Warning for Ultra widescreen Mod after I disabled it

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Echothesis#7320 wrote:

However if you re-read comments from UW users here and in dozen similar threads, is there a single narrative about "now I cannot see my breaches and strongboxes I lost my farm speed"? Loss of immersive view carries much stronger negative impact than supposed fix of unfair advantage.

This is exactly it.

You guys keep speaking of 32:9 and 16:9 as the only options. PoE 2 support 21:9 natively, and there are no black bars. 16:9 will offer superior visibility to 4:3, but someone playing at 1024x768 will likely experience higher framerates than those playing at higher resolutions. Is GGG restricting lower res play for the races?

This gets pretty ridiculous quickly.

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kage_kurai#7601 wrote:

You guys keep speaking of 32:9 and 16:9 as the only options. PoE 2 support 21:9 natively, and there are no black bars. 16:9 will offer superior visibility to 4:3, but someone playing at 1024x768 will likely experience higher framerates than those playing at higher resolutions. Is GGG restricting lower res play for the races?

This gets pretty ridiculous quickly.

But no one will play at 1024x768 because viewport immersion is more important than supposed extra performance (which isn't even true, resolution stopped being a deciding factor in rendering performance since upscaling technologies arrived. In poe, particle effects kill performance regardless of resolution). People would sooner reduce other settings to save performance, but will never go back to 4:3.

With "competitive advantage" from vision limited to easier location of rare mobs and points of interest on the map (which can matter only during race event), the cure does more harm than the disease. Extra vision won't offer benefits in actually fighting monsters at extreme range for reasons discussed above several times. Either you cannot reach them with your main skill, or you can reach them offscreen without seeing them as well. Projectile range is unaffected by FOV.

“Ripples into the shared market” contradicts your own camp’s narrative

Not at all. The degree of ripple can still matter. A small group having a big impact is possible—especially in trade-based economies. Even a small edge in visibility can allow UW players to spot breaches, corpses, loot, and key spawns faster, increasing clear speed and thus farming rate. In a race or trade-heavy league, that can affect prices and competition, even if you don’t feel it directly in casual play.

“Just fix it with Fog of War”

Totally agree that a tech-based solution like FoW or line-of-sight occlusion would be ideal, but you’re talking about a massive architectural change. PoE is built on a legacy engine and GGG has consistently prioritized league development and PoE2. “Fix it properly” is easy to say, but if the fix is years off or unfeasible with current tech, what do you do in the meantime? Let certain users have a persistent mechanical edge?

“Widescreen users are directly impacted. Others only hypothetically.”

That’s a false dichotomy. The indirect effects—leaderboard shifts, trade value dilution, or pushing streamers/pro players into spending more on hardware to stay competitive—do have real consequences. It’s like saying performance-enhancing drugs only directly benefit the user, ignoring the whole system it distorts.

“Anyone could just buy a widescreen.”

That’s the worst kind of pay-to-win logic. We usually reject that mindset when it comes to MTX or power purchases—why is hardware-based advantage any different? Not everyone can or should have to buy a niche monitor to stay competitive in a fair game environment. Game design should aim to equalize, not reward privilege.

“Viewport immersion is more important than supposed extra performance”

Sure — but this isn't an argument against restricting FoV, it's an argument for preserving game design consistency. Immersion is important, but it's a subjective benefit. The extra visibility in ultrawide isn't just more immersive — it’s also objectively advantageous in certain contexts. So if the added immersion coincidentally gives you a boost in clear speed or loot collection, that’s where the issue arises.

“The advantage only matters during races”

Races are just the most obvious scenario. But players grind for XP ladders, currency farming, boss rotations, Delve depths, etc. all season long — and yes, visibility can speed up that process. Even if ultrawide FoV doesn’t let you attack mobs offscreen (which it sometimes does, depending on the skill), being able to see them earlier means:

Pre-positioning better
Knowing when to flask, vaal, or guard skill
Spotting map layout to optimize movement
Seeing breach/abyss triggers sooner
Locating loot faster and more efficiently
All of this adds up over time — it’s death-by-a-thousand-cuts advantage.

“You can hit mobs offscreen anyway”

That’s part of the problem. When paired with screen-wide AoE or automated triggers (like minions, totems, or spells like Tornado Shot, Spark, etc.), seeing mobs from further away lets you engage more safely and efficiently. It’s not about “can I hit them offscreen?” — it’s about how early I can plan to hit them, and whether I even know they’re there in the first place.

“The cure does more harm than the disease”

That's fair if you think the disease is minor. But what if GGG has analytics or race data that says it’s more than a hypothetical? What if they’ve seen consistent UW winrates, or feedback from internal testing, that shows it’s a nontrivial edge? In that case, this isn’t a “cure that harms” — it’s damage control for creeping imbalance.

This isn’t about “no one would ever do X” — it’s about what happens if everyone is incentivized to. And if you let FoV scale freely with resolution, you’re not just rewarding immersion — you’re nudging players into a greater hardware arms race. That’s not healthy for competitive balance or long-term design.

If the goal is to push for broader FoV or true ultrawide support, the right way to do it isn’t by defending an uneven playing field under the banner of “immersion” or pretending there's no advantage at all. The constructive path forward is advocating for systems — like fog of war, smart occlusion, or enemy prioritization — that enable wider vision without giving any gameplay edge, real or perceived. That’s what fair design looks like. If ultrawide users truly care about preserving the feel of their monitors without gaining an exploitative edge, it’s on them to bring forward those ideas — not just cry foul because they lost a loophole. Enjoyment should never come at the cost of fairness, even if the unfairness is “only” hypothetical, because let's be realistic, Path of Exile's motto isn't "exploit early, exploit often" for lightly reasons, so let's not be hypocritic about this topic either.

Using the Ultra WideScreen trick has always been advantageous...especially for Sorcerer type characters

We accomplished that in Diablo 4.

Here is a trick (which, ATTENTION, does not work in PoE2 because they have fixed the maximum ratio. To avoid this, you must use special software from GitHub, which is immediately detected and can result in a ban).

In Diablo 4, having a super panoramic view for PvP is essential. In PvE, it doesn't matter as you don't die in D4 and face no penalties - the game is easy with mobile phone mechanics. However, players using physical super wide ultra screens made PvP incredibly frustrating because you couldn't see them, but they could see you. As a result, you were often eliminated immediately.

The trick for those with normal or panoramic screens is to use the Nvidia Control Panel to create a fake resolution with a wide panoramic ratio. For example, setting the resolution to 3440x1080 (when the original is 3440x1440) will result of course cinematic black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. However, after starting Diablo 4, you will experience a super ultra panoramic view, allowing you to dominate other players in PvP. Additionally, you can achieve an even more extreme panoramic effect by upscaling your screen to resolutions like 5120x1080, and so on.

Anyway, this is an academic conversation because PoE2 has a fixed maximum panoramic view (I checked), and I am certain they will not extend it like Blizzard does.

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DarkDredd#2184 wrote:

Using the Ultra WideScreen trick has always been advantageous...especially for Sorcerer type characters

We accomplished that in Diablo 4.

Here is a trick (which, ATTENTION, does not work in PoE2 because they have fixed the maximum ratio. To avoid this, you must use special software from GitHub, which is immediately detected and can result in a ban).

In Diablo 4, having a super panoramic view for PvP is essential. In PvE, it doesn't matter as you don't die in D4 and face no penalties - the game is easy with mobile phone mechanics. However, players using physical super wide ultra screens made PvP incredibly frustrating because you couldn't see them, but they could see you. As a result, you were often eliminated immediately.

The trick for those with normal or panoramic screens is to use the Nvidia Control Panel to create a fake resolution with a wide panoramic ratio. For example, setting the resolution to 3440x1080 (when the original is 3440x1440) will result of course cinematic black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. However, after starting Diablo 4, you will experience a super ultra panoramic view, allowing you to dominate other players in PvP. Additionally, you can achieve an even more extreme panoramic effect by upscaling your screen to resolutions like 5120x1080, and so on.

Anyway, this is an academic conversation because PoE2 has a fixed maximum panoramic view (I checked), and I am certain they will not extend it like Blizzard does.

Yep. I even made a video about it where I forced the game to an insane ratio so I could "Leap Slam" multiple screens. Then Blizzard capped the max range of the slam, so it doesn't work anymore, but damage skills were still another problem.

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DarkDredd#2184 wrote:

In Diablo 4, having a super panoramic view for PvP is essential. In PvE, it doesn't matter as you don't die in D4 and face no penalties - the game is easy with mobile phone mechanics. However, players using physical super wide ultra screens made PvP incredibly frustrating because you couldn't see them, but they could see you. As a result, you were often eliminated immediately.

Poe has pvp?:) It wasn't even included in this EA, building pvp on current balance of 100k - 100M dps variety is impossible.

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“The advantage only matters during races”

Races are just the most obvious scenario. But players grind for XP ladders, currency farming, boss rotations, Delve depths, etc. all season long — and yes, visibility can speed up that process. Even if ultrawide FoV doesn’t let you attack mobs offscreen (which it sometimes does, depending on the skill), being able to see them earlier means:

Pre-positioning better
Knowing when to flask, vaal, or guard skill
Spotting map layout to optimize movement
Seeing breach/abyss triggers sooner
Locating loot faster and more efficiently
All of this adds up over time — it’s death-by-a-thousand-cuts advantage.

“You can hit mobs offscreen anyway”

That’s part of the problem. When paired with screen-wide AoE or automated triggers (like minions, totems, or spells like Tornado Shot, Spark, etc.), seeing mobs from further away lets you engage more safely and efficiently. It’s not about “can I hit them offscreen?” — it’s about how early I can plan to hit them, and whether I even know they’re there in the first place.

A player needs racer and minmaxer's mindset to actively use every small detail for an advantage as you describe. And play 24/7, only then those minor advantages snowball into real progress. Not all poe players carry this mindset but they all are subjected to penalties.

However, all in all, I think we've finally arrived to a common ground:) Don't really have objections on your latest representation, but it still aligns with my point of GGG sacrificing normal players comfort, modern game standards, and common sense for the sake of few nolifers who will try to turn everything into competitive abuse even outside of race events. Same goes for rippy difficulty in pinnacle content and crappy trade QoL.

GGG thinks only of abusers (and still fails to stop them, every league there is another money printing bug, poe2 included). They could've ignored those malicious griefers (minority), but they ignore normal players (majority) instead.

When you all say about D4 being "easy with mobile phone mechanics", it can also be called "not going into extremes for the sake of extreme players" like GGG does. Yeah you can become a pvp cheater with custom FOV, but pvp is not part of progression in D4, and cheats shouldn't be prevented at the cost of warping core game experience. Even denuvo is less invasive on players than some of GGG balance measures, including those black bars:)

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JakkerONAIR#4902 wrote:

Yep. I even made a video about it where I forced the game to an insane ratio so I could "Leap Slam" multiple screens. Then Blizzard capped the max range of the slam, so it doesn't work anymore, but damage skills were still another problem.

I told you before, all skills should have had capped range from the beginning:). This is blizz lua coders fail, not the reason to axe resolutions

Edit: to clarify, in case you wasn't aware, logic of combat skills and abilities is usually created by far less tech-savvy people than the engine developers. A separate designers use built-in scripting system, usually lua, to write spells. They never interact with the engine at low level, which occasionally leads to all sorts of problems, and creates spell which overtax the underlying engine, like when you use poe2 fireball + scattershot + echo + wildshards + raging spirit, it absolutely busts the instance:)

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Echothesis#7320 wrote:

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JakkerONAIR#4902 wrote:

Yep. I even made a video about it where I forced the game to an insane ratio so I could "Leap Slam" multiple screens. Then Blizzard capped the max range of the slam, so it doesn't work anymore, but damage skills were still another problem.

I told you before, all skills should have had capped range from the beginning:). This is blizz lua coders fail, not the reason to axe resolutions

Edit: to clarify, in case you wasn't aware, logic of combat skills and abilities is usually created by far less tech-savvy people than the engine developers. A separate designers use built-in scripting system, usually lua, to write spells. They never interact with the engine at low level, which occasionally leads to all sorts of problems, and creates spell which overtax the underlying engine, like when you use poe2 fireball + scattershot + echo + wildshards + raging spirit, it absolutely busts the instance:)

Because you are not aware, GGG will never cap the range of skills how you want.
It's not something they overlooked or didn't care about or are not smart enough to change - it's literally intended this way.

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JakkerONAIR#4902 wrote:

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Echothesis#7320 wrote:

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JakkerONAIR#4902 wrote:

Yep. I even made a video about it where I forced the game to an insane ratio so I could "Leap Slam" multiple screens. Then Blizzard capped the max range of the slam, so it doesn't work anymore, but damage skills were still another problem.

I told you before, all skills should have had capped range from the beginning:). This is blizz lua coders fail, not the reason to axe resolutions

Edit: to clarify, in case you wasn't aware, logic of combat skills and abilities is usually created by far less tech-savvy people than the engine developers. A separate designers use built-in scripting system, usually lua, to write spells. They never interact with the engine at low level, which occasionally leads to all sorts of problems, and creates spell which overtax the underlying engine, like when you use poe2 fireball + scattershot + echo + wildshards + raging spirit, it absolutely busts the instance:)

Because you are not aware, GGG will never cap the range of skills how you want.
It's not something they overlooked or didn't care about or are not smart enough to change - it's literally intended this way.

I am very much aware. One video of poe1 5-way afk rota service is enough to understand their definition of balance and attack ranges:) Do you know ANY other arpg game that allows such mess as that KB + aurabot?