Drakk the ARPG-ist's PoE Review: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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I think, he meant FPS drops, that happen due to very poor optimization and inability to reduce particle effect density/quality. Sure, top-tier PCs may have less issues with that, but there'are situations where is the BEST PC in the world will hang out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXTYhif9080

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Jgizle wrote:

The lag desync issue is usually an issue on the players side. GGG has stated several times that people have spammed support on this issue. They usually say to try moving your router closer to your pc or using a wired connection and almost all people have their issue fixed after this. Next is hardware. If both of these are not the issue then it is your location in relation to the server you play on. If you are in california playing on texas server it is going to take a while to send your data and receive data back. Thus high latency and you get lag or desync. They can fix that by adding more servers, provided they had the money to do so.

As for currency in ESC. Chaos has no value really in Esc because the essences are superiir to chaos itself and are easier to get. Thats the reason for ur issue. If this becomes part of game chaos value will go down.

As for players not being online, thats an issue with poe trade. GGG should do more to help make it more accurate.

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heedkid wrote:

@OP
Literally half of your uglys were killer-features which brought PoE player base when beta started. Flasks with unique mechanics: you can't just mash 1-5 all the time how it was in d2 era, all your flasks have meaning. After PoE i played many arpgs and your usual "fill inventory with bottles and drink" felt bland and hollow. So flasks PoE-style was one of reasons i started to play. (Of cource i'm not talking about current pathfinder issues)
Second, uniques. Oh boy. That truly what bought my attention back in the past: uniques are not your best in every slot. All you wear atm in d3 - uniques. Even in d2 and Median, Sacred, GD. Sets and uniques were killing itemization. In PoE instead of best choices you have to think why you need specific unique, which drawbacks it brings, how to build around it. Situation got worse with jewels system though, now you can see folks running around in just two rares, but that is unusual. Anyway, getting unique in your item build sometimes is a puzzle on its own and that's great, kept me interested in itemization for 4 years.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

Thanks for the feedback! I disagree with much of it, but it's still valuable stuff for the dev team to see. Multiple perspectives are important.

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Ðrakken wrote:

-Flasks
This is a matter of my personal taste and hence not in Ugly. I think flasks are silly. "Excuse me monsters, I am parched! Please pause hitting me for one moment while I sort through my portable refrigerator for the flavor of magic mountain dew that will allow me to get unfrozen! How am I moving my arms when I'm frozen you ask? Who cares!" I guess this contributes to gameplay with more buttons to mash, but I don't like being beholden to my jamba juice selection/charges just to play a build which would work without them if they didn't have to exist in the game. Other games have them or a variation of them, and my opinion of them in PoE is no different than in those cases: They're restrictive and silly.

I feel that flasks should probably be categorized before being criticized. I find those that provide short-term buffs (not status immunities, but actual buffs) to be the least appealing addition to the game.

My biggest beef with such flasks is that they are

A. Boring to use. Click a button, get the effect, watch the seconds count down, click the button again, watch the seconds count down again. Keeping track of such timers is not something I find fun.

and

B. Necessary. With defensive mechanics being in the piss-poor state they are right now, a lot of endgame content is simply not doable without them.

Re: rares vs. uniques. Ever play D2 classic? Before uniques were in that game? A lot of people opined that that is a much more interesting implementation of RNG, and I kind of agree.

I like GGG's compromise here, where fantastic uniques are available, but they are not just stat-bags and are rarely BiS unless they are used to enable a particular mechanic.

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Mooginator wrote:

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Ðrakken wrote:

-One-shot mechanics + EXP Loss on Death.

I don't have a problem with either of these mechanics in isolation: players should be rewarded for learning and mitigating the mechanics of dangerous monsters, and punished when they do not; HOWEVER, in PoE's current state with both of these elements being so unforgiving, they need to be mutually exclusive. Right now this system cuts good builds off from content and progression entirely with exactly zero recourse for player correction. How my berserker, with 6.8k HP, 160+ res and 5k armor unbuffed/unflasked can waltz through T14 maps for hours and then in a T11 map in one hit from a monster offscreen while fully buffed with zero room for player correction destroy me and lose all of that progress, is utterly ridiculous. Whats worse is how painfully COMMON this sort of scenario is lvl 85+.

Players have been complaining about this since BETA. You are absolutely right - the 1-shot mechanics without any report on exactly "what it was" can make the game very frustrating - and paired with the experience loss on death (which really should be removed or reworked), it undoubtedly drives players away. Another issue is the massive majority (I'd say 95%) of players will never, ever experience end-game content (shaper, uber atziri, etc.). This is because of the death and 1-shot mechanics that make the game crazy difficult rather than "fun and progressive" at high levels.

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DDusk wrote:

First of all u r making a "review" of the game and posting it on that games own forum...where incidently all the hardcore community is....how does that work? Are u trying to sell us the game we're already into... :))

U could call it ur memoires but not a review. :) its just silly...

Second of all u missed the whole point of the game if u think flasks are a bad system since it fixed alot of problems the rest of the arpgs have....witch is basically staking hp in ur invenotry and having to refill every time u go to town. Plus they ad an extra layer to the mechanics of the game.

Third...uniques are SUPPOSED to have downsides! Since otherwise they would all be best in slot and thus making yellow gear worthless....

And #4: Yes the game should be able to kill u. If u had a 6.8k hp zerker u proly had the increased damage taken node.... and that combined with u prob getting lazy with actually reading map and mob mods couse u were doing a lower tier map led to to your death....

I had a 4.8k hp char and it never died unexpectedly...it was me and my greed or lazyness that killed it....was on softcore ofc but I never got 1 shot.

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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Jgizle wrote:

The lag desync issue is usually an issue on the players side. GGG has stated several times that people have spammed support on this issue. They usually say to try moving your router closer to your pc or using a wired connection and almost all people have their issue fixed after this. Next is hardware. If both of these are not the issue then it is your location in relation to the server you play on. If you are in california playing on texas server it is going to take a while to send your data and receive data back. Thus high latency and you get lag or desync. They can fix that by adding more servers, provided they had the money to do so.

I think, he meant FPS drops, that happen due to very poor optimization and inability to reduce particle effect density/quality. Sure, top-tier PCs may have less issues with that, but there'are situations where is the BEST PC in the world will hang out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXTYhif9080

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Jgizle wrote:

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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Jgizle wrote:

The lag desync issue is usually an issue on the players side. GGG has stated several times that people have spammed support on this issue. They usually say to try moving your router closer to your pc or using a wired connection and almost all people have their issue fixed after this. Next is hardware. If both of these are not the issue then it is your location in relation to the server you play on. If you are in california playing on texas server it is going to take a while to send your data and receive data back. Thus high latency and you get lag or desync. They can fix that by adding more servers, provided they had the money to do so.

I think, he meant FPS drops, that happen due to very poor optimization and inability to reduce particle effect density/quality. Sure, top-tier PCs may have less issues with that, but there'are situations where is the BEST PC in the world will hang out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXTYhif9080

In the game you are right, there is no way to change that. Stuff like burning and chilled ground cause fps issues. Even a mao that gives mobs charges every x seconds causes lag because every mob in the map is being updated every few seconds.

If you have a more modern pc though you should be able to over ride the games graphical settings with a global over ride depending on your graphics card. AMD Radeon and Nvidia I know for sure have these functions, AMD having a superior version. Intel Graphics cards have a similar option although not as good as either of the above.

AMD Catalyst Control Center
Nvidia Control Center (Also GeForce Experience)
Intel Graphics & Media Control Panel

There are also 3rd party programs such as

ATITool
RivaTuner

If you have no way to do these on your pc then your pc itself is not intended for gaming in general and as such it is no surprise you would have issues.

Having more RAM helps for using virtual memory to improve graphical performance but that is limited. Really your graphics card itself needs at least 1 GB of dedicated memory.

I have 16 GB of RAM and 1GB of dedicated memory on my AMD graphics card. Combined with global over ride in Catalust Control Center to turn off shadows and lower particle effects I have never had any issues with POE performance. That was until I tried the experimental frame optimizations which resulted in eratic fps changes from 10 to over 200. My pc cant quite handle multi threading so thats an issue on my end, which GGG might be able to help on.