Performance and Stability

dear Chris if company has possiblity to change their graphic engine into Havok would be perfect coz that engine better coding ty

This has been the case for how many years now? And it only gets worse. So many words, so little change.

good read

Atleast now you actually acknowledged that there was a performance/stability problem. Acknowledging that there is a problem is the first step in solving a problem.

You knew before that minions can cause performance issues, but still you proceed with a league mechanic with high enemy minion count & highlighted a change in minion gamestyle for a league. It's either lack of foresight or just as if you did not even care, tsk.

"No matter what engine we are using, Path of Exile would be slow"

New engine in 4.0 confirmed?

That explains why I haven't encountered any performance difference with my melee builds in standard ...

if thats the 'melee patch' and its chances to blame: here is a solution

revert all the melee patch mechanic changes. noone is going to notice because:
a) melee is something you actively push playerbase away from
b) these changes did nothing to improve 'strike' skills gameplay
c) noone cares about melee when you introduce A-Bombs as an alternatives

like seriously, all the hype you created around melee mechanic changes is all hot air from gamers point of view. targeting is STILL garbage, the experience when swinging sword just to the side of a mob standing in front of you is still garbage and the skill design is - sorry to be blunt - terrible when you make it center around said targeting (chain hook)

if 3.7 melee mechanics are to blame - revert them. noone is going to notice, seriously

Appreciate it and I feel for the developers, 4 new full content leagues a year is brutal. I can only imagine if I had to add a full system into a huge stack of mechanics, while refactoring whole systems, I mean half the damn time I can't get the leadership at work to choose what color they want the damn submit button, in 13 weeks development time.

To fully rework entire chunks of the game like you guys have done this year. + adding in new mechanics on top of it, and never being affraid to try things.

I mean sure we could get same old same old, league over league and have safe, lag free mechanics, but i would get so bored with the game.

We can only have so many leagues where the content is touch a stone and spawn a huge wave of monsters, before it gets old. Sure they are fun, but it does get old. So I welcome the new aspects with things like blight league. Shows you are willing to take risks, and without taking risks, the game would just turn to old news.

For the whole "new engine" people game engines are always new. You never stop adding in the new pieces to them, multi-threading comes out you add it, DX11 comes out you add it, DX12 comes out you add it in. New <insert> any industry standard and you add it in. Just like we got at start of year with lighting rework to incorporate the newer lighting techniques. The problem is when you have games as large as this one, in player base you can't just jump to the newest, cause only 10% of the population has machines that can run the newest. I mean It was only a few months ago we heard screaming that they were finally removing DX9 so they could make the whole engine better. And people were chomping at them about killing the players using DX9 off.

is there room for performance increases, yes but they are tricky. POE doesn't suffer from rampant duping bugs, massive cheats, and a world of other negative things half the other online games suffer from, and in doing so there is a server cost that has to be paid.
In addition they have so many unique items that are actually unique. Not just ohh look a unique it does 10 Fire damage and flames like in other RPG "uniques" instead a single unique can completely change the entire game play experience. Which means it has to be calculated.

Also the game is not horrific, and the devs bust butt to fix things they couldn't expect, but also don't want to change from our 4 leagues a year model, which leaves a bit less testing time to work out mass kinks, it's also hard to simulate millions of peoples computers, drivers, builds, and the crazy things this game lets us do. They could strap us onto a game on rails, or worse stop making leagues for a mobile phone game. :)

I also appreciate their openness and willingness to say, hey we screwed up, it happens. We tried to push a bit too fast, and got burned. So to mee I say keep pushing, keep trying, keep bending the servers to their knees. Cause I really can't find anything that keeps me up at night thinking about how i can make some odd ball unique build, more so then this game. All "current engine 4k ultra HD" BS out there still sucks in regards to game play. I either point a gun and shoot a person, or I run around a mostly empty "open map" following a quest tracker. Not much to get excited about.
So thank you GGG for the post, and thank you for the work.

Hey Chris,

thanks for your detailed post in the topic. Some questions still remain, tho.

You cut down instances of skills in the past, eg the maximum number of SRSs or blades from Blade Vortex. So the issue is not new and known ... still this „oh we make the peoples to have dozens of minions“ passed Q&A? (btw, does this dude still has his D3 mousepad?)

On the server side, you cap the maximum number of damaged targets of certain skills, like Contagion(?), if i remember correctly. So why are some skills capped while others are not, being able to stall server performance?

Monster density seems to be critical
sometimes, too. You can hardly distinguish the monsters in dense stacks, for me it seems quite pointless to have such high numbers of monsters in tiny areas.


Thanks for your attention!

Kind regards,
some other Chris

Do blighted encounters especially in blighted maps in waves waves.
It is impossible to complete blighted maps, if u don't have build that utilizing some proliferation/ or if u are alone.
Also it will reduce some "constant" server calculations.