PoE Performance Issues still present. Need a word harsher than abysmal.

"

Drakier wrote:

Dude.. you need to chill out a bit honestly. Just because something has been there for a year, doesn't mean they aren't always making improvements to it, or adjustments in many different ways attempting to fix stuff while also fixing other stuff. This "problem" happens to a relatively small portion of the population. That doesn't mean it should be ignored, but it also means that they aren't going to dedicate quite as much time to finding/fixing it initially. I have faith that it will eventually get fixed.. just might not be in what you would consider a reasonable time.

Free to play means free to play. There are a lot of players that donate a lot of money. There are also a lot of players that don't pay a cent. Really, more than "free to play" should be the phrase "beta". It's beta software. It's not going to be polished and finished yet. Eventually it will. They aren't there yet.

And finally.. picking on someone's grammar? really? You do realize that English is not everyone's first language right?

The only official information regarding the AMD related FPS spikes is that they are, and I quote, "Constantly buying new hardware to test builds on". That's it. There have been no actual attempts to fix the issue, and official information regarding this is also non-existant. It's not even in a list of known bugs!

When a bug, that's been highly prevalent ( 300 people complaining about the same issue counts as prevalent, if you ask me, and that's 300 people who actually BOTHERED to say something, or are knowledgeable enough to realize that the issue is not because their rig is underpowered ), goes unfixed for more than a whole year, regardless of development team's size, I can't help but call negligence on it.

This is a product that has been RELEASED. Public, out of its testing phases, and marketed as a feature complete multiplayer experience that will continue to get content updates. It is no longer possible to call it "Beta". At a point like this, game breaking bugs SHOULD be gone. If they are not, development focus should be on finding the issue, and fixing it, ASAP. And instead, as many have pointed out in this thread, the latest patch actually made things WORSE.

"

Mettiu wrote:

Dude, english is not my mother language. I will like to see you talking or writing in my language. There are free to paly games developed by big companies but this game is developed by how many people ? 18 - 20? I know you have performance issues like many others. I have also some performance issues but constructive feedback is way to help developers. And it is still in beta. Also big games with big budgets have issues in beta. Like for example CoH 2. It had many issues in first beta I played.

There are free to play games developed by big companies, yes, and they have more resources for quality control. They also, for the most part, release a working product that functions without major game-breaking bugs at launch. If it's a beta, yes, you are excused, but after you announce RELEASE, your product should not be plagued by such bugs anymore, unless they appear due to subsequent patches after release that introduce these bugs. Here, this is not the case. If your team is small, spend more time on quality control. In most development practices, it is actually the BIG companies that mess this up, because one hand doesn't talk to the other, thanks to the sheer size of the team. A small team means better communication means a more coherent development focus. If anything, this HELPS with fixing bugs.

I have given plenty of constructive feedback. Twice, I was ignored. Third time I finally got a vague response and some minor collecting of information, and then nothing, not even so much as a "I've talked about these issues with the rest of the team and we'll try to find the cause of it as soon as we can". I don't even know if my text rendering bug has been put into any kind of internal lift of bugs!

How am I to simply toil along, believing that they are not simply trying to make people forget about it and just focus on putting out more content, without fixing the base mechanics? How am I meant to invest in a company that does not communicate clearly about its issues that a lot of people are experiencing with their product, and what they are doing to actively reduce these issues?

I am not doing this out of spite. I am doing it, because I see a very severe issue that has gone unnoticed or purposely avoided since beta, and I want to see it fixed, because the ultimate outcome is that more people will be able to enjoy Path of Exile, which ultimately means more paying customers for GGG. And so far, I have been disappointed by the response. You, the players, come in here, saying that this status quo is perfectly fine, that it's okay to spend money on a product, even if it doesn't work correctly. Have you ever heard of a little phrase called 'fit for purpose'? Every consumer should take it into consideration, even if they do not have a law equal or similar to the Trade Descriptions Act.

And lastly, English is not my first language, either. I'm from a former Soviet Union country. You don't see me making excuses, do you? The forum posting feature has a spell checker, and while it is not compulsory, it would not hurt to better yourself and actively use it.

I do find it humorous that some people in this thread do far better, creating legible sentences with fewer mistakes, but apologize for it anyway. That's courtesy, and I praise people who do that. Look to your peers, they know how it's done.

Am I the unluckiest person in the world?

Drakier, you state, that : This "problem" happens to a relatively small portion of the population

Me and my three friends - we ALL are affected by this, we have ALL already lost some HC characters to it. That is 100% of my (local) population. My PC is on the lower side and I agree that you can say I should just be quiet and enjoy that this game is for free. No, I will not. I love this game. I HOPE for this game to be optimized and fixed already and if I will just keep quiet about it, it apparently wont happen.

My friend has two times more powerful PC than me.
His FPS lag spikes : from 100 FPS to 2 FPS
Mine: from 60 FPS to 1 FPS

So what should I make out of this? Should I be happy, that we both cannot play properly, but my PC was way cheaper?

I already stated that in the 0.11 patch notes thread - I will not give any more money until heavy focus on performance tweaking is announced. I cannot even begin to imagine how this software is going to become Release quality without at least BASIC streamlined resource preload mechanism.
GGG, you give me that and I will donate generously. I can only hope that you even care

Currently, there are four hundred and seventy five pages in this section. On page four hundred and seventy one - 17/02/2012 - Huge FPS drop in Dark Forest (compared to any other instance) - as far as I can see, is the first instance of reported FPS drops, at least in this area.

The GGG response to that post was:

"

We plan to optimize these areas once they're complete, but until then all you can really do is turn down settings in areas where this happens!

...

ATI HD4850 user here with Intel e8400 processor.

My game used to become unplayable if I had full chat open and some spells (discharge mobs in sewers and Piety were the worst), made my game freeze for 1-3 seconds when used for the first time and caused me a lot of deaths on hc.

After installing newest beta drivers from AMD's site and completely uninstalling and redownloading PoE. My game works much better now.

FPS stays stable even with full chat open and skills don't lag that much anymore, but its still noticeable.

"

Vate wrote:

ATI HD4850 user here with Intel e8400 processor.

My game used to become unplayable if I had full chat open and some spells (discharge mobs in sewers and Piety were the worst), made my game freeze for 1-3 seconds when used for the first time and caused me a lot of deaths on hc.

After installing newest beta drivers from AMD's site and completely uninstalling and redownloading PoE. My game works much better now.

FPS stays stable even with full chat open and skills don't lag that much anymore, but its still noticeable.

For what it's worth, I also have - currently - an HD4850/E8400. I never open chat, and I've found the best drivers are the 13.1 modified. However, even with these, on first skill use, in a new instance, I get complete freeze for 1 to 2 seconds. Subsequent use of the skills, tend to be better, but far from good.

It appears you have to go to Reddit to get any response on this. Here's a statement from Chris there:

"

There's definitely an issue with certain hardware configurations that we haven't yet been able to successfully reproduce in our office yet. We've been buying hardware that people say causes the problem for them, but it runs perfectly for us. I don't mean to make this sound like an excuse - we're seriously ramping up our ability to improve performance for people with such configurations.

In addition, we have a dedicated graphics engine programmer arriving who will work fulltime on this type of thing.

http://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1gouuk/lets_discuss_the_state_of_poes_graphical/

Anyway, I'm beginning to think my main issues may be with my processor. I'm running an Intel e8500. I've been monitoring it's use and when I'm getting hit hard with FPS drops it's basically being maxed out by the game. It seems like the more time I spend playing the worse it gets for my processor. It also jumps to 100% usage when I'm loading instances, especially when they start taking a little longer to load.

I don't think this is normal. When I first start running the game it usually runs smoothly, somewhere around 80% load. Given some time or other players joining with me it seems to really tax my processor.

"

Drakier wrote:

logokas: 300 people is very minor in relation to the overall account count. I believe they're somewhere up near 3 million accounts? I'm not saying this to say that you're unimportant.... but 300 people (lets even say 3000 people or 30000 people) is relatively small in comparison to the total number of accounts (even if you remove all the RMT/spam/hacker accounts).

As has been pointed out, Chris has said things about the performance in other places. I agree their communication on this particular issue could use some work. But they ARE working on trying to reproduce and fix the problem... even going as far as to hire an expert in graphics engines to attempt to figure out the problem and fix it. I'd say that is some dedication on their part.

As for the "Release" argument... that has been used many times before and doesn't change the fact that it's still a beta. They call it a beta because that is what it is. It is still in testing phases. Not all the known bugs are ironed out, and I'm betting they won't release this game as officially "Released" until most (if not all) of the bugs have been squashed. That's just good software development / release practice. You can attempt to call it whatever you want. It doesn't change what it actually is. You can call it a fish for all I care. The end result is, GGG considers it a beta; that means I consider it a beta. Beta software is not always stable. Bugs happen. Etc.

Firstly, the last number I've heard is 2 million accounts, which was passed in March 2013, I believe this was when Open Beta started. But that's really irrelevant. What you have to understand is that forum posters account for maybe 5% of the whole population, and yet, a rather serious chunk of them are experiencing a problem. And like I said earlier, there are probably hundreds if not thousands more who are suffering the same issues, and either don't know any better, can't be arsed to complain, or simply threw the game in the trash and have never touched it since.

Second, how is it dedication to fixing bugs when it has taken them a year to make these significant efforts, such as hiring experts and buying hardware? I find it bad quality control management, shoving money at a problem months down the line, rather than focusing development to eradicate such a game breaking issue. You cannot excuse this, and I cannot emphasize this enough, more than a YEAR of existence for a single bug affecting hundreds, possibly thousands of players. That's as bad as EA with their quality control!

As for the release argument, I concede that yes, the game is, as pointed out, in Public Beta. However, it is being treated as a retail product, with updates having a major focus on content, rather than testing and bugfixing. If I was trying to sell you a banana smoothie, but I hand you a banana juice instead, and claim it is fine because I'm still learning, but still ask you to spend money on it, is that okay, too?

So far, I have seen no focus on getting these problems fixed. The game engine is heavily reliant on CPU power, as pointed out by many people with somewhat underpowered PCs, as well as exhibiting major performance leaks, and stuttering, with these reports going as far back as March 2012, possibly even earlier than that. There has been no improvement to these issues over the span of the year, during which time Path of Exile has had significant content updates and changes.

Everything I have seen up to this post, the erratic and fragmented communication regarding these issues by the dev team, the changelogs listing no attempts to help these issues, offering instead vague workarounds such as turning down graphics levels, threads spanning dozens of pages with people all describing problems that make it essentially impossible to play the game in certain ways, all of this points me to the conclusion that once the game is officially released as a 1.0/gone gold/retail/finished product, these issues will STILL be present in the game, and we will be no closer to having this fixed than before.

THAT, is my bottom line, and I hope to god I am wrong. Because a free-to-play game that stands on broken fundamentals, is a game nobody will want to play for very long. Need for Speed WORLD taught me that. I complained then, too, and at the end of the day, nothing happened. EA with their deep pockets and greedy business model did not care enough to fix the underlying issues ( as they often tend to do, turd of the year etc ), apparently had no interest or reason to attempt fixing a gameplay ruining performance issue that plagued the ENTIRE playerbase.

I am here because I have witnessed a performance issue, and have attempted to bring it to the developers' attention, among with other, more prevalent issues, because I want to see these issues fixed.

Yet most of you are happy with the way things are and simply ignore the complaints, spewing things like 'lol its beta' and 'chill man they are working on it', without any sort of second thought that maybe, just maybe, this isn't getting the attention it requires.

So go ahead and hate me for throwing sticks and stones at your precious and 'perfect' game that has nothing wrong with it, if that's what you feel you should do. And if/when the day rolls by that your HC character dies to one of these bugs, when we're well into 2014 and out of beta, remember that I was here, trying to get it fixed, and also, that I Told You This Would Happen.

"

You can attempt to call it whatever you want. It doesn't change what it actually is. You can call it a fish for all I care. The end result is, GGG considers it a beta; that means I consider it a beta. Beta software is not always stable. Bugs happen. Etc.

i died when i read this lol