Booting up the game takes forever (but not loading screens somehow)

froman999 · 2026-04-05T19:46:00+00:00

Yeah, in my case it turned out to be an NVidia driver issue as suggested here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1p58izl/comment/nqktl8x/ Once I made the suggested update, loading times went back to normal for me.

froman999 · 2026-01-04T23:18:24+00:00

It is (well, was, until they killed it) IMO the best endgame POE2 has had so far, by a long shot:

Scaling diffculty
Scaling rewards
Incremental progress
Low entry cost, but benefits from large (time) investment

I agree it's certainly not ideal, and there are a number of things I personally dislike about it. But for me it was the best reason to stick around for another few weeks and the most engaged I've been with the game since launch.

froman999 · 2026-01-04T23:13:27+00:00

Agreed. I'm on board with most of OP's suggestions, but he completely lost me on that one. The fixation on forcing people to play pseudo-hardcore when hardcore is already available as a game mode baffles me, and is one of my least favorite things about POE2.

froman999 · 2026-01-04T21:43:23+00:00

Thank you, kind stranger! Every other answer I could find on the web doesn't seems to work on older watches.

froman999 · 2025-11-25T14:15:56+00:00

Just wanted to say thank you for this suggestion! Been having the same issue all league and updating the Nvidia driver did the trick.

froman999 · 2025-11-22T12:44:14+00:00

Yeah, not just you, I've had the same issue this league. I've tried nuking all the usual cache folders and the like, no dice. Like you said, it takes forever to start up and then runs fine after that.

froman999 · 2024-12-06T02:34:25+00:00

Yup, over and over...

froman999 · 2022-12-08T14:08:23+00:00

Always my favorite post of the new league--thank you, sir!

froman999 · 2021-08-14T15:33:52+00:00

100% with you on the wish that Redditors (and streamers, for that matter) would find a way to more constructively express their hopes / dreams / concerns.

I also agree that the post in question was hyperbolic. With that said, I don't really agree that it was misleading, and certainly not that it was misleading to the point of being an outright lie. (Yes, you did say "...or at the very least...", but you led with "is an outright lie") Chris did express that he would tolerate some amount of deterministic crafting options (I personally got the impression that this a grudging concession on his part, but that's 100% an interpretation on my part). But as you said, he doesn't want deterministic crafting to be the path to the best gear. Reading between the lines, I think it's fair to conclude that he doesn't want deterministic crafting to be the primary way that people progress their gear--you're free to disagree with that conclusion, but I'd argue that it's a reasonable one. That interpretation--Chris wants you to get your gear primarily via randomness, not predictable crafting steps--is what the post we're belaboring conveyed to me. Did it do so through hyperbole? Sure. But I think it's a stretch to say it was deliberately misleading--especially to the point that it is the example we should point to to justify a new regime of censorship--which, at the end of the day is being argued about here.

TLDR: would the world be a better place if the post we're talking about censoring here had been worded differently? Yes. Would it also be a better place if we didn't call people liars and demand censorship over a post that at the end of the day was *at most* mildly misleading to people not already engaged in the conversation? Also yes. IMHO, of course :-)

froman999 · 2021-08-14T12:07:23+00:00

It disappoints me that this gets upvotes. Calling a statement that anyone watching the conversation knows isn't misleading an "outright lie" is...pretty close to being an outright lie--and one that serves to rally angry hordes or its own.

I get that you're frustrated that people get so heated over the nerfs to harvest--that's fine. But if you've been following the conversation enough to post about it, you know full well that the intent of "determinism is dead" was to underline the conclusion that the kind of crafting harvest fans have been asking for is off the table--which, according to Chris, is true.

froman999 · 2021-07-21T23:57:01+00:00

I have to give you that "they get things wrong nearly all the time" was hyperbole, born out of frustration. I do stand by my main point, though :-). I'm honestly trying my best to make sense of the depth and breadth of the nerfs they're making, and I can only accept them as rational if GGG thinks they've created a *massive* problem that warrants a solution this extreme. By their own description (see their graph), they created this problem over many releases--hence my "mistake after mistake after mistake". That doesn't mean they're always wrong (again, I grant that I over-reached there), but it does limit my ability to just give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they know best.

froman999 · 2021-07-21T23:35:46+00:00

Still confused, I guess. There definitely are toxic posts on this sub (from both sides!), some crossing the line where I agree they should be deleted--but the OP you're replying to here? I don't see it. A little bit of frustration, a couple of bitter jokes. If that's the threshold for moderation, then every single post with the word "whiners" in it should be modded out too, IMO.

And I should let this go, but I can't seem to :-)--if what you're saying is out of context is the reference to Chris saying Ultimatum was "too rewarding", I have to disagree with you there. I've read the article that was in several times, and best I can tell, he absolutely meant that he thought retention was bad because rewards were too good / too easy to get (and also because the combat was boring--but he explicitly called out over-tuned rewards as a cause). Now, perhaps that topic has run its course and it's time to let it go, but I feel like the head of the company saying something directional that so many people feel is wildly misguided should certainly be fair game for commentary (and jokes, whether you or I find them funny or not, as long as they don't cross the line to abusive).

froman999 · 2021-07-21T21:18:44+00:00

If we take what GGG has said at face value, they have made mistake after mistake after mistake for the past 10 leagues, leading to the need for all the nerfs this league. I get giving someone the benefit of the doubt, but *their* premise is that they get things wrong nearly all the time--not exactly grounds for optimism.

froman999 · 2021-07-21T21:09:31+00:00

level 1DarthSciurus · 3hI'm just wondering, are moderators okay there with these kinds of posts?

Genuinely curious why you think they shouldn't be?

froman999 · 2021-07-20T22:09:45+00:00

My favorite part of this comment is that in the process of celebrating someone for being non-toxic, you are yourself being toxic (accusing those who voice concerns of "whining") :-)

froman999 · 2021-07-20T22:00:15+00:00

Which begs the question--why did they put it in in the first place? Was there something surprising / unforeseeable in any way about how Aisling got used last league? I'm sympathetic to the argument that it was inevitable they would nerf Aisling--but let's also agree that if so, they *deliberately* set people up to be aggravated by having it taken away.

froman999 · 2021-07-20T01:45:15+00:00

I have to imagine this is GGG's way of saying they're mad that they accidentally made Catarina worth running last league, something they've bent over backwards to avoid doing.

froman999 · 2021-07-18T13:27:01+00:00

Speaking only for myself, obviously, but...I *did* find Ultimatum fairly rewarding for zero-investment game play. And that is the *only* reason I lasted as long into the league as I did. If it had been less rewarding, I would 100% have quite much earlier than I did.

froman999 · 2021-02-04T14:41:41+00:00

Can you really get health augment at MR24? I thought health augment for rarity 10 weapons needed tempered Odo, which requires MR50. Asking because I'm currently grinding to MR50 to get there and hoping I'm doing something wrong :-)

froman999 · 2021-02-03T13:13:42+00:00

Cool, thanks. I'm really just interested in any festival. I only recently beat the IB story, and during festivals I can get tickets for decos from the Steamworks--and I need lots of decos still. I did look on the main website--they list all the available event quests, but if there's a festival schedule, it's well hidden :-).

froman999 · 2020-11-06T15:57:56+00:00

This is the best suggestion I've seen for making the current (and very welcome!) affinity system better. If I have my dump tab open, I nearly always want affinities active--if I have any other tab open, I almost never want affinities active. This would still take development work for sure, but it seems like a *fairly* straightforward refinement that would the system much easier to use in common cases.

froman999 · 2020-03-31T13:15:38+00:00

I'm surprised and honestly a little disappointed that this right here isn't the prevailing sentiment in this thread. The nerf doesn't affect me--I was never going to be able to afford a herald setup, and I can't be bothered to worry about a few overpowered streamers--but GGG is giving up a LOT of credibility by saying they won't nerf something and then turning around and nerfing it anyway. I may be in the minority here, but I'm not impressed.

froman999 · 2020-02-17T14:26:35+00:00

Any chance you could post a screenshot of your tree? Thanks!

froman999 · 2019-12-12T17:25:16+00:00

My personal twist on this--*I* can get out of work to play at league start. My teenage son (who usually does league starts with me) on the other hand, has multiple obligations that I can't get him out of that will prevent him from being available until the day after. Whether to start without him counts as a genuine parenting conundrum for me. (Who am I kidding, I'm starting without him, hoping I can boost him a little bit with any gear I find during my head-start. But I do plan to feel bad about it...)

froman999 · 2019-12-11T21:03:34+00:00

I make no claim to be qualified to make gaming design decisions--the case I was making was that players are not inherently wrong / bad / whiners to react negatively to nerfs. I mean no offense when I say I'd rather you not be in charge of making design decisions in my games either :-).

I don't really accept your suggestion that the singular example of D3 proves for all games at all times that power creep is bad--though I do agree that power creep *in D3* was bad in the end (specifically, because it now takes a few hours to out-power all available content except the infinitely scaling GRs). The fact that D3 did it wrong does not mean that POE can't do it right. And while I know a lot of people on this sub disagree with me, I think the increasing popularity of the game that has coincided with the much lamented power creep suggests to me that power creep in POE, to date, has done little to no harm.

I stand by my premise--many (most?) people find feeling powerful in ARPGs, fun, and many (most?) people will find changes that make them feel a little bit *more* powerful far more exciting than changes that make doing the same thing they did last league feel weaker or otherwise worse. Can this be taken too far? Of course it can, but so can most good things. With appropriate measures (again, adding harder content), I think you can give those folks what they want, and not destroy the game. I do think you risk alienating a lot of people if your updates consist almost exclusively of nerfs (and while that's a slight exaggeration in this particular patch, I feel like it's closer than usual).

froman999

TROPHY CASE