Current Development Priorities

Maybe for a change the cold spells will became playable again.. just for a change..
They are just worthless gems now.
Here a small list of worthless gems - maybe think about fixing their nowdays crappy nature :

- Decoy totem. - is there a single person actually still using it, since it can not be casted from CwDT ?!

- Ice Spear - while it was something before patch 1.3, nowdays it is a gem which even the noobs does not pick up.

- FrostBolt - hype before release and practically none playing with it after. Thanks for the hype anyway.

- IceStorm - it's a funny staff, but definately not cheap build, will we see a gem for it finally or a bit of boost of it's damage ?

"

Yordan wrote:

- Decoy totem. - is there a single person actually still using it, since it can not be casted from CwDT ?!

Dude, decoy totem works really great now imo after they changed the taunt. I used it on endgame lab argus and it made him dumber than a rock, didnt take one single hit while killing him :)

Plus it makes enemies do 10% less dmg on you! For a little while at least ^^ Using totem res gem with it makes it pretty sturdy.

Well guys, thanks for "--noasync". Maybe now I can stop getting unexpected disconnects in empty areas :D

im enjoying prophecy league.
but if it has some secret you better go to share soon. atleast my friendlist all went gone :/

Done a little testing, and --nopreload works a lot better for me than --noasync.

Sorry, still using my original fix :|

"Crash During Loading Screens
While we've made great headway on most issues reported in 2.3.0, the crash that some players get while loading into areas (often associated with the text "Unable to deserialise packet with pid X") is one that we have completely failed to reproduce in our office environment. We've tried it on a wide range of hardware, destination servers, operating systems and with developers of different star signs, but it has never happened for us. From what we can see from reports, the players it does happen to get it quite a lot. Could someone who is very tech savvy and gets this particular issue a lot please email me at chris@grindinggear.com so that we can get to the bottom of it? Thanks!
"

Nice to know I am not the only person with that problem (I was sure it was my internet provider). I hope that you will soon find out what's going on and fix it :)

great news, thanks for the update :)

and sorry to all for being mr grumpyhead since the league started.

"

In 2.3.1, we've found and fixed various places where things weren't preloaded correctly and were loaded during combat, which caused stuttering. Now these will be correctly loaded when you enter the area, giving you a smoother experience in-game.

The Hope is springing up eternal ...

"

Thanks to the detailed results of some users on reddit last week, we have identified that the problems some users were having with our asynchronous background preloading technology relate to thread contention on their machines. One of our performance programmers is working to resolve this so that everyone can enjoy the background preloading without any performance hiccups.

Why do not you read and respond to your own forum? Are you ashamed of it?

"

In the meantime, if you experience stuttering in the first 20-60 seconds of an area, please try running the game with "--noasync" added to your command-line parameters (without the quotes). This is a temporary solution until we have it working perfectly. I should stress that for the vast majority of users, the new system works really well, so only add this if you actually have problems!

We're already doing that ...

"

We also have changes coming in 2.3.1 that reduce the number of filesystem seeks that Path of Exile has to do to load various types of assets. This mostly improves load speed/stuttering on platter-based hard drives (rather than SSDs), but they're also the type of drives that need the most improvement at the moment.

We are committed to improving performance in large and measurable steps with each update.

Great! You mean you will test the new improvementos before releasing them for us? How nice!

"

Networking Issues
The good news on this front is that the problems that plagued us during the first half of the Perandus league are a thing of the past and we haven't had any further issues like those. These were a combination of a bad route at our host and one physical server that we feel was haunted. Upon swapping away from that machine and making sure that alternate routes were used, we haven't had any further issues of that type.

We have, however, noticed some user concerns about networking in the last week. We've investigated these and found two specific causes so far:
Our ISP had two issues recently that affected networking for some users. They needed to do emergency maintenance on a router, which caused packet loss on some PoE connections. They also had a fibre connection break somewhere, so additional traffic on the remaining connection caused some disconnections for Amsterdam and Washington D.C. users. When these happened we contacted them for information, but there was nothing we could do ourselves other than wait for them to fix the issues.
Various West-coast US ISPs that our players use had some significant stability issues recently. When we've seen reports of these, we've forwarded them along in a hope that it'll help them find and resolve the issues.

Problems with routers? Problems with ISPs?
That's no excuse. These problems have always existed and will always continue to exist at least for many years to come!

"

What's Next?
As you know, we have a 13-week schedule of releases. The next release is an unannounced expansion with version number 2.4.0. While half our team is busy with the issues described above, the other half are feverously working on new content. We'll reveal more information about this expansion over the coming months!

Version 2.4.0, a better product?? I doubt it!!!
Quite frankly? I play straight over two years and, in my experience, do not expect anything good.

13 more weeks? I do not know if I will expect more all this time. There are other products on the market with a good appeal.


Anyway thank you for your attention Sir.

"

Crash During Loading Screens
While we've made great headway on most issues reported in 2.3.0, the crash that some players get while loading into areas (often associated with the text "Unable to deserialise packet with pid X")

I have had this problem happen.

I'm on a HDD machine, and the one thing I find that seems to produce it is trying to enter the game as soon as the main screen pops up. Meaning clicking log-in and selecting a character as soon as possible.

Edit: Additionally I should add that I am also just powering on my computer and launching POE very shortly after windows loads. It seems relevant as I know under the old loading system POE launched much faster after it had been played at least once since booting the computer.

It has never happened twice in a row or during game play for me, and it has never happened if I give it 5-10 seconds at the log-in screen before pressing anything.

This last update with the loading changes has drastically hit my performance. Playing an area like docks with the rain going really causes a lot of stutter sometimes.

I played discharge, coc, never any issues before. Glad to see it's being worked on.

So... I have stayed off the forums this league because I try not to rage here too much. After Perandus I thought, surely, Prophecy would have FAR less problems... boy, did you guys surprise me!

The league mechanic is fine, and THANK GOD for Strongboxes not freezing me anymore. Those two items are great! But everything else has gone to shit.

First off, getting to the Login Screen in 2 seconds is meaningless when I now spend like 30 seconds stuttering through town. Also, if I sit in a busy town like A4M, I will continue getting FPS hiccups indefinitely. It is completely unreal how botched this new preloading is.

Secondly, the long 20-60 stutters in actual game areas is also unreal. How this could ever be perceived as superior to the old loading is beyond me. You guys must have fired or lost a QA guru a few months back, because prior to Perandus, things were NEVER this bad. This is now two leagues in a row where performance problems are making me question even playing the game anymore.

THIRDLY, if that all wasn't enough, is that I get randomly DCed at least 4-5 times per day. I never used to get DCed, like, at all. Maybe twice per league. I've been DCed no less than 15 times already and I'm only playing two or three nights a week. I should note that certain Prophecies and/or Prophecy mobs seem to be linked to this so I don't think it is related to the network issues.

FWIW, I kindly left out any discussion of the myriad of ISP/Routing issues. That is a whole different can of worms, but for me, I prefer to comment on the things that I *know* are in GGG's immediate court and can be dealt with directly.

Look, I know game development is rough, I know things go unseen. I know you've got thousands of us on weird franken-PCs and what not. But these facts have been here since the very beginning and the game was never like this. So clearly your methods, attention to detail or - SOMETHING - has changed on your end to produce such glaring performance problems two leagues in a row now.

Please don't let such a wonderful game drown in tech issues due to carelessness or apathy or whatever is going on.