LE smoother

Hello devs, in PoE exist soft(not official) which can delete some shades, smokes, fog, lights, remove some kinds of items on ground(not lootfilter but decorations), sounds etc. for better
frame performance.
And sometimes people get banned for using this soft, not often, and this is single cases, but anyway people use it by their own risk to be banned

What developers think about soft for LE, if its doesnt change gameplay, abusing mechanics, and only way it can be used for - better framerate. If some enthusiast create analog of “poe smoother” and I will use it, would I get banned for this? or every case personal, or every kind of manipulating with game files 100% way to be banned?

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What about just having better settings / options to disable features to improve performance on different hardware? Or even better, EHG just builds in performance improvements that would make this type of need irrelevant (not required). Alternatively, if its GPU performance specifically, why not just tweak settings at a driver level - overriding the game settings without specifically running software.

Any application that works like you describe is likely going to go against the ToS - especially in Multiplayer mode with Server authoritative networking because its a very small step from improving performance locally to doing something nefarious with the active game.

I dont work for EHG and cannot answer for them, but somehow I doubt they will approve of any software like you describe.

GGG ban people for using the tool you mention because it gives unfair advantages to those using it, by removing effects specifically designed to limit your vision such as darkness or fog. That it’s exclusively available from hacking forums should be a clue.

If you use similar tools in other games, you’ll risk getting banned from them, too.

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Holy beep, GitHub is a hacking forum now…
Man, you’re soiling yourself here. Please don’t.

I believe, Server Authoritative means that anything which doesn’t pass server-side validation simply does not happen and, eventually, the perpetrator gets banned without causing any real impact on anything (except miniscule dent in server’s resources spent on said validation).

And whatever potential abuse you imagined is extremely likely to be included into validation list already.

And that’s the million dollar question.

Remember Quake III Arena, where downscaling textures and (most - because size and shape could give unfair advantage) simplified models were a common thing, just to eke out more performance. And nobody gave a damn.

…and Last Epoch is not even that kind of competitive.

(neither PoE is - but Dr Baldhead reached 420% Delirium and is unlikely to admit it in any foreseeable future)

Upd. 25112022 A portion of feedback on “hide by community flagging” feature.
Without knowing WHAT community did deemed as inappropriate this is worthless.
In this particular case it’s extremely likely that feature was abused to hide pretty much valid criticism.
Which is unhealthy…

Obviously. Against the ToS and the system would hopefully/probably detect it.
I just mentioned it because I have no idea how the 0.9+ versions with multiplayer will handle things - even in solo local play mode. So developing something like this even to work in local offline mode is still probably going to be disallowed.

Well, if LE optimises the game sufficiently not to need the OPs “innocent & non-game breaking” performance based improvements. Then having settings would be fine. Assuming purely innocent motives, especting EHG to improve things performance wise on changing goalposts of old and new hardware is unlikely to work for everyone so logically settings are the only real solution. I dont consider changing graphics / effects etc which give unfair advantage to be relevant to the performance improvement need. Different things in my mind. One is innocent, one is cheating.

I will say that currently, the settings on LE 0.8.5F are in need of tuning. From my experience helping out with technical issues, there is definitely some very odd gradings of performance vs setting configuration - .e.g. toggling quality can sometimes make a huge performance improvement but very little visual change ~ the settings need better grading.

Well, then it’ll gonna be one more victim of ‘we won’t allow volunteers to produce unofficial mods which would make our game run on more rigs with worse specs because we’re afraid of a monster under our beds’ then.
It won’t cost a dime for them - and might result in significant positive profit impact.

If I remember correctly, current set of visual settings is based on Unity’s built-in visuals settings framework. Which is of exceptionally dubious quality by itself (and Unity 2019 actually made it so worse so games which updated its engine to it became unplayable en masse for laptops similar to one of mine). Badly documented (from end user’s point of view). And, due to its structure being designed by people completely unaware of end users’ problems (and/or unskilled on the topic of optimization), lowering visual preset makes performance actually worse on most low-end rigs often - unless developers (real game developers, not Unity’s Marketing-powered beep-for-brains) really commit their efforts into improving it.
Had to ponder this topic ALOT since the update which occurred right after my purchase did destroyed the performance completely.

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Have you got a link to a relevant public-facing GitHub repo for it?

I don’t think anyone’s about to download a version of the software that hasn’t been updated in over five years. As an aside, I hope you are ~12. Communicating in such a manner would be pretty embarrassing if you’re an adult.

I’d hope they’ll have something in place that would detect it, but I wouldn’t be massively optimistic. Between being able to buy the game on Steam, refunding it there, and playing on the standalone client afterwards, to there being no validation of data sent to the leaderboards at all, to how easily the log in screen (and, thus, user authentication) has been removed from cracked copies of the game, security has never been a strength of EHG’s. It’s fair to expect standards will be different for 1.0 onwards, but that really doesn’t excuse just how insecure everything they have released to-date has been.

Online play won’t inherently flag purely client-side modifications such as this tool. Any system that scans for such and reports back to their servers would have to be developed separately. If they want to release 1.0 ASAP, I could see it not being in at launch…

Oh wow. Didn’t know this was possible. Is this still a thing?

You can start with either opening Google for the first time in your life - or with this link GitHub - ajaxvs/poeNullParticles: Path of Exile particles remover .
Public version from GitHub works - and works quite well even on my waffle presser. Regardless of game version.
There are more.
Do your homework, find these on your own.

Note to moderation team:
The man is clearly up for a conflict. I. e. I’d deem it as a consensual escalation - which can’t be considered as abusive behaviour for him. While it doesn’t make any honor for me, I hope that readers might find resulting dialogue as at least mildly entertaining. My part of dialogue targets only a person which expressed his intent to receive ye olde Lamarr style roaste.

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it’s updated multiple times in every league, so yes, it’s on github with all the updates. I don’t know what you wanted to hear

This isn’t something that we are prepared to make a lasting determination on at the moment. Modifying the gameplay experience in a competitive environment is not something that we will likely encourage. It’s a big topic with many different stages. There is probably a fine line somewhere in there that we could draw eventually. Unfortunately, detecting if software like this is being used responsibly vs used at all is almost impossible. For this reason, in some situations, the whole program gets banned as a result of the possible abuse cases.

I know that it doesn’t seem like modifying those things will change gameplay or present the ability to abuse mechanics but it can. It might not be used this way in game right now but allowing it now could preclude us from using the things it removes as game mechanics in the future.

So, for now, we will approach each instance case by case. As we are not in a competitive environment yet, detecting these types of things is not a high priority task. If a program like this were to come to our attention as problematic, we would likely start by providing warnings before immediately banning people.

This topic is extremely subject to change and this post in no way serves as permission to use these programs.

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Leaderboards?

How about, not in a reliably competitive environment yet?

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