Diablo: What fresh hell is this?

[Bal]

Path of Exile is starting a new league today. If you haven't tried it, now is a good time. I recall some interest was expressed in this thread.

[Mongrel]

This league is going to be so wacky with all the wild changes - I spent the last 3 days crafting abyssal jewels like an absolute madman, alt-spamming until life loses all meaning.

Not going to jump in day one, but Starr and I are a hell of a lot more likely to play Legion than we did Synthesis and we'd be happy to team up with anyone who feels like it.

[mharr]

I have never touched PoE purely because it has a million players and requires unique character names. I can't even with that.

[Bal]

I just name my characters after what they're going to do plus Bal on the end. Current character is SandyBal, because I'm using sand. Playing exclusively in leagues, I just don't care what my name is, because most names are nonsense and your friends list is account bound.

[Mongrel]

Since TenCent "asked" them to ban all political discussion, I'm probably going to name my next character "Tea and a mint square".

If I do a Cyclone build, it'll probably be a riff on the Tazmanian devil, obviously. Maybe something about orange juice.

[atog]

The giant black-and-purple phallic object league has been pretty rewarding so far. I've gotten a couple uniques (a wand for lightning mages, a templar cassock, a gold farming amulet) and some high tier currency from the Frozen Legions.

Day 5, and I've managed to steer a budget double strike berserker (big meatwad all-in on damage, practically no defenses) to the midpoint of the acts. The beginning of act 6 was rough - I was running out of mana despite pouring gallon jugs of windshield wiper fluid down my gullet - but I changed some gear around so now I'm leeching a little mana to keep up.

Random pubby parties can still work out for you if you want to railroad past packs of generic goons and take down bosses in a hurry. They will, however, ignore side missions, crafting recipe pickups, and other optional content. Loot gets ignored for the most part; no time to go back and pick it all up or you will get LEFT BEHIND.

Melee did get a few nice tools, Blood and Sand among them. The basic laws of modern warfare still apply however, you don't bring a sword and buckler to a major infantry offensive. Ranged area antipersonnel weapons still do a far better job - volleys of burning arrow or toxic rain, big-blast chaos damage skills, arc or arc traps kill packs of dudes around corners, etc.

I'm always looking for friends to grind with (unlike some Syndicate members who seem to think you can run a research lab all by yourself).

[Mongrel]

Starr and I play PoE. A Let's Play!

"Hey I'm stuck with this no-stopping pubbie party and I can't get up. Can you do me a favour and get me a drink?"
"Sure."
...
"Oh, I crashed. Well okay then."
"Well now you can take a drink at least."
"'Take a shot every time you crash.'"

[Mongrel]

But seriously, they need to change the DC text to "An Expected Disconnection Occurred."

[Mongrel]

If any of y'all want to roll with us, we're still low-level scum for now (under 20, Act 1).

You can look us up as BannedInBeijing (Starr) and Tea_and_a_mint_square (me).

[Büge]

Starr and I play PoE.

But... portalofevil shut down *years* ago!

[Friday]

I would but I worry that if I play another Diablo3-alike I will lose what little remains of my life

[Friday]

Guess what girl ground 500 hours last season to get her DH up enough gear/paragon to hit top 300 on the boards last season in nonseasonal play

*thumbs at herself*

this retard

[Friday]

still not as retarded as when i ground to rank 11 for mount in vanilla

[Bal]

You're right to be concerned. PoE make DIII look like a shallow pond.

[Mongrel]

It's also an operation which has never really grown beyond amateur-hour management and coding (never mind the writing), one which has twenty expansions of cruft stacked on top. So the game's about as stable as an unsupervised sixth-grade group science project.

[atog]

Desktop icon that reads "Don't Let Kiwis Code"

The best is when you survive an endless Tower of Babylon filled with gauntlets of saw blades, lava floors, pressure-activated pungee stick traps, halls of guillotines, and poison darts in the walls, a massive mechanical simulacrum of the first Emperor slamming a morningstar around in a small box while you dodge and scurry out of the way, bleeding and stunned in turns, and then he grinds to a standstill and keels over, exploding into loot and treasure keys...and then the game crashes to desktop before you can say "Bilbo Baggins".

[Friday]

That's literally nightmarish

I have had nightmares where that is exactly what happens

sometimes after I spend a while farming in a game and I'm heading back to a save point I will start to have anxiety that the game will crash just before I save

[Mongrel]

With this game you basically expect that all the damn time.

Grab the currency and expensive shit first, and always have a full inventory, 'cause you never know when you're going to get booted and lose a portal.

The game has basically regressed to the point where all expansions are basically Beta releases and the first few weeks of every league are bug squashing. Lately it's so bad people are joking they're alpha releases. If you think I'm kidding go the official site front page and look up the weekly bug patch notes.

That's without getting into the fact that my computer, old as it may be, can handle many resource-intensive games with far, FAR higher requirements perfectly smoothly, while PoE just stutters and chokes constantly. Defenders of GGG often protest that a SSD is a must to play the game, but even without getting into the absurdity of that "requirement", most people with SSD's still experience problems - even with bleeding-edge computers.

A lot of people complain about buggy games with the usual hyperbolic claim that IF YOU DON'T FIX THIS THE GAME WILL DIE, but in PoE's case this really is true, I think. It's that exhausting.

I don't even know what I'd do if I tried playing anything other than the minion or AoE-based builds I like anyway (I hate too much clicky-click, but playing around that also lets me survive a lot of the lag and other performance issues). Starr on the other hand has built a number of melee guys and they have for a pretty miserable experience. Probably, I would not be touching the game at all, if that was all I could play.

[Bal]

I don't know what kind of internet or toasters you guys are running this on, but I've had exactly one crash since this league started, and a couple other server side issues besides. I've taken three characters in to end game, well past level 100 delves, multiple eternal labyrinths completed.

[Mongrel]

In my case doubling the RAM (which is now QUADRUPLE the supposed on-paper requirements) fixed most, but not all, issues. I would watch as the game not-so-slowly consumed every scrap of memory my computer could muster, so I finally caved. My only consolation is that RAM is universally useful and the money I spent didn't go to GGG.

It's funny how there are days when we think our connection's gone bad, but it turns out, that nope, it's just PoE's servers being low-budget dogshit again. As much as I give Tanks shit for being a Russian squeeze operation, at least the code is ruthlessly optimized and tighter than a tick, if only because most of the playerbase plays on some variety of ancient shrivelled-up half-potato.

Actually yesterday's patch notes were hilarious. Apparently there were numerous abilities which they patched last patch which had to be re-patched because they were coded so poorly that players imply using those abilities was causing undue server load.

Are there players who play without any issues? Of course there are, otherwise the game would have already collapsed. But are there far too many issues indicative of a sloppy, amateur-hour operation that rushes to put out content with little-to-no testing? I sure as hell think so. It's the old adage about "If one student is doing poorly, it's probably the student who's got a problem, but if half the class is bad..."