Unplayable. CONSTANT latency spikes & negative progress. Wasted my $

It doesn't matter how good the gameplay, graphics, bosses, etc. are when the game barely functions on its own for a large chunk of people. The biggest problem for a ton of ppl is the latency. I & many friends on many many different setups & specs are CONSTANTLY and I mean CONSTANTLY lagging no matter if we are wired, on whatever server location, VPN, you name it. Reminds me of PoE 1... Literally every 2 seconds is a spike and it is unplayable causing a plethora of issues for anybody trying to play the game that doesn't happen to be lucky enough to land on one of the very few decent servers you guy have. You create all these systems like mob respawns after death yet lag is probably causing a decent amount of deaths. Then I and many others will sit there on ONE map during campaign (with relatively cracked builds mind you) for and hour trying to get back to the place we were at. But the party isn't over yet, cuz the game disconnects and/or crashes and doesn't properly save progress sometimes so its then reset again.. On top of that you'll also encounter a common mob that one shots you and resets your progress again. And FINALLY after an hour and a half of miserable game time you finally make it to the checkpoint that was 3.4 miles away from the waypoint you started at since the giant, mazelike map design with a random rotation makes it damn near impossible to coordinate where you are going even after you've completed the map for the 3rd time. And in the end, even when you finally get 5 minutes of grace (If you get 5 minutes at all) where you can actually play the game, first thing I get is the audio scrambling and the SFX going out while the music plays at Aggorat. Nice one GGG. I've pushed thru hours of miserable trash hoping that maybe it would get better as I've seen many without any problems at all. But this is just ridiculous. I paid money to play EA and I cant even play it & enjoy it for 10 minutes.. its a joke.

I understand EA isn't a finished product of course, that's obvious. I also understand it expensive to run servers. But these are issues that have persisted for like a decade back into PoE 1 like I said. There are thousands of complaints about latency and no, its not on everyone else's side cuz we've (or at least I) have checked into it deeply and wasted our time. Just make it bearable at least... Cuz I was really excited to play PoE 2 and dropped $ on a supporter package weeks in advance looking forward to a smoother, slower experience. You got the slow down, but the smooth isn't there for many many players still. I pushed thru so many hours and came to the conclusion that I just don't have any fun playing it like this. And as good as it is, I'm not about to waste my time, let alone open my wallet until I can actually play the game.

And this is why you paid for a glorified beta test.

And almost every post about lag or latency turns out to be not the servers or in some cases not even latency.

Yeah it's unplayable for me as well. I have to deal with it by constant reloading and creating new instances of the same zone. And then clear it as fast as possible so it does not start to lag spike. This is what is killing any joy i could have had from the game for me.

I'm pretty sure this is a local issue bro, I've been playing PoE 1 for years and years and I can count on 1 hand how many times I've had connection issues, on PoE2 so far I have 200+ hours and not a single issue, I watch many streamers and I've never seen any of them with that type of issue.. I have 6 friends on Discord that also played poe1 forever with me and that are also playing PoE2 and none of them have this issue.. So idk, seems to be a local issue.

Same issue. One of the many issues I'm experiencing.
On top of the lag I'm getting booted off the game around 10 times per day during boss fights.