Introducing PoE Community Help - (Unofficial) Technical Support for Path of Exile!

• Check it out here: https://www.poecommunity.help

• Please consider supporting it on Patreon or BuyMeACoffee

Hi everyone,

I've been on the forum for a while now - my post count is over 14,000 (!) - and as a lot of my posts are in Technical Support, I've been aware of the limited nature of technical support for PoE.

For those unaware;

• GGG no longer provide Technical Support via email.
• GGG do not post in the Technical Support forum section.
• There is no official support site or knowledge base for PoE.
• Some aspects of the sticky threads in Technical Support have been updated to also help those using macOS - but several have not (e.g. client cache; network connection testing).

It may have become somewhat more modest as of late - but about a decade ago I was an MVP on Blizzard's EU forums, and they had a very substantial support site with a lot of in-depth information pertaining to particular error messages (e.g. World of Warcraft's infamous Error #132) and various others issues that players could run into. Honestly, it was... pretty awesome.

Ever since I've starting being active here on the Path of Exile forum - including a brief stint as one of GGG's Valued Posters - I've been aware of how comparatively unhelpful and limited my posts here have been. Unfortunately, GGG not offering first-party Technical Support also curtails what is possible for community-based efforts; a huge amount of the time, anything GGG doesn't themselves post publicly, we're not going to know. Additionally, without pre-existing resources to refer to (and link to!), each individual thread is approached as yet another effort to re-invent the wheel - trying to remember e.g. how to resolve X error message, or what causes Y impact on a person's latency.

I have sporadically tried to address this issue in the past - such as with a step-by-step DxDiag guide, trying to establish and publish GGG's macro-related policies (223,721 views!!), or posting a guide to Steam account linking (319,085 views!!). Occasionally GGG would recognise these efforts and attempt to help bring attention to them - such as the Help and Information sticky thread linking to that guide for Steam account linking I had created - which I always appreciated.

Recently, I have started working on https://www.poecommunity.help

It has a dark mode... and also a light mode, for you wrong 'uns that want to burn your retinas.

I'd like to try to set expectations;

• The home page - people's first impression, no less - sucks and needs to be redesigned.
• It is comparatively early days for the website. While it does have quite a few pages, I hope to continue expanding on it over the weeks and months ahead.
• I do not work for GGG - nor have I ever in the past. I don't have any access to their internal documentation; all I can do is attempt to figure such stuff out for myself and document it.
• While I would love to have this resource grow to rival those of professional support sites - such as those offered by Blizzard Entertainment, Riot Games, or Epic Games - there is only one of me, and it isn't feasible financially for me to work on this full-time.

With all of the disclaimers out of the way, let's get to the fun stuff!

PoE Community Help is designed so that you can quickly and easily search for whatever issue you're having (e.g. "disconnections"; "FPS drops over time"), and it'll surface one or more guides that are perfect for that issue. Let's take a look at what this looks like in practice!

• You're having lag spikes, so end up on https://www.poecommunity.help/troubleshooting/lag/spikes and begin reading through it. None of the troubleshooting that's there helps, unfortunately - so the guide suggests you create an MTR / WinMTR log to examine the issue in-depth.
• It links you to https://www.poecommunity.help/information/server-connection for help creating the log. For this tool, it is important that you run the test to the correct IP address or hostname, so the guide explains in plain English how to find that information - no assumed knowledge.
• You can't run a program you don't have installed, so that same page explains how to install WinMTR on Windows, or MTR on macOS - just click on the tab for your OS.
• You're using macOS, and the guide for installing MTR relies on Homebrew. So it calls this out and links you to https://www.poecommunity.help/miscellaneous/mac/homebrew-install so you have more, simple, step-by-step instructions. PoE Community Help includes all of this information itself, so you never run into the issue of a 'stale' external link that doesn't work anymore.

If you find PoE Community Help useful, or are just glad it exists and want to see it thrive - I've set up a Patreon page and a BuyMeACoffee. I'll post updates, solicit feedback and suggestions, and that kind of thing. I'm interested in everyone's input, regardless of your technical proficiency.

If you want to know why you should support it on Patreon... well, you probably shouldn't;

• I hate ads and tracking, so the website comes ad-free by default. No ad-free version to sell.
• I want to help as many people as possible, so all of the content is free. Nothing's paywalled.
• I'm not going to plaster the website with annoying pop-ups. They're a bit cringe.

I don't really expect anyone to choose to support the site, but it'd mean the world to me if you did.

Thanks for reading,

John.

Animated site logo because why not

reserved

Good man! I wish I could muster the same level of enthusiasm for PoE that you do; I still enjoy the game, but I also have... issues... with GGG. I'm glad to see the Value in your contribution to the community, even without the label. =^[.]^=

"

Raycheetah#7060 wrote:

Good man! I wish I could muster the same level of enthusiasm for PoE that you do; I still enjoy the game, but I also have... issues... with GGG. I'm glad to see the Value in your contribution to the community, even without the label. =^[.]^=

Love ya, Ray.

Fair play for moding the forums back in the day... I know what that's like! 😅

"

Sarno#0493 wrote:

"

Raycheetah#7060 wrote:

Good man! I wish I could muster the same level of enthusiasm for PoE that you do; I still enjoy the game, but I also have... issues... with GGG. I'm glad to see the Value in your contribution to the community, even without the label. =^[.]^=

Love ya, Ray.

Fair play for moding the forums back in the day... I know what that's like! 😅

PoE's forum wasn't my first rodeo; I'd done a gig Modding a sci-fi fandom board once, as well. We had a wonderful feature called "No Holds Barred," a sub-forum with zero moderation (except to keep an eye out for actually illegal activity). If you posted there, you knew what you were getting into. Of course, PoE's forum was, back in the day, a rather wilder and woolier place; "colorful language" wasn't against the rules then. =^[.]^=

Great stuff Sarno :)

"

xjjanie#4242 wrote:

Great stuff Sarno :)

Hey, thanks! :)

I get 0 hits on 'SystemPropertiesPerformance' 'Ultimate Performance'/'powercfg' 'affinity' 'shader cache'. Those things were most helpful to me and i think will get you a lot of traffic from people looking to boost their performance (being poe1 or 2)

also isn't it a bit late to the party? i feel like anyone capable of reaching beyond the official channels will/can ask an llm to troubleshoot their issue these days and even get shell scripts to automate it for them. is there even a demand for this?

What Ray mention would be a much more worthwhile endeavor imo- the 'reasonably moderated forum' this place is turning into an HR office with coin flip as an enforcement apparatus

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AintCare#6513 wrote:

I get 0 hits on 'SystemPropertiesPerformance' 'Ultimate Performance'/'powercfg' 'affinity' 'shader cache'. Those things were most helpful to me and i think will get you a lot of traffic from people looking to boost their performance (being poe1 or 2)

I'm open to the feedback (thanks) - but the goal, at least initially, is to provide a set of shall we say... safe and uncontroversial advice for people, which can be given freely without knowing anything about the reader, their setup, and their technical proficiency.

I'm not sure it makes sense to encourage the average, not especially tech savvy person to venture off the beaten path into modifying CPU core affinities - or notably dialling up their system's power usage (read: heat output) when it could be some OEM build with two intake fans behind a sheet of glass at the front of the case which is on the verge of overheating at standard settings.

I could definitely see a new section with some disclaimers which is designed to cater to people who are more confident with advanced system modification, but for now it's intended more to help people troubleshoot problems than to eek out every last bit of performance.

"

AintCare#6513 wrote:

also isn't it a bit late to the party? i feel like anyone capable of reaching beyond the official channels will/can ask an llm to troubleshoot their issue these days and even get shell scripts to automate it for them. is there even a demand for this?

There's definitely growing usage of LLMs, for sure - and it'll be interesting to see where that goes.

Do you really think the average person has even heard of shell scripts, though?


The website is intended to cater to a wide audience. :)