I've been complaining since day one of getting involved about the really bad connectivity issues with Path of Exile 2 and I only hung on for as long as I did because of the fact that I realize that GGG (the devs) were completely overwhelmed with the amount of response that they got to this early release and therefore were scrambling to have enough servers or whatever is involved in order to accommodate all the millions of people that want to play around the world.
I decided to give them a bit of time to sort that out but now it has been over a month and things actually seem to be getting worse at times. Last night I played Astro-Bot for about an hour and then wanted some casual run around shooting stuff for loot interspersed with occasionally leaning forward on the sofa to focus just a bit on a boss. This is something the likes of which an ARPG provides so wonderfully.
Since my around level 40 ranger is on some pretty difficult territory and grinding for XP on lower levels is mostly a waste of time due to intentional diminishing returns off of fighting lower level mobs, I instead figured I would try out starting a new character, a sorceress.
I still want to comment POE2 for having one of the best character selection screens that I have ever seen in any game.
However, here comes another gripe because I am still me and I am still going to complain about stuff constantly. Entering text using a controller is a pain in the ass on the PS5 and is very time consuming. So unless you are choosing some wonky character name like nobodyhasthisname442731, chances are the name is already taken and you are going to have to go through the whole naming process over and over. It would be nice if the system could suggest a similar name or one with a certain number that IS available rather than just telling you the name is already in use. I suppose I don't really give AF what my name is because I have no intention of ever playing this game with other people.
Well, anyway, I got into the part of the game where you actually get to control something which in POE2 is right the fuck away, and I commend them for once again, doing this really well. The story can happen if you want it to but it happens at the loading screen and you can skip it anytime you want. Good!
So I land on the shore with my washed up sorceress and things are going fine until I get a mere two enemies on the screen an then the lag spikes start happening en masse.
I was able to not so gracefully and without dying make it past the first boss which was no longer a surprise to me because I have already played through this before and realize that especially as a ranged character, the only thing you have to do is just continually dodge-roll and pop off a few spells once you've gained some distance. That's what I did and then I made it into the first town.
There were probably 30 other players in there so the framerate and the constant "game paused" screen was popping up every few seconds. Then my character would do the commands that I was holding down when the game was paused and run across the room with me not having any ability to prevent it. let me tell you, if there is one thing I really enjoy it is not being able to fucking navigate to an NPC that you MUST speak to before you can leave because the servers can't handle 30 people being connected to the same instance at the same time.
I thought things might get better once I struggled but eventually succeeded to make it to the area outside the town where I would have my own instance, a new one created just for me on the server, but not... it got worse. I was running backwards frequently because my toon was (as far as the game was concerned) still facing enemies that were long dead and when I would get rushed by some wolves I would go to cast fire wall only to have it not work and then once the lag caught up with me I would cast it 3 times in a row completely missing all of them.
You have to work pretty hard to die in this starting area so I trudged on through hoping that it would improve if I just stuck with it.
After getting past the first boss in the tunnel that is some sort of giant worm thing and returning to town and seeing that the lag issues were not getting any better I turned it off. This is my final turning off of this game until they can sort these issues out.
There are loads, LOADS! of articles and videos explaining how people have been able to improve their connections and I'm not saying that this doesn't work for anyone, I'm saying the 3 or 4 that I have tried have not worked at all for me. Maybe it improved it a bit but the lag comes back, it always come back for me. For those of you out there that haven't been having any issues I say that this is fantastic and I am happy for you. But for me and hundreds of thousands of other players around the world this game is basically frustrating and borderline unplayable because the connection can't keep up. I actually switched over to an ethernet connection and regularly do speed tests on my internet connection to see what the deal is there.
I don't have the greatest internet connection in the world but my WIFI speeds clock in at 200Mb/sec and the upload is something like, I dunno, enough for everything else I do in my life but with POE2 more often than not I am regularly dealing with massive lag and input delay. It's not fun to play like this and since it is unfair to blame it on the users when hundreds of thousands of users are having the same problem, I am going to walk away from this one until they can sort it out on their end even though I would be very surprised if they admitted even a teensy bit of fault.
Perhaps I will come back to this in the future but last night's foray into a new game was enough to convince me that the issues I was having have not been resolved and perhaps they can't be resolved at the moment. If that is the case and they are working on it, well, they need to work on it a hell of a lot more if they are going to even attempt to accommodate millions of more players once this goes free-to-play.
I know how sensitive people are about this game so keep your pants on if you have no problems and love this game as much as Elon Musk pretends to. I'm not saying it is a bad game. I'm saying that if you are going to have a global game that enforces an always online protocol then perhaps the provider of the game should actually be capable of delivering such a service. I don't want to have to "mess with the settings" in order to get a playable game and I am not going to do that anymore.