I, Slayertip, Have officially given up hope for GGG.

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Slayer_Tip wrote:

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

If you dont enjoy running it then have someone else run you through it for your points. I run a few people through everytime i farm on good days, for people who want their points but cant/dont want to run through it quickly.

how would that work? i thought lab was pure solo instanced.

It works like any other instance. And a player doesn't even have to be in the boss rooms for the kills.

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Slayer_Tip wrote:

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

If you dont enjoy running it then have someone else run you through it for your points. I run a few people through everytime i farm on good days, for people who want their points but cant/dont want to run through it quickly.

how would that work? i thought lab was pure solo instanced.

No, its groupable. You can even wait outside of the boss rooms in the stash area while they kill it on 1 player HP.

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

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Slayer_Tip wrote:

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

If you dont enjoy running it then have someone else run you through it for your points. I run a few people through everytime i farm on good days, for people who want their points but cant/dont want to run through it quickly.

how would that work? i thought lab was pure solo instanced.

No, its groupable. You can even wait outside of the boss rooms in the stash area while they kill it on 1 player HP.

oh, thats interesting, thanks for informing me :)

Personally I've never complained about labyrinth, contrarily at the start of labyrinth I made a positive thread. Now, after some time has passed i think that the big flaw labyrinth has is that people are rushing it for the enchants, there is not much motivation to do labyrinth itself. Maybe raising a labyrinth area level would help, better loot would help.

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Slayer_Tip wrote:

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vio wrote:

i also miss your opinion of what's wrong with the lab from your personal point of view.

In my opinion, the thing wrong with the lab is... Too much for too little.

By that, i mean, getting trials done, which some, are absolutely out of the way, You can DC in lab, crash, or even die, and youll have to start again, its too much time wasted for 2 measly points.

i currrently play with a friend of mine who is pretty beginner and he failed at some the normal trials already.
he's in a4 merciless now but never finished cruel trials due to his horrible positioning skills, low end laptop and his spiky connection latency thanks to deutsche telekom.

i'm really thankful that the game provides some test areas for him where he can train for the traps and doesn't lose alot of (for him precious) playtime when dying.

---

with trials ggg put an incentive to visit certain areas again which got skipped before. which of course is a nuisance for some leet players because it means prolonged gameplay in the normal levels. which they hate.

but those folks will demand shorter ways to reach endgame until the game let's them enter maps after they beat hillock. preferably by being able to enter an endless ledge which automatically increases the monster level according to the player's level. which is every bot programmers dream.

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

Suffixes cannot be changed mod, scour, exalt for life/armour. Boom GG helmet.

Sry for the offtopic question: If you craft suffixes cannot be changed and you chaos it the crafted mod is removed but when you scour it, it isn't?

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Pyrokar wrote:

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

Suffixes cannot be changed mod, scour, exalt for life/armour. Boom GG helmet.

Sry for the offtopic question: If you craft suffixes cannot be changed and you chaos it the crafted mod is removed but when you scour it, it isn't?

"suffixes cannot be changed" is a prefix and is removed if you scour a item along with all other prefixes.

So the crafted prefix is always removed even when you chaos it? Seems costly...

By crafting it you would spend 4ex for 2 prefixes and then 4 more if you don't get them or get them high enough for just another try?

I am asking cause i have a similar item but doesn't seem worth crafting if cost is that high.

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PolarisOrbit wrote:

First impressions are pretty important, and one thing that I think was true for nearly everyone was the labyrinth gave a bad first impression. During the launch week there was too much server instability and client crash issues, and for a long uninterruptible level like the labyrinth, that was a recipe for disaster. There's no going back in time to make a new first impression, and GGG blew it big time with Ascendency.

IMO, the labyrinth is something that is fun to do a few times, but GGG tried to make it something players would do a thousand times for the enchants. Who is the lab for? From what I've seen in the community, it seems that heavy grinders don't like the lab, whereas the people who tend to enjoy it are like me who aren't so fond of grinding ad nauseum. It seems that GGG made a mistake of not considering their audience for this expansion. If the lab is enjoyed primarily by people who aren't big grinders, then grinding shouldn't be a significant component of the lab. And if grinders don't enjoy the lab but feel they need to do it often, then GGG is sending the wrong players into the labyrinth, which only results in their frustration.

One of my philosophies is that a game shouldn't strive to have things that players like, it should strive to have things that players love. If developers follow the former (a game that people like), they will be able to eliminate all the things that people don't like. But if they follow the latter (a game that people love) it's impossible to eliminate all the things that people don't like. This is because the things that players love elicit strong opinions, and not all of them are positive. I imagine many of the people who don't like the lab love something else in the game, and they are sticking around because of that. That's why it's important to have things that players love. For you, there is already something in the game that you love. GGG is wise to find new things that other audiences love. The labyrinth is one of those things. You aren't obligated to like all new things, but if you did, it would mean GGG has failed to provide something that a new audience will love. That's more of a tragedy than having to deal with a few things one doesn't like.

...

I like thoughtful posts and this is thoughtful.

I'd agree that devs do well when they create parts of the game that players love. But, there is also arguably a corollary on the other side, which is to not push everybody to do things that many find tedious and dislike or hate.

What we have now in POE is a situation where a core part of character development, around which all subsequent balancing will be taking place, has been gated behind a gaming experience that is unlike the rest of the game and that many players find tedious and dislike or hate. The term "frustrating" also comes up a lot, when players describe Lab.

There is one constituency of players who get shafted with Ascendancy gated behind Lab. Anybody who likes to try out a lot of builds (the so-called altoholic) and who finds the Lab tedious and frustrating will at some point find it difficult to want to continue playing, no matter how much they may love the rest of the game.

I still do not understand why GGG thought Lab might become a well loved part of the game when they were developing it. Old Solaris was a widely panned place in the game, with a lot of frustration and disappointment being expressed about it. "Can anybody give me the Solaris waypoint?" was a common question in Global before it was finally changed. Eventually GGG did make Solaris less of a maze, probably in response to all the claims of how tedious it was to run it. Then GGG turns around and make Solaris 2.0 when they do Lab, cranking it up to a multi-zone maze, which, like the old Solaris, has no checkpoints or waypoints.

Going back to the OP, I see the current controversy as a predictable response to GGG's choices. Lab was a highly divisive addition to the game and it will remain that way as long as Ascendancy is gated behind it.

Personally I think the latest expansion was a mixed bag, and that they're going with the wrong part of it while dumping the good.

Simply put, the Labyrinth is abysmally poorly tuned. Traps are either nonexistent or death-on-touch depending on your build and lag. I play a high % regen character, so to me... why even have traps? They're just a waste of space and time. The % HP damage mechanic is inherently broken, and unless they can come up with something fundamentally different that works, I will always consider traps a terrible design choice. Izaro is pretty wildly random as well, but that's a more complicated and less important issue than something which so pervasively defines the Lab as traps do.

On the other hand, while Perandus is perhaps debatably ill-suited to a trading economy, I find pretty much all ARPG trading communities are so toxic that I prefer not to deal with them - and for SSF players like me, Perandus is ideal. A permanent Perandus league would make me much more likely to stick around, as-is I'm not sure if I'll stay past the end of Perandus or not - especially depending on whether Lab ever gets "fixed" to make some semblance of sense and balance or not.

I must say, I share your feeling of being largely unheard, as well. No matter who or how many times I report someone for which broken rule, little or nothing seems to be done. Trading in global chat remains rampant despite extensive reporting and the fact that one of the mods even silenced me for a joke that they mistook for trading in global - that kind of situation creates a very bad impression of the chat moderators. People who habitually trade on global and mention, with scorn, that they've been silenced for trading in global quite a few times get no punishment adequate to even slow them down, while people who have no intention of trading in global are inconvenienced by careless misapplication. Likewise, I see more signs of cheating than I like, and while there seems to be some effort to clamp down on that, it just feels like it's really not enough. Similarly, reporting posts in my own threads that seem to clearly break over half the code of conduct points, with the request the offending post be removed, accomplishes... seemingly nothing. The only sort of interactions that seem to lead to productive results are ones which can be answered with "here's this thing we already have in place to solve that," and even then, some seem... rather off-angle as solutions to the problem I asked about. It's frustrating.

It feels like things could be so much better. I'm still trying to hold out hope that some day, they will be... things certainly aren't as bad as they are in some other, similar communities I've seen - the current situation over on Town of Salem, for instance is just... so many times worse I can't even begin. Still trying to hold out hope there as well, though, because there's certainly potential if the right things start getting fixed. Could be worse - could be Blizzard. I've already categorically given up on them.