting nothing or some very bad banner there for all lease time – money down the drain.
And even if we decide to make things fair and actually hurt streamers and devs promoting their game, will regular players win much? It’s like 100 streamers with privileges probably, 500 maybe, queue is dozens of thousands, removing priority would make queue maybe couple of minutes faster, does it justify doing all the damage to streamers/devs? I don’t think so. I probably wouldn’t get prio myself if I would stream it and I wouldn’t even be mad, I probably would just skip first day or so seeing clown fiesta letting it settle and whatever. Some people took day offs and don’t want to skip it? Well it’s devs problem with fucked release, not streamers making your queue couple percents longer.
Later people found a good reason to justify the ree – game has leaderboards and competitive scene so streamers with priority would climb it easy while others would lag behind. Legit reason, even though majority complaining probably never participated in this, but still legit and very easy to fix – make streamers choose if they want priority or leaderboard, you want to compete – no priority to you, you want content – no leaderboard and I might be wrong, but I think many streamers don’t care about it much and maybe even at all. But instead devs just stripped priority from all the streamers, giving in to reddit angry mob and restoring fairness, which is fine, if they are ready to take that loss and worsen their marketing in future if situation with queues repeats (which might never happen again or for a while), I respect the decision. BUT there is one thing here that also can’t be ignored – giving in to the pressure of reeing crowd might backfire many more times after, because people now know that enough upvotes and noise might push devs to do things that are against their own decisions. In my opinion right move would be to just explain to people why that priority exists and stand your ground, as soon as servers stabilized no one already gave a shit about that “drama” anyway.
And special mention goes to pepegas going to streamer’s chats shitting on them – that doesn’t help anything or anyone. Just creating bad image of community for everyone who’s new to it, making streamers annoyed, not even sad or something, because it’s just dumb, but sure is annoying when regularly someone comes in to post same shit you saw many times over past couple of days, getting list of banned people become thicker and then getting all the unban requests from people who after a few days when servers work fine realize that they fucked up and want to be a part of community again. My advice is just to do something else instead of participating in all the hating, but if you really need to vent about that, then do it on reddit or something with others, don’t bring it to chats and to devs, sure they are guilty and more than streamers, but no one deserves hate for this at all.