I never want to play the labyrinth ever again.

i really dont have any problems with the lab, and i play mostly hc nowadays

That said, it's annoying, and I can understand people just giving up because the final fight is just a giant clusterfuck. Also the amount of backtracking is tedious if you dont run the lab several times a day (you'll learn the daily general layout).

Remove some of the traps from the final fight and reduce the lab size a bit for the next larger update is my suggestion to GGG.


Also: as been said several times, use a movement skill for the traps, even if its flame dash or weapon swap whirling blades or leap slam

...and you can really kite Izaro, movement is king in that fight.

I can actually understand, while it's enough to play carefully through the lab and learn trap patterns, during izaro fights you can't do the same, and some combination can actually be deadly.

Also i would rework the way powerups switching is done.
You don't have information to know when one of them is getting ready again, especially if it's offscreen. I actually think that could be a good idea to let them stay off if you just switch them off once.

I even suspect that powerups are not really well balanced, and i can tell this just watching at all the complains: few complains in days of easy powerups, heaps of them when you have stuff that can oneshot you (like happened yesterday).

I really like lab, but i think there's actually space to improve and balance a few stuff.

"

NeroNoah wrote:

Holy fuck. What can I say...strictly talking you are an outlier. I can respect the differences, but I can't accept if you try to argue there is no place for that kind of stuff in this game.

Not sure what you mean by "outlier"? If you are arguing that few PoE gamers dislike the labyrinth then I have to disagree with you. In support of that argument I have two points. First, I would call the forum posts on that topic a "shit storm" here on the PoE forums. Second, the Steam trends seem to also indicate that it has not been well received. http://steamcharts.com/app/238960#All Notice in the graph, there are a number of spikes. Each spike in customers is when a new major patch of PoE was released. Notice on the last spike, it is very pointy and definitely has a much sharper drop off slope to it. Very pointy means that the drop off in customers started very quickly, players started quitting very quickly after trying it out. (The vast majority not posting their dislike on this forum before leaving, I'm sure.) The sharper slope means that players are still quitting sooner than when they did after previous major patches. I would further want to warn GGG that if they don't do something about it then the downward trend of that slope is going to likely dip below the lowest point on the graph before it levels out.

I think the labyrinth is great in concept. I love the idea of an area which has rooms that might randomly give you a key or a door, or even a forgotten reliquary. Whenever I get to the final fight with Izaro, my heart begins to race as I try not to get nuked by his mortar barrage or obliterated by his traps. It's exciting.

My only criticism is that your progress gets reset if you die. I don't play hardcore for a reason, I don't need it creeping into my softcore as well.

"

Turtledove wrote:

Not sure what you mean by "outlier"? If you are arguing that few PoE gamers dislike the labyrinth then I have to disagree with you. In support of that argument I have two points. First, I would call the forum posts on that topic a "shit storm" here on the PoE forums. Second, the Steam trends seem to also indicate that it has not been well received. http://steamcharts.com/app/238960#All Notice in the graph, there are a number of spikes. Each spike in customers is when a new major patch of PoE was released. Notice on the last spike, it definitely has a much sharper drop off slope to it. I would further want to warn GGG that if they don't do something about it then the downward trend of tha

t slope is going to liekly dip below the lowest point on the graph before it levels out.

I wouldn't be too sure about that, there are heaps of people who likes lab and are playing more than ever, others that are coping with the situation since you can avoid to farm there.

What i think is really dangerous and is driving people away is that to be honest it's the buggiest expansion i've ever seen and ram problems have just cut lots of people from the game, actually everyone with a 32 bit system or a 4gb of ram. Add to this server instability and other stuff and you can tell it would have been wiser to take some more week to add all this content. That i really like but i would have played in a more polished shape for sure.

"

Frattagli4 wrote:

I wouldn't be too sure about that, there are heaps of people who likes lab and are playing more than ever, others that are coping with the situation since you can avoid to farm there.

What i think is really dangerous and is driving people away is that to be honest it's the buggiest expansion i've ever seen and ram problems have just cut lots of people from the game, actually everyone with a 32 bit system or a 4gb of ram. Add to this server instability and other stuff and you can tell it would have been wiser to take some more week to add all this content. That i really like but i would have played in a more polished shape for sure.

Sure there are lots of people that like the labs. Both groups (lab fans and lab dislikers) were playing PoE before. However, there are not significant numbers of people being added to PoE because they like the labs. In other words, people that love Tomb Raider type games are not quitting the puzzle style games they are playing and now playing PoE because of the labs. But, significant numbers of people are quitting PoE because of the labs. This is the danger and cost of adding content that changes the gameplay and detracts from what made PoE so great in the first place.

You have a good point though that there can be other factors contributing to the sharper drop off of customers like instability and memory bloating though.

"

Turtledove wrote:

Not sure what you mean by "outlier"? If you are arguing that few PoE gamers dislike the labyrinth then I have to disagree with you. In support of that argument I have two points. First, I would call the forum posts on that topic a "shit storm" here on the PoE forums. Second, the Steam trends seem to also indicate that it has not been well received. http://steamcharts.com/app/238960#All Notice in the graph, there are a number of spikes. Each spike in customers is when a new major patch of PoE was released. Notice on the last spike, it is very pointy and definitely has a much sharper drop off slope to it. Very pointy means that the drop off in customers started very quickly, players started quitting very quickly after trying it out. (The vast majority not posting their dislike on this forum before leaving, I'm sure.) The sharper slope means that players are still quitting sooner than when they did after previous major patches. I would further want to warn GGG that if they don't do something about it then the downward trend of that slope is going to likely dip below the lowest point on the graph before it levels out.

Short answer: correlation doesn't imply casuation.

Long answer: you can measure player retention via the area under the graphs (basic calculus). Using that measure, the expansion seems the most successful ever, although it's too early to say, I'd wait one month more. But then, you have the sharp slope.

The more relevant questions are: will that negative slope be constant, will be higher or will be lower in the future? Can you explain it just in terms of labyrinth?

Here there are some factors that are as or more likely to have caused that or modify the analysis:

1)Technical problems

2)Steam sample has bias towards casual. Many could have finished the game at normal and call it quits. Others tried because the new content seems tempting and it wasn't their cup of tea.

3)The behavior for people using the other client could be totally different (specially because they are more able to stomach those changes, being from a time where the game was more punishing).

4)What you see in the forums is the vocal minority, for both sides. It's hardly a sample of the whole population. I see a 50/50 split, and there are merits to both sides. I think it's better to focus on improving the labyrinth. So using that is mere confirmation bias. This happened with Dominus/Act 3x, Atziri/Invasion, Masters, Malachai/Act 4, and even Talisman. The game is still alive even with so many people hating it.

So yeah, you could easily be an outlier. I mean that not as an insult, but the fact is that this kind of stuff is enjoyed by a huge amount of people in other games. It's fairly universal.

Let's just better wait more time before concluding anything.

"

Turtledove wrote:

http://steamcharts.com/app/238960#All Notice in the graph, there are a number of spikes. Each spike in customers is when a new major patch of PoE was released. Notice on the last spike, it is very pointy and definitely has a much sharper drop off slope to it. Very pointy means that the drop off in customers started very quickly, players started quitting very quickly after trying it out. (The vast majority not posting their dislike on this forum before leaving, I'm sure.) The sharper slope means that players are still quitting sooner than when they did after previous major patches. I would further want to warn GGG that if they don't do something about it then the downward trend of that slope is going to likely dip below the lowest point on the graph before it levels out.

Not really. I've seen a few people use that as proof of an issue, when in fact it isn't very useful in this situation. If you look at that graph for more than a few seconds, you realize that anything more than 4 months old is a snapshot in one month intervals that use an average for that time period. If you zoom in to when Ascendancy was released you'll notice that it has stayed fairly steady. It did go down during the week, which is to be expected during work/school nights, but peaked back over 30K during the weekend. If you look at it right now, the drop is huge, since there are only 14K playing at the moment. As such, you can't really use this to compare player retention between this release or any prior release.

Edit: Of course, one could also use that and say that PoE has had an 82% gain of players in the past month, which we all know isn't true either. As I said, it can't really be used in this situation.

The only problem I have with it is on ES characters. Those are pretty unforgiving. You can easily fix a fuck-up with pots.

"

Pizzarugi wrote:

My only criticism is that your progress gets reset if you die.

This. I really think the whole reset thing is overdoing the "hardcore" aspect of POE quite a bit, especially on the harder difficulty levels. A single mistake or lag or glitch at the end shouldn't force you to have to redo the entire thing. That's ridiculous. I find the "platforming" aspect of it really out of place in POE and the idea of gated content isn't one I'm happy about but at least give us a reasonable reset point instead of starting from the beginning. At the very least you shouldn't have to redo any previous Izaro fights. That's just stupid IMHO.