I have to quit POE2 until PC crashes are fixed. Where's the communication?

It's really disappointing how little feedback we've gotten from GGG over the hard PC crashes that many of us are experiencing. I'm posting here in Discussion because there are plenty of bug report threads already but I want to address the lack of communication and how I feel like that impacts the game overall.

I did my best to navigate the crashes. Sometimes I was able to play for 2 or 3 hours at a time without getting a crash. All together, I played nearly 40 hours but had probably dozens of crashes. As I got into the giant zones in act 3, I could barely clear a section before a crash happened and I'd inevitably have to start exploring them from scratch. It started to feel pointless — to say nothing as I started to learn about how these crashes could be damaging my PC.

I had purchased a highest tier support pack and shared my keys with friends, who are thankfully not having these issues. I nevertheless put a lot of money into a game I was very excited to play after over 4,000 hours of POE1. Now, I'm just afraid that my attempts to play this much have have a cost to the lifespan of my hardware in addition to the time lost. How excited should I feel to wear a POE2 hoodie when I can't play the game?

I know GGG has listed these crashes as a known issue and a priority, but we have received no updates. In fact, the "known issues" note still suggests this is a Windows 24H2 issue when many people have reported issues on 23H2 (myself included), Windows 10, and others. The bug report threads are full of proposed solutions followed by replies that those solutions don't work and are only placebos. I'm not the most tech savvy player to begin with, and I shouldn't have to do weird manipulations to my setup to try to get a game to work — especially when those solutions don't seem to solve the problem anyway.

I'm not someone who's going to post a negative review on Steam or otherwise try to hurt the company, as some are doing. I really believe in GGG and want their products to succeed. But at this point I'm just so incredibly disappointed by the lack of communication around this problem affecting many players. It honestly seems pretty out of character for GGG! I sympathize with the other players accusing GGG of just going off on holiday without addressing it, because what other conclusion can be drawn? At least tell us what you've figured out so far and how we can be helpful beyond just sending a DxDiag file into the void of a staffer's DMs to which we get no reply or acknowledgement at all.

I can't keep trying to load the game until I know it's safe to do so, and I need GGG to actually acknowledge that they're working to figure how and when that will be. It sure would be great if it's soon so that I can actually spend MY holiday downtime playing. Once I can actually play the game safely, I look forward to discussing other aspects of it, because I was enjoying it as much as I was able to so far.

Yeah I think I'm going to have to join you on this one. My latest PC freeze today had me looping in the BIO's. I had to reinstall windows 11 to get it top stop. The constant freeze's are legit breaking my PC and it wasn't cheap, I'll revisit at a later date, this is not worth flushing $2,000 worth of hardware.

I luckily haven't had any hard crashes, but I've experienced so many weird situations where I'm booted to the login screen. Eg last night I spent what was (to me) a valuable rare waystone to open a map. The portals for it opened then I was kicked to the login screen - when I came back it ate the waystone, removed my map mods, and said I "attempted it". Okay thanks.

It's one thing to lose cause I play bad, it's another thing to lose cause the game is unstable.

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Tsono#0224 wrote:

Yeah I think I'm going to have to join you on this one. My latest PC freeze today had me looping in the BIO's. I had to reinstall windows 11 to get it top stop. The constant freeze's are legit breaking my PC and it wasn't cheap, I'll revisit at a later date, this is not worth flushing $2,000 worth of hardware.

LOL no game has the ability to effect your bios to make it boot loop.... and it wouldn't do anything to the master boot record to stop windows from working. Like the most likely thing is the CMOS got cleared while holding down the power button but that could always happen, and instead of having to reinstall windows you just would of need to swap the legacy/UEFI setting and your windows drive would have shown back up.

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baconbyte#0146 wrote:

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Tsono#0224 wrote:

Yeah I think I'm going to have to join you on this one. My latest PC freeze today had me looping in the BIO's. I had to reinstall windows 11 to get it top stop. The constant freeze's are legit breaking my PC and it wasn't cheap, I'll revisit at a later date, this is not worth flushing $2,000 worth of hardware.

LOL no game has the ability to effect your bios to make it boot loop.... and it wouldn't do anything to the master boot record to stop windows from working. Like the most likely thing is the CMOS got cleared while holding down the power button but that could always happen, and instead of having to reinstall windows you just would of need to swap the legacy/UEFI setting and your windows drive would have shown back up.

No other game that I play (and thats alot) makes my entire PC freeze forcing me to hold power button to restart it. The rest of what you said is a foreign language. IDK who's fault it is Windows or GGG but playing poe2 on a 5800x3d 4080 super latest drivers all the way down to audio drivers, should not freeze my PC to where I need to force it to shutdown via power button. I've restarted my PC more times in last 10 days than the last 6 months.

An unexpected shutdown can damage your Windows installation. Depending on what your SSD is doing when they power is yoinked, it can corrupt what it was doing. And if that happens to be something important to Windows, it's reinstallation time. Your memory won't be affected or your CPU.

In a sense it is impressive that PoE2 actually manages to completely lock a pc up by crashing so badly that you have no choice by to pull the plug or hit the reset. Windows shouldn't be allowing this to happen to a client process.

And yes, I've had the same lovely experience half a dozen times in the past two days. This needs to be fixed - and it looks like there's several crashing bugs in the game - not just the hard locking, but also numerous DX12 crashes when it tries to instantiate items it doesn't have.

The game is not stable enough to enter EA, imho.

I had my 1st ever bluescreen crash a few days after poe2 launch. I was not impressed.

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MartijnK72#0618 wrote:

An unexpected shutdown can damage your Windows installation. Depending on what your SSD is doing when they power is yoinked, it can corrupt what it was doing. And if that happens to be something important to Windows, it's reinstallation time. Your memory won't be affected or your CPU.

In a sense it is impressive that PoE2 actually manages to completely lock a pc up by crashing so badly that you have no choice by to pull the plug or hit the reset. Windows shouldn't be allowing this to happen to a client process.

And yes, I've had the same lovely experience half a dozen times in the past two days. This needs to be fixed - and it looks like there's several crashing bugs in the game - not just the hard locking, but also numerous DX12 crashes when it tries to instantiate items it doesn't have.

The game is not stable enough to enter EA, imho.

Even cutting power during a windows update these days isn't going to bork windows. This isn't the days of windows xp/vista. I've not had a hard freeze since I swapped from dx to vulkan, and others have reported the same thing but that's more anecdotal than fact. Maybe some patches they put out have just lowered the chances now. POE has always done better with vulkan than dx though. Who knows it could be gpu drivers/chipset drivers. Is it only in the steam client or both? There's no real way for an enduser to tell we don't have access to that kind of debug info from the client. Even the windows event viewer just says it was a critical error with no real info

In case folks didn't see, another user created a form to collect data about people's systems. You can fill it out and share your DxDiag here: https://forms.yandex.com/cloud/676004d9e010db19370ab6c2/

I am joining you in this. With a little more than 90 hours in I had success for quite a while running on dated hardware. Ryzen 5 1600 and a GTX 1060 on Windows 10. I ran about as poorly as you would imagine, but it ran. I would have consistent frame rates of about 30, with a little stuttering here and there when initially entering a map or town. It was playable, but not great.

I had been planning on upgrading hardware on this dated system for a while anyway. This gave me reason to do so. I purchased a Ryzen 5 5600, upgraded cooler, and updated ram. The GPU remained the same. For the first 20 minutes it ran wonderfully well (compared to my previous experience), and while monitoring temps and usage, it looked great. Then I experienced a crash. Hard reset, as if power had been cut. CPU wasn't hot, GPU same. Just dropped a deuce in the bed.

This wasn't my first experience with a crash, maybe the 3rd or 4th. But this time, it was difficult to even boot into Windows. Enough is enough. I really enjoy the game, it's a fantastic direction in terms of gameplay. But there are significant issues with how the CPU is utilized. I tried many of the fixes, with no luck. It's best for me to step back, and have faith that GGG will resolve the issues.