There should be a techical/performance update before 0.5!

Because it has nothing to do with content/endgame and should be patched and deployed as soon as ready. It should be fixed before 0.5 so that we can enjoy the new content, and there will be crapload of bugs to be fixes anyways related to the new content, one thing to tick of the (long) list.

As it stand the performance is really bad, a lot of ppl report on that, across all tiers of gaming HW, also very high end! Shader problems are extremly annoying and you seem the only game publisher that does not know how to precompile shader cache once.

For me it got worse over time I have to say...
And also server performance (especially EU), better fix them in between not with the season!

So such technical diffulties are not troubling the new season.

The lack of concern to make this game function really does blow my mind for a company so dead set on using the "early access" exscuse.

We get all the negatives and zero upsides to "early-access". No rapid development as they decided it was better to try to milk the player base on two shoddy buggy messes rather than honor anything they said at launch.

I still wake up everyday and check the forum in some delusion that I'll see a post saying "yeah we majorly screwed up and now both games are worse than ever and we're not going to try to sell useless MTX during the early-access and we're going back to do all the work week neglected last year"... a lot of ifs and ands.

It's clear the leadership has dragged both titles into the dumpster. Will it be able to ever recover is the question.

Seeing as it's going to launch in this undercooked state, I highly doubt it.

Honsetly I have an idea where their heads are stuck, but I wont say it.
Client crashes for exact same reasons carried over from poe1 to poe2 speaks for itself. 12 years to fix the issue - no fix on horizon yet, that alone is INSANE. After recent 0.4f patch, where they claimed they fixed some client crashes, crashes got MUCH, MUCH worse and WAY more frequent than before. I could literally count on one hand how many crashes (game exits to desktop without any driver issues) I had before this patch, now it happens multiple times in a row before i even get to my hideout and dozens of time while trying to map to farm crystals. The game is unplayable, and if this is not adressed within a week or so, I am pulling my support until its 100% resolved.
I wont even mention performance of the game, or upscaling support because everybody knows its over a decade behind the industry, reason for that? Honestly I have no idea, its deffinetely not a reasonable one. GGG, how are you not embarassed? This is, indeed, really, really embarassing. Sometimes I wish this game was developed by some chinese dev company...

I've had VERY few issues at all; sorry but if htere's no crash reporting mechanism that sends in machine specs, location on crash, etc. then good luck getting this fixed

The lagging/stuttering/freezing/disconnects that result in sudden death combined with loss of xp on death is why I have very little motivation to continue playing. It is a terrible experience to have hours of your time wasted because of something beyond your control.

Either you play at a map difficulty that gets you xp and you die due to poor game performance resulting in the inability to progress.

Or you play at a lower map difficulty so you don't die even with the poor performance but you get so little xp that once again you can't really progress.

#1 priority needs to be to improve the performance of the game.

If for whatever reason you are incapable of that, then...

#2 set a cap on the amount of xp you can lose from dying each level. Lower the xp death penalty to 5% and make it so each level you can only lose that 5% a total of 4 times for a combined loss of 20%. Any deaths at that same character level beyond that result in no death penalty. Once you level it resets and you can again die up to 4 times losing 5% xp each time.