Why downgrade skill/aura effects?

Excellent reply Russell. I think that this should be put in the manifesto that so everybody can read this and understand the reasoning behind why the changes were made.

How about some graphics option where players can keep the effects they want?

so ur gonna be nerfing anything that causes lag? change the whole dynamic of the game becuz of lag? .. that this the most non smart thing i have ever heard..

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FockThePoliceUSA wrote:

so ur gonna be nerfing anything that causes lag? change the whole dynamic of the game becuz of lag? .. that this the most non smart thing i have ever heard..

You're totally right, they should leave the lag and desync in that so nothing gets "nerfed". Who cares that people die and lose time/characters because of it, by George we need the game to at least look good even though it's unplayable.

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FockThePoliceUSA wrote:

so ur gonna be nerfing anything that causes lag? change the whole dynamic of the game becuz of lag? .. that this the most non smart thing i have ever heard..

What does game Dynamics have to with game Skill/effect optimization ? You're thick.

I, for one, applaud Russel's reply, keep on working to reduce that lag.

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Russell wrote:

So yeah. We are trying to clean up combat a bit. Huge effects cause huge lag when spammed 100 times a second all over your screen.

Implement option to reduce effects from other party members. Since in group of 4-6 you cant see nothing. And maybe it was not best to have some skills that can hit like 10 times in second unless you got desync and optimization under control.

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Russell wrote:

You also cant see for shit.Other games sadly don't do this so they dont get to know our pain. Its annoying when we get compared to titan quest and d3 effect optimisation wise when they only have around 30 skill effects at max on a screen at a time. As we go from 20-30 solo to 200-300+ party endgame. Floating damage numbers are not effects.

Maybe because they know it will be very hard to optimize so they go different way. Maybe you should learn from them. Its not fair to compare PoE with D3 since they have way bigger game budget but I was playing diablo 3 a lot and there are sometimes many many effects on screen and game is still very fluent. BTW there is really no reason to have 300+ effects on screen since it will be one big mess. Sometimes smaller is better.

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Russell wrote:

On my 7980 fireball if shot 5 times on top of each other would drop my fps from 100+ to 20-30 for a second. Now think of that when its spammed all over your screen.

Did you see new unreal engine? It can handle 3+ milion particles just fine. And some crazy lights effects also.

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Russell wrote:

Anyway in conclusion if PoE gets to the point where players use 1 aura each. Or none aura each unless they want to be a cool support guy I dont see auras changing look until then. The reason those other ones are slightly larger is because I was told they would most likely not all be used together. Also with the aura nerf people are using slightly less auras so I made the auras slightly larger to fit that : P.

I really hope aura changes were not based on they casue lag.

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DalaiLama wrote:

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Russell wrote:

The reason as we have said a few times is:

Snipped.

OK, this makes a lot more sense now. Now I can stop wondering why these graphical changes were made and if they are coming back.

Thanks for taking the time to write up such a detailed explanation. This is just another example of why I support GGG and Path of Exile. Your team cares about the game they are making and the people that are playing it.

Thanks again.

This makes more want to support Russell than GGG as a whole. Just show us they probably never tested correctly their engine before he joined them. Now I feel sad for him thinking at all the work he has to fix the mess, though at least it means they need him to do the job.

I don't play this game because of the graphics, but I also really don't understand why a game with such modest graphics is such a resource hog. Pretty auras were improving the looks of the game by a lot. If they cause such performance issues then I think that's because of a very inefficient engine or horrible implementation of those visual effects.

Then again, I'm no expert and I'm otherwise very impressed by this game. There's always something to bitch about I guess. ;)

Can you keep this as an option then..maybe a slide where people can adjust the partial effects level? I don't see why you're simply downgrading the graphics for everyone...that'a a bit too lazy imho..

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Mettiu wrote:

I really hope aura changes were not based on they casue lag.

Really how do people keep confusing VISUAL changes with GAME BALANCE changes.

My god how thick can you be.