Over 430 threads discussing labyrinth problems with over 1040 posters in support DONE!!!!!

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They can't say much about labyrinth plans because they have none. They will make technical and balance adjustments like for any other part of the game. But I think in one of the state of the exile interviews chris already mentioned that they don't have any plans for further modifications for the labyrinth and move on to new content, for me that is enough information.

You don't know that they have no plans. You don't know that they won't make plans based on the constant stream of negative feedback they get about Lab. I also watched that State of the Exile interview, and it sounded a lot less like he was convinced the Lab was great, and more like he was trying to make excuses to keep it around because he liked it--not because players did. As long as Ascendancy is locked behind Lab, they can never know if players like the Lab or not because they often only run it for the Ascendancy. Maybe they can take a guess if someone is running it multiple times on the same character, but that could just be them selling runs too, so it's still misleading.

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Not sure what you expect from them. GGG usually starts speaking about things when they know they can pull it off. They don't raise expectations about things they can't implement anymore, they did that in the past a few times and it was a terrible mistake. So you usually get teasers about the next league 2 or 1,5 months before the next league starts. They start teasing bigger changes a bit earlier (like ascendancy classes). If you look through some posts from the past you will find a lot of things they wanted to do, which are still not in the game... some of those things are from Beta even. They are more focused on speaking about what they actually do and are working on, instead of speaking about what could happen at some point eventually.

I'm not expecting them to announce all their speculative plans. I referenced that as an example of how he can talk about the game without fear of being "wrong" or "dishonest." What I do expect from them is more frequent, and more transparent, communication about what is going on. They make excuses for the silence, but that doesn't help anyone. It just makes players feel like this dev team doesn't value its players (who are also their customers).

Small indie devs can't afford to alienate their players. That's what happened to Red5 (Firefall). That was a great game for a time, despite all its limitations and developmental issues, but the player base is so small now that they can only really afford to keep the servers online with minimal development going on.

Do you/we/GGG want this to happen to PoE? Both of these games have non-Steam players, but the lesson is still painfully obvious.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

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goetzjam wrote:

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mark1030 wrote:

Where did they discuss long term plans with regard to changing existing content? Did they announce somewhere they were going to nerf reflect auras or bosses or items or map drops or anything else in a long term plan? Hell, they didn't even announce fixing desync until shortly before they employed lockstep. I think you're looking through nostalgia glasses.

Edit: casual, your join date is march 2016. Are you just pretending to remember the good old days or are you on an alt account?

Hes on an alt account or a liar either way mostly worth ignoring his comments.

goetzjam, as I told you before, your ad hominem posts weaken the credibility of ALL your posts, not just the ones with insults in them.

I played through Steam for a long time, using a non-Steam account for the forums because I didn't know I could just sign in through Steam. He used to say that same bullshit to me. It's obnoxiously rare for him to post something that isn't ad hominem, fallacy, off-topic, derailing, or otherwise useless to the discussion at hand. I think the only reason he hasn't been banned from the forums is because he's a f2p whale.

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Albinosaurus wrote:

You don't know that they have no plans. You don't know that they won't make plans based on the constant stream of negative feedback they get about Lab. I also watched that State of the Exile interview, and it sounded a lot less like he was convinced the Lab was great, and more like he was trying to make excuses to keep it around because he liked it--not because players did. As long as Ascendancy is locked behind Lab, they can never know if players like the Lab or not because they often only run it for the Ascendancy. Maybe they can take a guess if someone is running it multiple times on the same character, but that could just be them selling runs too, so it's still misleading.

Well the Lab is primarly there for the ascendancy. They hand out some rewards to just not have it lying around after you are done, so you can get something from it. But afterall players should still go to mapping. The Endgame lab is a bit different here, and considering the amount of enchants there are at least enough people doing it. Also Offerings are fairly expensive, they cost more than T12 maps. So there is a high enough demand, considering how avaible it is. People might just be there for the rewards, but then it is rewarding enough, so thats fine either. To be fair the majority will propably feel similar to me about the lab... it isn't any different than the rest of the game. I'm usually not making those super-tanky chars (they have 4-5k HP at most and to be fair very often just use tabula :P), thus avoiding things is a natural thing, because you die if you don't do that, and if it is an attack, a spell or a trap doesn't really matter. And if they allow me to trade from inside the lab basically all issues are gone entirely. At this point the lab is just PoE. Yes I can't portal out, but since I'm usually playing Standard in the temp leagues (I only play HC sometimes in shorter races), I don't have the need to cheat death and just take my XP penalty with pride.

So GGG basically does everything they can to make the Lab just PoE. And that is also the reason why they are so confident that people don't mind it that they have to go in there a few times to get their ascendancy points. Yes DCs in the lab are annoying and it would be cool if they find a solution for that, but thats technical, not something that matters from a gameplay perspective.

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I'm not expecting them to announce all their speculative plans. I referenced that as an example of how he can talk about the game without fear of being "wrong" or "dishonest." What I do expect from them is more frequent, and more transparent, communication about what is going on. They make excuses for the silence, but that doesn't help anyone. It just makes players feel like this dev team doesn't value its players (who are also their customers).

Small indie devs can't afford to alienate their players. That's what happened to Red5 (Firefall). That was a great game for a time, despite all its limitations and developmental issues, but the player base is so small now that they can only really afford to keep the servers online with minimal development going on.

Do you/we/GGG want this to happen to PoE? Both of these games have non-Steam players, but the lesson is still painfully obvious.

They could do dev blogs or something like this, but during my time at university I worked in a project (had nothing to do with development) and they expected us to share information regularly with other projects. I takes so much time to constantly inform others about things that very likely half of them might have guessed already or doesn't interested them. The thing is as a company you can't just throw around random information, they have to be decently presented, you will get questions about them and you need to actually gather all these information and select which ones are ready to share. Doing this frequently is a massiv time sink. Not something small companies can afford to do.

GGG has their ways of giving out information if we really need them, and I'm fairly confident that they keep doing that. I have really no complains here. I would wish for a bit more information with patch logs (we usually get those in interviews after the patch) but I would wish that they explain balance or other changes in the patch log. Riot is actually a very good example but they are a lot bigger. But reasons for such changes should be obvious, balance changes also don't happen that often so it would be something you basically have to do every 2 months or even just once per league, since the smaller content patches have hardly any balance changes.

And I mentioned before, according to them player numbers go up, and if what they do works there is no reason to change it.

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Albinosaurus wrote:

Honestly, I'm just waiting for 2.4 to see if the game will be worth playing again. Right now it doesn't feel like it is, especially since Warframe just released a huge update, have another one coming shortly, and they've been working their asses off on hotfixes to address issues that came with the recent update. They have also been very communicative with the community, and actively use player feedback to drive decisions going forward in a very transparent way.

Guess what GGG is not doing? Any of the above.

I'm not saying that GGG aren't working at all, but everything they do is behind a screen of "We can't talk about it because 'derp, expectations.'" You know how DE handles that issue? They set the expectations for the players, and the surprises that do come out are always pleasant ones like, "Hey, check out these awesome new features we decided to throw on melee weapons (alternate holstering animations and new stances) just because it's awesome!"

When Chris says something like, "This is something we would like to do, but currently it's just an idea..." we can know that he's not promising anything. He's only saying that to let us know that they are excited about introducing new stuff to the game. As players, we're usually excited for it too. When GGG is completely silent on their own forums--except for the Thought Police that don't like us showing how many people actually hate the Lab under the excuse that the threads are redundant--players tend to get bitter and resentful.

You know what would be an awesome move from GGG? Have them create a post of "The state of the Labyrinth, and our plans going forward," or a stream to similar effect. Take a page from Warframe, and be more open and honest with us. Check this video out and tell me you wouldn't love something similar from GGG.

Well said! +1

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Emphasy wrote:

Yes DCs in the lab are annoying and it would be cool if they find a solution for that, but thats technical, not something that matters from a gameplay perspective.

I am sorry to disagree with you. It is impacting my gameplay experience to not be able to enter any "domain" zones.

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Emphasy wrote:

Yes DCs in the lab are annoying and it would be cool if they find a solution for that, but thats technical, not something that matters from a gameplay perspective.

Since you cant rejoin the area after a dc, it is also the contents and therefore GGGs fault. Until now, there was no content that demands from you to have at least 30-40 minutes freetime (yes, some people need that long for lab and chris said it himself) AND giving no option to return to the "map" (portals, waypoints etc.).

+1

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gibbousmoon wrote:

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goetzjam wrote:

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mark1030 wrote:

Where did they discuss long term plans with regard to changing existing content? Did they announce somewhere they were going to nerf reflect auras or bosses or items or map drops or anything else in a long term plan? Hell, they didn't even announce fixing desync until shortly before they employed lockstep. I think you're looking through nostalgia glasses.

Edit: casual, your join date is march 2016. Are you just pretending to remember the good old days or are you on an alt account?

Hes on an alt account or a liar either way mostly worth ignoring his comments.

goetzjam, as I told you before, your ad hominem posts weaken the credibility of ALL your posts, not just the ones with insults in them.

+1 hit the nail on the head, maybe you should just skip over his ignorant post, like i started doing. He's definitely not worth my time. He's forgotten that this is feedback and suggestions, a place for players to do exactly that, post an opinion, without being personally attacked.

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flipser wrote:

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Emphasy wrote:

Yes DCs in the lab are annoying and it would be cool if they find a solution for that, but thats technical, not something that matters from a gameplay perspective.

I am sorry to disagree with you. It is impacting my gameplay experience to not be able to enter any "domain" zones.

Well thats a different matter. Bugs and technical issues always negatively impact player experience. And honestly players lost maps before of those issues and in this case you can't just restart them. It is an issue, but something that is global, they won't remove maps because you can lose them because of DCs, neither will they remove the lab for the same reason. Technical issues need technical solutions exspecially if they are so random in how they affect players. I can't actually remember when I had the last DC during maps or labs, while others might have more issues. But it is not something that requires gameplay changes. They did never change gameplay much because of desync (they did remove multistrike on movement skills, but that was basically it and there were gameplay reasons for it too).

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Since you cant rejoin the area after a dc, it is also the contents and therefore GGGs fault. Until now, there was no content that demands from you to have at least 30-40 minutes freetime (yes, some people need that long for lab and chris said it himself) AND giving no option to return to the "map" (portals, waypoints etc.).

That is the thing. An way to basically rejoin would be cool. Maybe they could also make the lab a bit easier to navigate so that the times between experienced and unexperienced lab runners don't vary that much. However I expect people that want to get through the lab quickly to be done with it to look up the layout anyway, so that might not help much, although unless they take very long on Izaro if they look up the layout they can't take that long, this only happens if you end up in dead ends or need to be very careful with the izaro fight and approach it a lot slower.

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Emphasy wrote:

Well the Lab is primarly there for the ascendancy. They hand out some rewards to just not have it lying around after you are done, so you can get something from it. But afterall players should still go to mapping. The Endgame lab is a bit different here, and considering the amount of enchants there are at least enough people doing it. Also Offerings are fairly expensive, they cost more than T12 maps. So there is a high enough demand, considering how avaible it is. People might just be there for the rewards, but then it is rewarding enough, so thats fine either. To be fair the majority will propably feel similar to me about the lab... it isn't any different than the rest of the game. I'm usually not making those super-tanky chars (they have 4-5k HP at most and to be fair very often just use tabula :P), thus avoiding things is a natural thing, because you die if you don't do that, and if it is an attack, a spell or a trap doesn't really matter. And if they allow me to trade from inside the lab basically all issues are gone entirely. At this point the lab is just PoE. Yes I can't portal out, but since I'm usually playing Standard in the temp leagues (I only play HC sometimes in shorter races), I don't have the need to cheat death and just take my XP penalty with pride.

So GGG basically does everything they can to make the Lab just PoE. And that is also the reason why they are so confident that people don't mind it that they have to go in there a few times to get their ascendancy points. Yes DCs in the lab are annoying and it would be cool if they find a solution for that, but thats technical, not something that matters from a gameplay perspective.

You are making the same mistake that many before you have--confusing difficulty for being the issue, and not just that players hate the content, especially given all the nonsensical restrictions and artificial forms of difficulty. The Lab doesn't challenge your builds, it cheeses them. That's why people hate it. If we want to play Frogger, we will, but that's not what we come to PoE for.


I don't think you can trust the "player numbers have gone up" thing you keep referencing (that I haven't seen anywhere), because they always do that at the start of a fresh league. The more damning metric is how fast those numbers went back down, and they definitely have.

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They could do dev blogs or something like this, but during my time at university I worked in a project (had nothing to do with development) and they expected us to share information regularly with other projects. I takes so much time to constantly inform others about things that very likely half of them might have guessed already or doesn't interested them. The thing is as a company you can't just throw around random information, they have to be decently presented, you will get questions about them and you need to actually gather all these information and select which ones are ready to share. Doing this frequently is a massiv time sink. Not something small companies can afford to do.

GGG has their ways of giving out information if we really need them, and I'm fairly confident that they keep doing that. I have really no complains here. I would wish for a bit more information with patch logs (we usually get those in interviews after the patch) but I would wish that they explain balance or other changes in the patch log. Riot is actually a very good example but they are a lot bigger. But reasons for such changes should be obvious, balance changes also don't happen that often so it would be something you basically have to do every 2 months or even just once per league, since the smaller content patches have hardly any balance changes.

And I mentioned before, according to them player numbers go up, and if what they do works there is no reason to change it.

You make it sound way harder than it is. Now, unless they have fired him without me hearing about it, it's supposed to be this guy's job. When you saying something like, "you can't just throw around random information," it sounds like you know even less about what you're talking about than you claim. It's a self-evident statement. We don't want random information; we want relevant information.

If they don't have someone who can/will do that appropriately, they can hire me. I'd be willing to do it, and I would love to bring players to the leading edge of the development process. And they would love to be there with me.