mac disconnect bug, fix is consistent but a headache and waste of POE's bandwidth

Playing on a MacBook pro. With last league, I frequently started getting a bug where trying to join an instance (whether HO or map), it just sits on the load screen. Ruh roh, POE increasingly going single player for all Mac users...

With this league, instead of that happening, it now just kicks back to the start screen of the app to log in with a disconnection / failure to login message. Sometimes it crashes the app entirely. Changing internet connections didn't help at all, so it's not that either.

People in various forums and social media said it likely has something to do with MTX of other users in the instance or hideout, which is why it's intermittent.

At first people said to reboot or reinstall, and it seemed to work ... except when it didn't (which was still a lot).

I noticed that when getting the crash though, either one of two symptoms come up.

(1) When you're on the character selection screen, the character models for each of the classes look wrong, like they are low res, missing facial features.

(2) The other is that the character models look fine, but when you click your character to log in, the load screen is extremely pixelated, and then immediately it's going to crash.

So I started digging, and messing around, I found something that seems to work very consistently...

* in steam, right click on POE
* click properties
* click installed files
* click browse
* select ShaderCacheVulkan.packed and delete the folder off your system
* go back to the "installed files" screen in steam and click "verify integrity of game files"

It's now going to scan, find the folder is missing, and re-download the shader directory. Now, this is certainly not ideal as it's literally 1.7gb to download every time you restart POE. But it seems to be working 100% consistently.

Hopefully this provides some info for GGG to fix it.