Path of Exile 2.3.0 Launch and Follow-up Patches

So umm, it's nice to have helmann loading screens but what's up with maps with rain? Everything works flawlessly for me at max settings but once the map has rain fps drops rapidly, it didn't happen before this patch as I suppose everything loaded properly in bit longer loading screen.

I am happy now that with this new sound system that GGG changed in PoE 2.3.0 made my computer run PoE with my old (very) sound blaster audigy 2 ZS without crashes in Windows 10, even if I remove the --softwareaudio parameter in command line.

Now It works perfectly !!! :)

Overall, I love the league mechanic and the sound improvements are amazing - it sounds better than ever. However, I am experiencing very drastic lag spikes (upwards of 2490ms was the highest I noted with an FPS drop to zero), especially on initial game launch and about 30 seconds in. After that, the game will run fine (45-60ms latency), until I go to someone's hideout, or any master instance. At that point, I have a better-than-50% chance of the game locking up on me and forcing a re-start. Like others have stated; previously I had never had significant issues beyond the occasional server disconnect.

That said, I am patient, and I know you guys are working the stability issues. After reading here and reddit, it seems like there's not a whole lot of consistency with the problems to go off of either, so hats off to the team, it's got to be a ton of effort.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

so now the game loads almost instantly and i load into zone almost instantly. nice.

then when im in the zone the game is still loading all the assets and i fucking die because my entire screen freezes up when i go to move and i get swarmed by mobs. This lag then follows me through the entire zone and the entire experience is laggy as shit and generally unresponsive.

can I have my load screens back seeing as the game obviously needs them?

So far, I have had a complete freeze happen twice. The game just freezes, nothing is moving, not me, not the enemies, not the environment. Then it unfreezes, and everything moves as if it's on steroids, catching up to where it would have been had it not froze. Luckily, I didn't get killed. It's damn near impossible to control your character's movements and actions during the unfreezing. It's like trying to control your character while having 3 "speed" shrines active on you at once until the game catches up.

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morbo wrote:

I was having some weird issues with sound in maps, sound crackling, cutting off, etc. It >seems< this has now been solved.

Still, there's a small weird stuff that changed since 2.2: map drop sound effect now plays a lot more loud, compared to other sound effects. It's loud to the point of being annoying. Aynone else experiencing this?

Similarily loud are silver coin drops.

1) I have noticed this too.
2) It might be intentional.
3) I expect Unique item drops as well as high end currency drops to produce equally loud sounds.
4) I like it, it makes them more noticeable and makes me feel warm and fuzzy knowing that something special dropped (Isn't drowned out by other sounds).

Since the 2.3.0 patch I've been experiencing severe lag spikes. I'm not sure if these are network latency issues, or if they are related to effects.

Quite often in battle everything will just stop moving for me. This happens to each player in the party, but not synchronously.

I don't really feel like its network latency, as previously when you encountered network latency effects would continue to animate to a certain degree (like in those cool moving screenshots GGG posts here and there)
In these spikes, everything completely freezes.

It doesn't really seem like the same ole lag ups you get from excessive casting speed.
Two leagues ago I ran a Mjolnir build and while it was intense and could cause disconnects on occasion, it was fairly predictable when it would occur so you could back off and prevent it.
These current spikes are very unpredictable and even sometimes occur when players are not doing anything (other than running auras)

I've died a few times to this. (more an annoyance than anything)

This is most prominent when entering an area where other players are active in battle.

We have a player who is an aura bot running about 5 auras at the moment and he is also self casting firestorm.
Another player is running Cast on Critical strike with Firestorm and Spectral throw on a shadow.
I am running a shadow with Cast on Crit with Ethereal Knives and Poison.

The two other players are on Lenovo Intel I7 Laptops with Geforce GTX 650ms with 8gb ram running windows 10
I am running on a AMD FX-8120, 16gb ram and a Geforce 960 running Windows 7 (fully updated)

Otherwise, this has been an awesome patch and the Prophecies are an excellent addition to the game, which I hope sticks around for the long haul.

"You will encounter a patch which you will love and enjoy for the rest of Path of Exile's existence"

I still cannot hear NPC "hello" or "goodbye" dialog. (Except for the very first time I click on an NPC after logging in, or the very first time I click on an NPC after a daily mission.)

I like the fact that when you work on something for months,like this new sound system or the reduced loading assets mechanic,it arrives completely broken to the players and needs 5-6 patches to sort it out.
There is something really wrong with your testing method before release,because it's not just one time this happened.
It's every time an expansion or a league hits.
I don't even want to remember perandus launch,which you described as "the most successful launch ever".
I don't know who's fault it is,but you really need to make some changes.

Well, finally, sound. Let's see how long it lasts. ;)