Mirage league observation with 13 days played. Tinfoil hat needed, must read! Huge feedback!

"Hi, I really wanted to share this after all my years of playing since alpha as I feel it won't be seen otherwise, sorry to bother y'all with my opinion, I know y'all are busy.

I spend most of my free time playing Path of Exile and theorycrafting. I also talk about games a lot with other players about mechanics and technical support aspects, so I end up thinking pretty deeply about design decisions and technical directions. I wanted to share some observations about the current state of Path of Exile during Mirage league.



My main thought is this:

The game feels extremely buggy right now because some systems that are clearly designed for Path of Exile 2 are probably being introduced or tested inside Path of Exile 1. The smooth movement feeling from that used to exist in poe 1 is gone.

Movement, input, and interaction systems feel different right now, and it reminds me a lot of how Path of Exile 2 currently feels.



Some examples I’ve been noticing lately:

Gpu cache bugs

Global chat cache bugs

Motion blur/text blur

AA over/under sharpening bugs

A Slight movement micro stutter bug was introduced that exists in Poe 2 for some players

Movement sometimes feels strange or inconsistent. Sometimes the character just stops or feels like it gets caught on things and stutters.

Loot highlighting and picking up items occasionally feels off.

Collision with monsters feels different than it used to.

Sometimes inputs feel like they don’t register immediately.

None of these feel like normal small bugs. It feels more like something deeper in the system changed.

My guess is that some movement or input systems are being adjusted so both games can eventually share more of the same underlying engine.

Controller support being added might be a big reason for this.

Supporting both systems at the same time probably requires rewriting how input is handled internally.



Path of Exile 2 uses dodge rolls and more animation commitment in combat. Path of Exile 1 has always been extremely fast with almost no animation commitment. Skills cancel instantly and movement skills can override almost everything.

If the roll mechanic or similar systems are being tested or prepared inside Path of Exile 1, that could explain why movement and collision feel a little different right now.

I also have a theory about why gameplay pacing might slowly shift over time.

Modern endgame builds in Path of Exile are unbelievably fast and generate massive numbers of calculations.

Every hit in the game triggers things like this I think:
accuracy checks
crit checks
damage modifiers
resistance calculations
ailment chances
item effects
triggered skills
ect and then some...

When builds are producing hundreds of hits per second across multiple projectiles and triggered spells, that becomes an enormous amount of server calculations.

Multiply that across thousands of players online at once and it becomes pretty clear that the engine is doing a huge amount of work.

Because of that, I sometimes wonder if certain balance changes over the years were partially about performance as much as gameplay balance.

Things like reducing aura stacking, limiting trigger loops, reducing projectile duplication, and adjusting minion scaling all drastically reduce the amount of calculations happening in extreme builds.

From a technical standpoint, dodge roll style movement also makes a lot of sense.

Teleport style movement abilities require instant position updates, path validation, collision recalculations, and enemy targeting updates. A dodge roll with a fixed distance and animation is much easier for the server to validate.

Another interesting side effect of all of this is how it connects to the in game economy.

The faster builds clear maps, the more monsters they kill. The more monsters killed, the more items and currency get generated. That increases both server load and the rate that items enter the economy.

So pacing changes can indirectly affect both performance and economic stability.

Overall my impression is that several long term goals might be happening at the same time:

Aligning systems between Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2
Controller compatibility in Poe 1 with the roll mechanic being coded in
Managing extreme build scaling that stresses the engine
Preparing both games to share more technical infrastructure in the future



I could be completely wrong about parts of this, but I figured it was interesting enough to share.

Either way, I really appreciate how deep the systems in Path of Exile are. It’s one of the few games where players can actually spend time thinking about how everything under the hood works.

Thanks for all the work your team continues to put into the game. I'm sorry if this was a lot to read but as a veteran alpha tester who's 33 now, I felt I had to share how I felt about the direction of the game.



As always my last feedback I always say is please remove the TFT community, it kills in game interaction entirely. I miss the days when I could complete challenges/maps in 820 with other players. it's become so bad people bot scanning the chat for keywords to complete their challenges so they don't have to pay TFT fees. Anyways this is my favorite game and ill always continue to support it buying supporter packs, I hope my in depth feedback helps."

I sent this email on the 9th to GGG. Maybe this feedback lead to the TFT situation being resolved, hopefully because of me! You're welcome ;)