Developer Q&A - Answers Part 3

The lag for me is not an FPS issue (although I do get more than a few stutters,I have a rig which handles diablo 3 GR 105 smoothly), there is an obvious instance lag issue as well. I play a summoner build and once I am at my srs cap the whole thing can crawl to a halt, with mobs randomly rubber banding around the landscape. I dont know what efficiency savings can be made in the server-side coding, but there needs to be some made, since yesterday a friend and I could reliably CRASH an instance by both running spectres and SRS with vaal haste.

Are there some kind of server-side projectiles calculations going on? That would appear to account for a lot of the lag, since it gets infinitely worse when I switch to a Flame Sentinel Spectre.

Overall, its utterly unplayable in groups, and at times it seems to be pushing the server to its max even in solo play (breaches etc). When combined with the multitude of other QoL improvements desperately needed for summoner, it is not surprising barely anyone plays them even though they are consistently at the top of ladders.

Please, Im sure that players would understand if you took a patch for JUST server-side improvements, since there are obviously quite a lot that need to be made, again other ARPG games even are not an issue for me, this is unique to PoE. Even WoW 40 man raids used to be less laggy, and there are literally 10x more people.

Hate to sound so whingy, really I am loving summoner but I just wish I could actually attempt higher maps without knowing that at some point I will get a random lag spike and find myself either dead or logged out.

Cool - thanks for answering the questions

Well, maybe it's not the right place, but my question is about the behavior of the players. Do GGG analize the players decisions? I mean, in a maze... what's the more frecuently choose: the left or the right? What is the prefered way... the wide one or the narrow one? Some statics would be nice! Also if there is some data about at what level do people "feel" that some phenomena (like drops) are frecuently, normal or rare.

3 pages of Q&A nothing about PVP

wtf stupid game and devs.

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Are there are any plans to make older supporter packs available again?

Definitely not. We told customers that they were exclusive.

I approve this message


Jelly? :p

Lately I was wondering:

How many workers at GGG are left-handed?

I just want to say thank you for keeping exclusive mtx/packs exclusive. I have been very disappointed in other studios/games by claiming exclusivity then 6 months or a year down the road my special skin is available for everyone for 1/3rd of the price i paid.

I know you probably lose some money for sticking to this idea but i really appreciate it. It is one of the big reasons i quit league of legends a couple years back.

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Can we expect UI quality-of-life improvements? Even relatively small and obvious changes take months and years to appear. There are still no convenient character and friend list sorting, moving tabs around is a pain, I can't see who is in my ignore list (or remove particular people/see what I ignored them for), and so on, and so forth. I realize some of these require design considerations, but come on. Surely a fancy new act 2 chicken physics can share some of its budget allocation with more tangible improvements.

Instead of trying to justify the improvements we have made or to merely promise there are many more coming, I wanted to shed more light on the reasons why some of these improvements are slow to be finished.

In general, if an improvement only requires a UI programmer, then it can be made rather easily. In the past we had only one UI programmer, so there was a long backlog of such improvements that we found it hard to get to. Nowadays we have three, so we have had time to add features like adding item highlighting in stashes and item filters. The delay occurs when other types of programmers need to be involved. For example, for moving guild tabs, there's just no server-side support for this. A server-side programmer would need to add the ability for the tab locations to be changed and then expose this to the UI guys. While this wouldn't take incredibly long to do, the server-side guys are extremely busy working on very important issues like deployment, realm scaling, anticheat, and so on. To unblock this process, we need to hire and train more talented server-side programmers, and they're the hardest ones to find (dozens of applications per interview and dozens of interviews per hire). This is something we're actively working on.

Here's a tip: you could just rearrange the tabs on the client side. I.e. have a local mapping of "tab 1 on the server -> tab 3 on the client", etc. Zero server coding required.

Any sort of update on the standalone shop yet?

Would be nice to see how much support can grant additional rewards such as designing a future divination card for example.

I haven't heard anything on the sort since when the Ascendancy update started.

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This is unlikely. The game is designed around its current drop rates and SSF mode is meant to be more challenging due to the inability to trade. Even in SSF, people are reaching top-tier content quite quickly.

Please, please, STOP balancing your game around people who play 14-17 hours per day.

Steel posted his experience on reddit - the guy played 15 hours a day. Of course he will reach top-tier content quite quickly.

For the rest of us, playing SSF is absolutely horrible experience because nothing ever drops and you constantly lack crafting materials.