Metagaming and you - what did you do during PoE's loading times?

Originally Posted by Corwin
I wouldn't complain as much if the loading times were short, but usually I have time to go and get a libation of some sort while I'm waiting, and waiting, and WAITING!!

Originally Posted by Thrasher
haha. For me it's a cigarette. I felt sick after resting in the stronghold too much.

Personally, I crumbled up pieces of paper (should have tried Origami instead) or just plain blanked out.

Are they that long?
Players play in a hurry so anything that seems empty hit them hard.

Yes it gets worse the more you explore. Start of act 2 caused a huge jump in loading time. It's about 15 seconds now (without an SSD).

I run several computers, connected with InputDirector, so I just read some news or something whenever there's any kind of stop in any game. When I play MMOs I even tend to either have a single player game or movie running on the side because there's so much downtime (travel times, loading times, etc).

Another reason to buy an SSD, loading times were never long in my case, like 5-6 seconds for the bigger maps.

Why they didn't put SSD into recommended specs?

Err, I just normally relax, sip a beverage, peek at the manual or calmly pat my cat and wait.

I'm only 18 or so hours in though, so haven't experienced the heavier loading times the more veteran players have as yet.

I watch streams on second monitor. At the moment mostly MKX but at release I was watching known twitch people play PoE while I was playing it as well

I don't have a SSD and the loading screens are not pleasant.

I sat there, enjoyed the music and patiently waited for the game to finish loading.

I'd say at max my screens take 4-5 seconds to render. Long enough to check scores on Sportscentre!

4-5 seconds here as well…

Originally Posted by Fluent
I sat there, enjoyed the music and patiently waited for the game to finish loading.

Same here.

I would delete a bunch of my saved games and that speed things up a lot when loading once the game was loaded.

My biggest wait time was on start up…. ….. ….zzzzzz…..zzzzzz….

First time you load an area, it's slower too.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
First time you load an area, it's slower too.

I also noticed that but since I have a SSD it's negligable for the most part. I must have something like 1s for small areas like indoors and 5s max outdoors.

It becomes really horrible. 10 seconds are really nothing and the problem actually starts before the loading screen.

I have got 184 saved games now after I finished the game. It takes (and I just checked the clock) 27 seconds from clicking on "Load" until the list of savegames is displayed.
Gladly you can mostly dodge that by using quicksave and quickload.
But the zoning times get really, really long as well. The bigger the zone, the longer it takes.
Also checking the savegame size: It starts at 121 kb
After 3 days it was at ~ 600 kb.
And now the savegame where i finished the game has a size of 6258 kb.

While it only took a couple of seconds in the beginning to load a zone, it becamme really long later on. And you need to zone far more often. E.g. when you are doing the bounties, traveling a lot, or just want to take a nap in your stronghold.

Just checked my loading times:
Entering Caed Nua: 90 seconds
Entering the Resting Building: 20 seconds
Entering the upper level to sleep: 20 seconds

I am pretty sure that, if I cut together all my loading screens of the let's play together I would end up with several hours of nothing but loading screens.

I regularly purge my save games down to just a few. If you really need alot of them, I'd copy them somewhere else, and delete them form the game directory, and copy back a file into the game directory only when needed.

I think it was the original Witcher that made a separate save file for each use of quicksave? And I use F5 like it's the Lost numbers in the bunker. I had to go on a save file purge at one point cause the game started crashing when I tried to bring up the load screen.

As for PoE, I'm still in Act 2 but it hasn't been that bad so far. I believe I put the game on a basic disc drive as well. At least those days are almost over, you can get terabytes of SSD now and the prices are only going down.

Originally Posted by Kordanor
Just checked my loading times:
Entering Caed Nua: 90 seconds
Entering the Resting Building: 20 seconds
Entering the upper level to sleep: 20 seconds

That sounds AWFUL! I remember quitting Eador Masters of the Broken World because of the loading times. I have tried it again after getting SSD and it was much more manageable.
I have just checked those times and, in my case they are all about 10 seconds (including entering Caed Nua)

it really depends on how long you already played. That said I also don't have a fast PC and I am using a HDD.