Betrayal Loading Lag

Come on guys, let's not be so hard on GGG. If you have a technical background you probably know how difficult debugging performance issues can be, and if you don't have a technical background, let me just tell you it's not as simple as just make things faster, or test things out.

It is virtually impossible to test all the environments that an application as globally used as POE will be run in. If you've ever done browser development, you know how frustrating it is just to cater to five browsers (IE, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari) and you know the ragequit you feel when someone using Opera reports a bug only their browser has.

Now imagine having to support Windows XP through Windows 10 (5 distinct version) with a huge variety of hardware (besides the obvious SSD and HDD distinction, there is also the distinction of type of graphic card, manufacturer of the hard drive, number of processors, etc.) and (something browsers applications rarely have to care about), varying amounts of storage and RAM utility, AND a variety of network stability and connection types. The number of distinct environment scenarios can easily balloon to the hundreds or thousands and it is totally unrealistic to have the GGG team test in each of those environment.

Performance issues can stem from anywhere between lack of CPU processing power, lack of RAM, graphics card can't keep up, high power usage triggering OS application locks, unstable network, bad network card, and beyond.

Even just having a bunch of people experience the same exact issue doesn't necessarily help with debugging because the cause may be locational, due to a specific hardware set up GGG doesn't have access too, or (even worse) intermittent and thus hard to reliably reproduce.

And it's rarely as easy as just looking at the code and saying oh this place is bad, let's make it better. Sure there are tons of optimizations probably ripe for the picking in GGG's code-base, but optimization refactors usually take quite a lot of time to write and even more time to test, so figuring out which refactors are necessary (worth it) is a huge struggle. In order to both "fix lag" and continue producing content, GGG has to prioritize what optimizations will address the most issues and/or has the quickest fix. You'll notice that almost every patch released has some sort of instance crash fix. And a lot of recent patches have had some sort of rendering or back-end optimization. It's a long and arduous process to get an application to run stably and fast in so many different environments, and it doesn't come down to just "test it more".

That being said, when the bug reports and performance problems can be localized to one or a set of features, the sane and responsible thing to do for GGG is to TURN OFF THOSE FEATURES while they are debugging. I know GGG wants as much of the game to available to as many people as possible, and in the grand scheme of the player base, a minority of players are encountering these Betrayal issues, but the severity of bug in the context of this game is high enough that such consistent reports of issues should have led GGG to turn off the offending feature long ago.

Fixing issues, and optimizing is a long work in progress, but every developer team should be prepared to just roll stuff back or turn things off when the code breaks in a major way. It definitely sounds like the Betrayal lag issues were major enough to warrant such action. Each patch note I was expecting them to remove Betrayal. They've removed all sorts of other buggy things before, like Abyss cracks, certain items, and things like the ability to essence craft with fractured items. Based on their history I have every reason to believe that they could have easily removed the Betrayal mechanics from the game temporarily, and the fact that they didn't and still haven't, while bug reports continue to come in baffles me.

I don't know who does the PR cost and benefit analyses, but a minority of the player base not being able to play most of the game due to one feature issue should outweigh the majority of the player base missing one small feature in the game (that isn't even the new core feature). I'm quite certain the backlash and overall opinion of GGG would be better off and not worse if GGG just decided to withhold the addition of Betrayal to the core game.


Now that being said, I can think of one sane reason that Betrayal hasn't been removed, and that is that GGG is having a hard time reproducing the issues and need the player base to continue submitting information to help with the debugging. While this seems like a dickish move, it is also a reasonable decision. I would say that GGG should consider and invest in some way of debugging issues with specific people on older versions of the game rather than continue letting everyone play a bugged version just to gather information about the bug, but that's a whole nother discussion. One way or another I'm pretty sure everyone would have appreciated further transparency and urgent address of these issues, perhaps including a statement of why GGG choses not to turn off Betrayal, or why they have not been able come up with another resolution for the issue quicker.

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CGNGlen wrote:

And btw. get a SSD guys will ya? Playing with an old HDD is 20th century.
Get a job, get a SSD and BOOM welcome to the 21st century! :)

You didn't read the comments. A lot of us (including me) have this issue with a SSD.

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Fips_PoE wrote:

HDDs for GAMING in 2019....guys come on!...

I guess you're an economy expert and know every country system to give that opinion.
Or maybe, you're rich enough to buy ssds and send them to those players with 3° world tech prices, im right?

For me a cheap ssd investment means $350 dollars, wich I wont spend.

What you gonna say next? "Then stop playing games you 3° world people boo hoo" ?

What the heck? They already did this "fix"? Obviously not working or not enough.

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Preloaded further Betrayal assets in an effort to reduce the amount of lag and client "freezes" that occur when Intervention encounters begin.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2469313


This is really annoying. They announce after 2 months possible fix for syndicate freeze, which already being done with 3.6.2 Patch. Sounds like they dont know what are doing if needed 2 months for such a simple fix as just preloading everything. And announce it 2nd time before even be sure if is working or not. Sounds like they just want to give you something so to keep you in.

Man man... Im playing long enough to remember some things. the loading problem is from many many years. Do you remember how many years we had an issue with same freezes when you roll rogue box? On HDD when you opened you get rekt because 5sec PC freeze on HDDs. They fix it as just adding to preload the rogue textures/sounds when u rolling the rogue mod. BUT it was there for YEARS.

So yea im fuckin tired with these loading issues. They dont have the skills or the engine, dont know what, to deal with this. Now playing on SSD and it became even here. Cant imagine what would be on HDD, probably impossible to be played.

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EonLight wrote:

Come on guys, let's not be so hard on GGG.

I give them props for at least not being as bad as Actiblizzard these days, but this is a major fuckup... The single biggest problem with Betrayal is that it is BAD GAME DESIGN not poor implementation. It is boring, overly complicated, bland, and has no real value and yet they're trying to dogpile 100+ worthless crafting recipes behind it. What does it add to the game? Nothing. Delete it. It started off as a mediocre idea and nothing they change now is going to make it worth all the problems and complexity.

It took them a month to even admit there was a problem, now they are doing the bare minimum to band-aid a design they should just remove entirely. While they are at it, cheap loss of 10% exp is also bad game design especially when 80% of the time it is their own fault for a dozen layers of bad RNG, movement lag, loading lag, or sometimes even as simple as bad drops preventing upgrades/progress for 20 levels at a time.

Good good good good finnaly good :D

Sounds good.
The freezes killed this league for me.
See you next time :-)

Warning!!
Lagycat detected!!

(this must appeat at entering map with it)

Also, you know well its not only about loading.
Animations and overall performance in maps with lagycats are screwed big time even when it is loaded already.

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Caulder10 wrote:

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kutux wrote:

so you are telling me that i pretty much lose an entire league because you guys decide to wait until almost 2 months to give a crap?

The league is only 1 month old...

stop playing on a toaster and blaming everyone else when your toaster doesn't work.

Why even bother writing such a blatantly wrong comment? People with very good rigs (and SSDs) also are getting this and this didn't exist in 3.5. It's obviously an issue with GGG's software as their engine is also known to be quite poorly optimized. Why are you white knighting an obvious software issue?
Also what "everyone else"? The guy blamed GGG's crappy software (which is true), not "everyone".
The tech forums and bug forums were full of these reports. Also since when did you need a NASA superpc to play an arpg from 2013 rofl... get a grip.

People like you probably blamed players for desync, server lag, game bugs, disconnects etc aswell lmao...