Intermittent but recurring 2500ms ping spikes

Edit: (Jan 9, 2024) This issue seems to be resolved. Somewhere around the 7th or 8th. Both TX and CA no longer have this issue. Whether it was GGG making a change to the server or one of the ISP's along the path to the gateway. No idea. But finally getting solid latency.

Edit: (April 1, 2024) This started happening again with the new league. I can only guess this is just a fundamental flaw in one of the gateways for the game or the servers themselves.


Please, someone help me figure this out.

Gateways: California and Texas

Lockstep mode.

DirectX 12

Windows 10

RTX 3060 12gigs VRAM (drivers up to date)

32gigs of ram

For the last year I've been having a consistent issue where the game will play smoothly (15-20ms ping) and then randomly I'll get high ping spikes where the game completely locks up (animation included) then fast-forwards to catch up. Often these come in pairs and then the game will go back to playing smoothly.

There is no consistent context for these issues. They happen at all hours of the day. They happen even with nothing is happening in the game (like moving stuff in stash or just standing there). They happen even when I have no other network traffic on my PC.

I haven't seen anything remotely like this in any other game or activity on my PC. If this happens when watching media, there is no interruption in music or video to match what happens in-game. This issue only manifests in POE.

I've done a WinMTR and the results were inconclusive. Even during a lag spike there wasn't any significant packet loss anywhere in the MTR.

Further context: I have path of exile installed on an NVMe drive (not the same one windows is installed on). I did this by copying the game files over because POE doesn't allow me to select a drive to install on. Is there any chance this could be the root of the issue?

Please help. I'm at a loss here.

I'm having the same exact issues as you and it's extremely frustrating. My latency display looks exactly the same as the picture you posted.

I ran a WinMTR report for 2 minutes 0 packet loss. Deleted my caches turned off my antivirus software, newest Nvidia drives etc. Nothing has helped at all.

This spikes seem to be completely random and happen doing anything between sitting in hideout vs doing juiced maps with a million things happening on screen.

My game is installed on the same drive as my OS, and I've already tried a clean install of the game as well.

My basic specs
Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB -
RTX 3080
32 Gigs DDR5
Intel i7-10700K @ 3.80Ghz
Windows 10
Gateway: Washington D.C.
Wired Ethernet connection directly to modem, have also tried a different cable.

Edit:
Added similar screenshot to OP, showing same lag.

Well, I'm relieved to know it's not just me. That's more evidence that this is a GGG-server issue and not something on my computer or my local ISP nodes. I really hope they can get this figured out.

I have same issue since 3.23. my game "freeze" and i am back to login screen (from france)

Still happening, by the way. It gets worse when I play really juiced maps and sometimes those waves come in 3's.

Still happening. I've tried every fix I can think of. I had a ping going to my local router during one of these spikes and the latency didn't increase so the issue is almost certainly somewhere along the way between me and GGG's server. But as noted, it doesn't show up on WinMTR at all.

This has happened on every gateway I've tried. California, Texas, and Washington, DC.

I've been having lag spikes in some instances and not others. As soon as I change from zone to zone it goes away. It spikes every 3 seconds or so, then I'll TP to hideout and it goes away. I seen a reddit post and he's saying the same thing. Started 3 days ago for him and I.

same here..

I've been having the exact same experience for a while now, any replies with some help with the issue would be much appreciated.