The Game is Brutal (in a good way), fix the lag?

Thank you in advance for taking the time to read this post, and for sharing your thoughts as well if you choose to do so!

If I am being honest with myself, this game frustrates (explicit word held back) me in a very good way. I'm at level 96 on my favorite character, a Ranger Deadeye named xXredruMXx. I have other characters in the 80's and 90's, but the Deadeye has been the only one I enjoyed so much as to make a second one and level it up into the 90's as well (My second is, xXSpectrumXx.

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Context: One players perspective while leveling from 96-100.
Thesis: The brutal nature of experience acquisition at level 96 is oddly pleasurable.
Player's Disposition: Favorable
Conclusion: (if you want to skip reading this whole write-up, this is my conclusion) Stop with all the other patch stuff and get the lag thing fixed first.
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Path of Exile 2 is brilliantly designed to reward players with a sense of accomplishment. First, let me point out that prior to the major changes which accompanied the DoH release, I had my Ranger running double corrupted 900% waystone maps. I would often open public games at night and call them funny things such as, "Death 2.0," "You'll Die Here," "HC Ultra Death," etc. The point of these groups was for players who had just reached a level breakpoint in standard league and who wanted to unwind. Everyone knows they are dying when they go into those games... Except, my toon was so geared I could carry 5 other players. It was comical at best.

Yes, it feels good to have that level of power in a game where everyone is attempting to get that, "I broke the game," feel. I'll just come out and say it: It's fun for about 3 days, then it becomes a, "What's the point?" No sense of accomplishment.

Post DoH, I can still run the old maps I have saved up in my stash with boosted difficulty, but I cannot carry a 2nd player without dying every other map. While many players may see this is a negative drawback to the DoH and post DoH Updates, I see it as a win. If you are one of those players, I want to challenge you to look at it from an alternate perspective. If you are at the point where you are burning down your old 400%-900% waystone find maps you had leftover from pre-DoH, you are a BAMF already. It's the dead weight you are carrying behind you (your buddies) that are causing the issue. GGG's updates simply made it where players have to carry their own weight now. Not a bad thing!

With this in mind, go back and play again, and look at your deaths in solo. If you set your toon up and didn't go glass cannon, your deaths are most likely due to server 5ms random lag from enemies entering and leaving the screen. Am I wrong? When you invite that 2nd person who isn't so geared/leveled into your game, your deaths increase because you now have increased mob difficulty without the firepower to do it. You could solo it, but the friend drags you down.

I see a lot of players pointing the finger at GGG for this difficulty curve increase. I challenge you all to look no further than to the left or right of you at the dead weight friend we all must at some point carry around due to real life social ties. It's not GGG, they made it where you can burn it down solo. For group play the game simply asks that everyone be able to burn down what you are attacking as a group. Not an unreasonable request for a company to ask players to actually play the game, no? The hard questions one must ask themselves are: Should I dump the dead weight and progress? Should I accept that my friends and I have a combined power of T13 100% survival instead of T16? Do I find new people to play with and dump my dead weight? Etc...

I for one don't want a game where I can carry 5 other players in the most absurd mob settings the game engine can throw at me. I've done it, it's fun for a very short time. I'm digging the challenge level of the game. When I die and there's no server lag, it's generally always my own fault (even when I claim the game cheated me). Therein is the issue in DoH for me, however. The whole, "And there's no server lag," piece of the previous statement should not be underwritten or taken lightly.

In a game where 5ms of lag is the difference between life and death, having 3 server in the continental United States seems to be a fairly big problem GGG needs to solve. Kudos to GGG for the balance changes in DoH... But uhh ohh? Your game is so balanced that the poor server quality is laid bare. We need better servers, and more of them guys/gals @GGG. I'm not sure how much a server costs to run, but can we run a special or something where it raises money for new/upgraded/additional servers? Also, it appears you mobs in maps are dynamically generated. Perhaps have a portion of mobs be organically generated prior to players entering the scene to ease the lag if you can't afford new servers?

Overall, I straight up love this game. It's my favorite game of all time, and I'm a spoiled kid from the 80's. Best game, and only getting better!! Still, the server stuff seems like a necessary cost the company should be footing at this point. Yes it's beta. Do you know what else it is? A player's first experience with the game.

"First Experiences Last."

It's a bit frustrating when the greatest barrier to progression past 96+ is your distance to a server. Im all for Always Online because it levels the playing field in terms of hacker mitigation. The caveat here of course is data exchange speeds. If you guys want your game to thrive, some investment in server coverage across the globe would go a long way.

Point in case - I live in the northern USA where my closest location is Texas. If you do the simple math on the speed of light in a vacuum, my maximum achievable lag after distance and prior to any hardware/software entering the equation is 5.66ms. Yes, I did the math. Of course the data traveling through fiber optics is passing through a lot of gateways and hubs along the way. Where 5.66ms on paper sounded good at first, the reality is far from a pleasurable experience.

Random lag spikes, deaths, etc. By the way, this should not be happening on a 1000mb hard line in 2025, nor is it something I experience in other games with my setup.

Ya'll have a real jewel of a game, but you lose the sense of accomplishment when you die to the Lag Monster more than anything else. The game is so challenging and balanced that you know you'll die, and generally it will be your fault if everything works well. The biggest word there is, "If." As a player I wish GGG would take the server situation more seriously. Forget all the patch updates and just give us more servers. Start there.

Stop with all the other patch stuff and get the lag thing fixed. Everything is useless if players are dying to the Lag Boss.

So regarding the lag spikes I myself now after some changes made never see any issues anymore with freezing/lag spikes.

What I did have happen was the nvidia driver crash and the game recovering over about 10 to 15 sec. Would reload and could continue playing.

The way I play now (not sure which of these 2 things fixed the issues for me):

Saw a reference in Steam forums where some one hard capped PoE2 to 60FPS. Tried that.

Next I switched to Vulcan.

After these I have NEVER had a stich/hitch again and this is across 5 or 6 playsessions spanning multiple hours. It was prolific before on seemingly a 15m timer.

Hope that helps someone anyhow. Dropping from 180FPS down to 60 did not impact my perception of smooth gameplay any as you would a shooter game.