How/Why Do People Stand Hardcore?

To start, I love permadeath in almost all games. It's a great, thrilling mechanic when it's used well, and when I started playing PoE I was sure I'd want to switch over to HC after learning the ropes.

However, after many, many standard characters of practice, there's still no way I would ever play Hardcore.

It has nothing to do with the game being punishing, because it really isn't in most cases. Avoiding death becomes pretty simple after a while, assuming you are in control of your character. No, the reason I would never play Hardcore is because this game's netcode, in my experience, just straight up can't handle it.

If I'm being generous, about 50% of my deaths are deaths that I could have done ANYTHING about. That's not deaths where desync wasn't involved, that's just deaths where I could have played around the possibility of desync better and survived as a result. The other 50% of my deaths are walking somewhere and then "oh, apparently I'm dead." Dead to monsters I had never seen, dead to warping to an area I had never been to, dead when there weren't any monsters around at all.

It's not horribly frequent, maybe once every twenty or so high level maps, but in a permadeath game that's still absolutely unacceptable. If I'm honest, it feels too frequent even for an exp penalty. Punishing players for your bad game engine is a really, REALLY poor design decision.

I know it isn't my internet, because my connection can handle any other multiplayer game I throw at it. I don't never lag in other games, but this is the only one in which lag will routinely kill me without my being able to so much as see what happened.

So I'm curious: Hardcore players, how do you deal with it? Do you really just die to nothing every few days and need to start a new character? Do you alt+F4 at the first sign of lag (which would mean hard quitting out of nearly every map at least once)? Maybe I live too far from the server and so my dysync is worse than average? Are there some tricks or builds or skills that give you a better chance against desync somehow? If there is not a solution, why on earth would you play HC?

I'm interested to know, because I'd love to play permadeath. It's just that the prospect of losing 50% of my characters to random chance is a bit much for me.

tl;dr: Netcode is bad, but I like permadeath. Is there a solution? If not, why would anyone play HC?

I pick builds that are highly resistant to things like desync. That's it. Like right now I'm using an arc build. Arc - auto targeting spell and far reaching.

However what you described is most likely some form of packet loss. You could be ok with your connection to other games because the hop route to other games' servers is fine, but it could be that it's not fine for the poe servers.

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jebroni wrote:

I pick builds that are highly resistant to things like desync. That's it. Like right now I'm using an arc build. Arc - auto targeting spell and far reaching.

However what you described is most likely some form of packet loss. You could be ok with your connection to other games because the hop route to other games' servers is fine, but it could be that it's not fine for the poe servers.

That's something I was wondering. If the desync is as bad for everyone else as it is for me, I can hardly imagine the kind of person who would enjoy HC. Thanks for your input!

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Get off dial-up

Here's my speedtest



Hardly the best ever, but not exactly dial up either.

oh look another thread about desync.

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Dahmura wrote:

oh look another thread about desync.

Oh look, someone who didn't read the thread!

Pure internets power.

I don't really know what to tell you man, your desync'y experience isn't really the same as mine. But; I've learnt the hard way things like no AoE skills you actually have to click on guys, careful with the movement skills, the power of decoy totem and so on. You get used to it.

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@OP Many players enjoy it, warts and all. A look at the one month HC ladder will attest to that.

If it's not for you, don't play HC. No biggy, sir. Relax and enjoy PoE in the way that suits yourself, and allow others the same opportunity. :)

Yeah, that's what I've been doing! I'm just looking for the HC player perspective on how they make HC work, because from where I'm standing I can't see it.

And the Class - ahem - League Warfare continues!

I'm a Standard player and have zero interest in Hardcore for a plethora of reasons. However, I worry threads like this will just spawn backlash threads titled (and I'm paraphrasing here): "Only people with less masculinity than me play Standard." I'm tired of HC people crapping on SC just because we want to play the game at our own pace and not check what month it is whenever we log on (I guess that only applies to temp leagues, but whatever), so therefore I'm not gonna engage in the same contempt towards others who choose to enjoy the game differently from me.

But if this is basically just a desync/PoE performance thread, perhaps the title should be changed.