Story of my first week back to PoE in 1+ years

Tonight I got home from work at 8pm, my wife and I ordered a pizza and decided to watch a few episodes of breaking bad together. Around 11:00 she wants to read so I decide to go downstairs with a 6 pack and the rest of the pizza and play some PoE.

I used to have a PC, but for the last year I've been facing the financial struggles resultant of immigration lawyers and student loans for my wife, and to help pay the bills I decided to sell my rig. I tried to play PoE on console in the past, right around the time of metamorph league, where I tried essence drain trickster for the first time. The game crashed pretty frequently back then and at first I thought it was just a one off thing, or maybe because my PlayStation is so old the hard drive might be shot. I tried all the troubleshooting I could to try and fix the problem and ended up just burning myself out and quitting because it seemed likely it was not an issue with my setup at all and had to do with the game itself.

Fastworward a year to last weekend. I felt the demons waking up (you know it if you have ever tried to quit before) and I knew that a new league was about to come out soon, but I missed the past 3 or 4 leagues so maybe I should catch up on what has changed before the fresh league hits. I install the game on my trusty PS4 and start up a new character in the ritual trade league and start playing.

Didnt crash at all until lvl 30. Not bad, maybe GGG has pushed some updates to improve the crashing and if it happens less often I might be able to tolerate it. One or two crashes every few hours wouldn't be too bad! I thought.

I get to the first lab, kill izaro twice, and am trying to find the last aspirants trial when I get hit with a crash. Well that sure is annoying but at least it's just the normal lab and maybe I just got unlucky.

I re-enter the lab as soon as I start the game up again (restarting takes like ~2 minutes each time because of loading screens on console btw) and I instantly crash again in the first area.

What the hell? I'm pretty upset at this point because I just wanna get the lab done and then it can crash any time it wants to...

Crashed again as izaro died in last phase, but this one didn't feel random it was at the exact moment of his death so it was probably triggered by something with his death, and didn't annoy me as much as the first two.

Finally on my fourth try I complete the lab and decide to call it a day because I'm frustrated that the whole process took me around 40 minutes through no fault of my own.

The next day I am excited to hop on and continue leveling my witch. I already forgot all about the crashes and was happy to see the necromancer portrait in the character selection. I played for about 1.5 hours straight and was in act 5 before I crashed again.

Whatever, didn't care. Didn't really disrupt me and just had to stare at a loading screen for two minutes and be on my way.

Next crash was 20 minutes later, and then I didn't crash again for the rest of the night.

Repeat for a few more days and I'm kind of annoyed but having fun regardless. After all it has been a year since I've played and I haven't played on PC since legion.

Ok so back to the beginning, I'm about to head downstairs with some beers and pizza for a night of trying to push my atlas past yellow maps. Crashed probably 3 or 4 times an hour for the next two hours, and every single time I crash I have to stare at multiple loading screens to enter oriath, then go hideout, and then back into my map, and the try to navigate back to where I was because every crash refreshes the minimap fog. So I'm blinding running through maps with dead monsters everywhere and empty quicksilver flasks to get back where I was. I can't just start a new map, because I don't want to lose the only copy of that map I had before I get the Atlas completion bonus.

Those 2 hours was all it took for me to finish all the beer during loading screens and I swear to god I almost went ahead and maxed out my credit card to order new PC parts right then and there. Happy I didn't because I'd be returning them anyways and I'd rather not have to face that reality after my brain adjusts to the idea of having a PC again.

Now here I am. I'm fuming. I really just don't want to play anymore because staring at loading screens is not fun and I don't have a lot of time because I'm working two jobs.

I had hoped this problem had been fixed in the year since I was having this problem before but clearly it's not so I will just have to wait until I can afford a computer.

Thanks for releasing a buggy mess to the platform for poor people and then putting minimal effort to maintain it. I know we little guys aren't going to be the most profitable but while I can't go spend 500 bucks on a new computer I can and probably would have spent $20 every now and then on MTX so that my zombiemancer doesn't have to run around with a stupid black top hat and I can buy some more stash tabs.

Also random side note I like to leave the game open so I can trade while I do housework sometimes and I have never even gone more than an hour in the hideout doing NOTHING before I can hear the PlayStation menu ambience from the other room (because the game crashed)