tl;dr of problem: 2 player LAN game, went through normal and elite without a single crash. Black screens crashes becomes extremely common during Ultimate, especially after loot bursts from killing heroes/totems. Tried lowering or switching off all graphics settings, tried disabling UPnP, happens regardless of whether we have loot-filtering on/off, graphics card all updated, no overclocking of graphics card… basically tried almost anything suggested from Reddits and forums.
It’s as though the large amount of loot generated is causing the crash because there is lack of sync between the two comps on what have actually dropped.
Do you still hear game audio after the screen goes black? And this happens only in MP?
Ultimate difficulty has higher quality loot, not really “more” loot, so the fact that it started on Ultimate difficulty seems like a red herring to me.
Yes, the audio will still be playing in the background and I can still move the mouse cursor around on the screen, but my character will not be moving even if I click around on screen.
Also, kindly allow me to give a bit more clarification on the ‘more loot’ comment. In Ultimate difficulty, activation of the totems spawns more heroes as opposed to lower difficulty, and killing heroes generally spawns more loot compared to trash mobs. Combined with the reward for clearing a totem, the amount of loot having to spawn on screen will seemed to be a lot more compared to lower difficulties. There do not seemed to be a problem with killing single heroes together, or even when we are fighting separately in different areas. So there could be links to data not being consistent on both systems? This is a consistent observation which I made from playing the game over the years but you are absolutely correct that it might not be related to what is actually happening under the hood.
These crashes are often preceded by a slight screen freeze on both computers and occasionally that the game doesn’t actually crash, loot might appear on the screen but when I click to pick it up, the name remains on my screen but would disappear on my friend’s screen. I would be able to repeatedly click on the name but the item will not appear in my inventory. There was also an instance of whereby my friend picked up an item, wanted to trade it to me and it caused a crash on my side as well. Years ago we used to be playing with ‘instanced loot’ but having missed out on items because of this, the current game is no longer on ‘instanced loot’. However, since we are no longer picking up everything, I can’t verify that this is happening consistently.
Friend just tested it in SP-Ultimate; went around looking for totem in Ultimate, found one around Foggy Banks with 3 heroes to fight and everything was smooth. There was a slight freeze immediately after killing a Unique around Malmouth area but no crash.
With regards to ‘Instanced loot’ playthrough, it was more than a year ago but I’m quite sure it was also occurring which was why we stopped playing. In the case of ‘Instanced loot’ playthrough the missing loot after clicking was definitely very common. I will try to do a test again with ‘Instanced Loot’ enabled in Ultimate to see what’s the outcome and update my findings here.
Edit:
Just did the test with ‘Instanced Loot’ and no black screen crashes after a few totem fights with multiple enemy heroes. However in one or two occurrences, there would be a brief screen freeze and there will be items which I can’t pick up (with the name of the item remaining on screen).
Disabled Auto Item Tooltips on both comps and did a few totems and shrine fights with at least 3 enemy heroes spawn in Malmouth. No encounter of black screen crashes and will still encounter brief screen freezes, after which items/money/components can’t be picked up. There was also an instance whereby the screen freezes briefly and loot appears to drop twice. I walked over, wasn’t able to pick up the irons and component (auto-pickup on but all remained on screen) and decided not to click on the legendary item. After at least 5-10 mins, went back to the same spot with my friend and my friend wasn’t able to see any of my instanced loot but I could see what had dropped previously for my friend. Took a chance and click on the legendary item still displayed on screen, and it did appear in my inventory.
General feel it that disabling ‘Auto Item Tooltips’ helps slightly in terms of the occurrences of screen freeze but do not solve the problem completely.
The good news remains that no black screen crashes after switching to ‘Instanced Loot’.
I would like to once again mention, the black screen crash OP described happens to me (SP) since forever but like this :
It used to happen while in-game, although very rarely, never on the main menu.
Since 2 patches or something, it almost never happens in game anymore, but happens a lot after the logo when launch, or returning back to main menu, or rapidly scrolling through characters.