Latency may be the culprit to our PC freezing and game crashes.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core Processor
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060
Storage: SSD(1TB)

CANADIAN SERVER(I've since changed to Washington DC)

Graphic Settings

I've tested:

DX12, DX11, VUlkan (DX12 seems to work best)

VSYNC (ON and OFF)
Target FPS (74 prior and current is 100)

Dynamic Resolution + Dynamic Culling (ON and OFF)
Dynamic Resolution (no Dynamic Culling)
Dynamic Culling (no Dynamic Resolution)

FSR, DLSS (Ultra performance, Performance and Quality modes)
NIS (No Upscale, 77%, 77% + 30 sharpness, 67%, 67% + 30 sharpness)
Also: OFF (none of the above) *post-edit

Fullscreen and Fullscreen Borderless.

NVIDIA Reflex (ON and ON + Boost)

Detail settings template:

[FIRST]
Texture Quality: Medium
Texture Filtering: Trilinear Filtering
Lighting: Shadows
Shadow Quality: Low
Sun Shadow Quality: Low
Number of Lights: Low
Bloom: 25%
Water Detail Level: Low

[SECOND]
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: 8x Anisotropic Filtering
Lighting: Shadows
Shadow Quality: High
Sun Shadow Quality: Low
Number of Lights: Low
Bloom: 25%
Water Detail Level: Low

*Please let us turn bloom off completely or allow us to hide other players(not in party). Entering town is a nightmare when everyone has BLOOM and Particle effects from MTX.


MY ISSUES

I like many others experience my PC freezing or just the game freezing. I've tested different setting combinations. Regardless of the settings, my FPS will be stable at 100 and the next it'll drop to ~40-45 and sometimes as low as ~20FPS briefly. At first I was convinced it was an optimisation issue or graphical one. I've since began to realise it may be a latency/communication issues between the client and the servers. I don't know if it's the client and a bug is causing these issues or if it's the servers(maybe both).

For example, I went into Keth while on the Canadian Servers. Every time I cast a skill(Stampede, Sunder, Hammer of the Gods, Boneshatter... didn't matter which) my FPS tanked but I also noticed my PING/MS sky rocketed. Enemies spawned and my ping sky rocketed.

We are talking from 10-14ms shooting up to 60 and sometimes 80+ MS. Although the spike in latency is not gradual. It is sudden and occurs in a split second or less.

After swapping to the Washington DC server from the Canadian one. I noticed my latency was far more stable and consistent. My FPS has been more stable as a result as well. My guess is do to the sheer number of players on a given server. The performance of that server is drastically impacted.

I'm not dev-savvy but my two-cents is if players could hide others in town. Basically not needing to render the mtx or textures etc... of those players, but the player location probably will be kept(idk). Maybe this could help with lightening the load. So servers don't have to update everyone on the new players coming and going. As well as the MTX equipped etc... Again I have no idea.

I wish to add, I've noticed that party play messes with endgame mapping. I also think it is a key component in proving my theory of latency being the issue. I sometimes help a fellow Exile I met in-game. He is EU and when I join him I have far more crashes during the loading screen than I do solo. As well when partying sometimes you are unable to open a new map if another member in the party has opened a map already in their hideout for example. Saying that an instance is already opened. Other times it'll let you open a new map but you will be disconnected from the game(sometimes crashing).

On day one of course server crashes occurred but once the servers were going and the game was good. I don't believe I crashed at all during the first parts of the campaign. I only noticed this towards the end of cruel (2-3) and heavily in Endgame. As well many crashes during party play. Most of all I noticed this after the 0.1.0d patch came out. I don't know if it's coincidence as well because that is when I met other exiles to party with. Mind you crashing happens when solo as well so there is that.