Stress test and first impressions

I'll keep this short and to the point.

Stress test weekend was fairly fun, i enjoyed most of my time with the game, and i think there's a lot of potential here. However, here are some things that really bothered me, and wish to draw some attention to.

1. At the very start of the stress test, i immediately noticed that a whole lot of things were being pushed to server, instead of resolving locally, such as movement, inventory changes, skills. The next day i noticed that the problem occured less, likely due to lagspikes occuring less, or perhaps these things simply being pushed to local instead of waiting for server response. It's best to keep an eye on this, as it really gets frustrating when you wanna swap equipment, and being forced to wait until the server catches up to you in that regard, or having to redo your swap again because it didn't register the first time you did it, because you did it too quickly. There is very little need to force server side resolving for these things, and many MMOs do without. Rusty Hearts has a similar sort of system, where towns are populated, but actual areas are solo. They too have some issues, such as area doors lagging behind the player. This is mostly a problem for people who are high latency, within the 200ms range.

2. My second, and perhaps biggest issue, is the framerate. Considering the nature of this game, and its visuals, it boggles my mind why i could barely get above 60 FPS, even with AA off completely. I have a 120Hz screen, and when I am not playing in 3D, I certainly want to see all 120 frames.

Additionally, the framerate hit the ditch as soon as global chat got too crowded. Why is that? I run a 1055T / 8GB / GTX580 build, and it slows down to a 20 FPS crawl in a top down rpg with a viewpoint that barely shows more than ten meters around the player? That's not right.

My only explanation to this is that some rendering is being pushed to the CPU, which happens to be the weakest point of my machine, however, it should NOT be the weakest point, because its a hexacore. Which means the game is single-thread, because that's where these CPUs fail. So for the love of god, multithread your game. There is barely any single core machines left, and a lot of PC gamers have long since gone for the i7-s and Phenom II X2/4/6-s. Take note from Bethesda's failures, who did poorly when they did not optimize skyrim properly for multi-core CPUs and neglected to even build their executable with optimization flags. The result is that without the optimizations, the game ran at 10 FPS at times, and struggled to even break 30 in most areas, and to this day, it can barely scratch a stable 60 with processors which are note capable of doing the required work off a single core.

3. While adventuring, there was a distinct lack of information regarding quests. In Diablo 2, and lets face it, PoE takes a lot of inspiration from that game, you always get quests when you enter certain areas. Sure, it lacks explanation as to how you suddenly became aware that Charsi's horadric malus was in the rogue monastery, but without that notification, you would not have been able to finish the quest during your roaming until you finally go back to town and THEN get the quest, and having to go back to area, only to discover that it has been reset.

4. Scrolls of Wisdom. Well..I can't tell yet if i like them or not, but i can say that there was no clear indication if selling unidentified items was better than identifying them, and THEN selling them. Some clarification would be nice.

5. Map issues are already in the Beta Manifesto, so i'll just remention that it sucks at the moment.

6. In the underground cave, there were moments where the front cave wall would block view of a crustacean, which is a small enough creature to go missing behind rocks like that. Some outlines when important objects are behind the foreground would fix this easily. Look at torchlight, they did that okay. Or the Left 4 Dead series, they employ similar visuals.

I..think that's mostly it, yeah. Fix the performance issue, especially the chat slowing everything to a crawl, that was just awful, tweak up the questing, make sure high latency people still have an enjoyable experience, and fix the other tiny issues. Maybe tweak the skill tree so it looks less of a clusterfuck and you can figure out which way you're headed with it.

Oh and, don't get greedy. I've seen Freemium games go downhill because of ridiculous microtransaction things like buying power outright, making the game grindy to sell exp boosters, etc etc. I've been hearing things about people buying beta access, and while that's mostly community greed, the more you give into such things, the more likely you'll fall into that pit. So tread carefully.

Loved the game in the stress test.

I dont mind if the graphics arent the best the gameplay is whats key and its fun.
Wouldnt mind seeing more inventory space maybe as a skill in the skill tree or associated with level/stats.
Some transperency while behind walls/caves so you can see what your doing would be good.
Didn't know you could level gems up was that explained somewhere in the game?
A better minimap would be nice, maybe one in the bottom/top corner.