Lag / Freezes - Critical Performance Issue

Dear GGG Support Team,

I'm reporting a critical performance issue that severely impacts playability. While this may already be known, its persistence and severity warrant detailed documentation.

Issue Description:
The game experiences repetitive freeze/lag cycles that create a rubber-banding effect:

- Game freezes for ~10 seconds and sometimes more
- Upon unfreezing, all actions execute extremely fast (catch-up)
- Makes the game partially to completely unplayable

Attempted Fixes (None Successful):

- Clearing shader cache
- Increasing GPU shader memory allocation
- Switching between Vulkan and DirectX versions
- Various other community-suggested solutions

Key Observations:

Network Independence:

- Issue persists across different networks
- Friend in different German region experiences identical symptoms
- Both describe it as "unplayable"

Temporary Workarounds:

- Creating new instances (Ctrl+Click waypoint → "New Instance") sometimes helps
- Fix is inconsistent and not reliable

Time-Based Pattern:

- Freezes occur significantly more frequently during peak hours (19:00-22:00 CET)
- Suggests potential server-side capacity issues
- Issue wasn't existent when the game was initially launched. Freezes started in 2025.

Additional Context:

- Similar (though less severe) symptoms occurred in PoE1, suggesting possible shared underlying architecture issues.

Request: Could the team investigate potential server-side bottlenecks during EU peak hours? The time-based correlation strongly suggests this isn't purely client-side.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.