Constant crashing in towns since 3.22 update

Wow so this has been going on since last league and still ongoing... lovely...

I've been having issues in town as well. Mine seems to be a freezing issue in town. The game will lock up and the audio still works but I can't do anything. I can't even open up task manager, I have to sign out from Windows in order to get anything back up. It's definitely making things difficult.

I'm getting crashes in town too.
Today was the worst day... I'm trying right to play, but 4 crashes in sequence... Can't play.

Anything at all on this? Might have missed it somewhere in the replies, but haven't found a fix anywhere.
Have played PoE since 2017 and never had any crashing issues, suddenly crashes just about every time I load into town.
ONLY crashes in town and RARELY in hideout, but never once happened in a different zone.

Same issues here, played since POE started and never had any issues until now.

Can't even login on any character in town with others. And when i do it's only for about 5 seconds then it kicks me out to the login screen. I tried different servers with no change. tried many different settings with no change. tried releasing and renewing IPs with no change. Nothing I do works. I can't play.

having same issue as well, this sucks.

Same here, i9, RtX4080.
Very annoying. Was giving it another try, bus this is very demotivating...

Same problem, the moment I make it to Lioneye's watch the game crashes. Made it to the mudflats once and the game instantly crashed when I saw the wisps from new mechanic. Standard works just fine, can go anywhere and do anything no problem.

any update?

I'm having the same problem, fairly new to the game (began a couple of months ago) but had not experienced any crashes whatsoever until entering Lioneye's Watch for the first time this season. To get to the endgame has been brutal, crashing every single time I spent more than 60 seconds in town, but I am finally through.

For me, it doesn't happen when in my hideout at all, it only happens when entering a town full of people standing around with a lot of cosmetic pets/effects/etc going on.

I've tried all the suggestions in this thread, verified game files, lowered visual settings far below what I normally run, lowered resolution, etc, with no change in the frequency of crashes.

I7-12700K, RTX 3080ti, 32gb RAM, Win11 Pro, all drivers/updates are up to date

This is incredibly frustrating. Heists are basically unplayable with it crashing every time you enter the harbor... I'm not looking forward to starting my other planned build I had hoped to get started at the same time but not like this.

Would be nice to hear something from support on this, the thread is months old but has no replies from staff.