SET FREE THE ASCENDANCY POINTS (or rework the lab) [New ascension methods/lab rework ideas]

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Zalhan2 wrote:

There is a vast difference from the people saying I do not like the lab because of "X" and some troller saying learn to play,or LAB is a way to stop bad people (who do not pay) from progressing and forcing them to quit the game.

Yes, my opinion is that no matter how drunk you are, there really no excuse for that kind of nonsense.

I have long been a fan of freeing the ascendancy points from the tyranny of the lab

the lab is just ever so awful

at least give us an alternative way to earn our points

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Zalhan2 wrote:

There is a vast difference from the people saying I do not like the lab because of "X" and some troller saying learn to play,or LAB is a way to stop bad people (who do not pay) from progressing and forcing them to quit the game.

Well, I don't think that you're in either category so ... :]]

The original title of the thread was "SET FREE ASCENDANCY POINTS," which is where the initial misunderstandings came from. It was missing the "THE."

That said, any native speaker of English can tell you that that title does not mean "gib us AP for free" either. There was clearly some bad-faith interpretation going on there and/or assumptions made by EFL speakers. But even the latter had no excuse: As someone pointed out, it was later clarified that this was absolutely not what the thread title meant. Still, some chose to ignore that, and focus instead on the "you want shit for free, get lost man!" angle, because it is such an easy statement to make fun of. Ever hear of a "strawman?" Well, there is a classic example.

So you guys can drop the red herring already, and focus on the more important question:

Why is the Labyrinth so unfun for so many, and what is the easiest/cheapest/most-likely-to-be-accepted way for GGG to fix it so that it no longer is?

At this point in time it is quite clear that GGG will not abandon the lab or remove the points in the near future, an approach I happen to agree with (I want them to fix this shit, not relegate it to obscurity), so I consider the above question more important than "Why won't they introduce an alternative?"

I've already given my reason:

The Labyrinth discourages exploration (and fiercely discourages it at that), and all content in PoE which discourages exploration will necessarily be a lot less fun than content which does not. Fixing this is not difficult, nor expensive, nor likely to meet with much resistance from Labyrinth fans.

But others may have different ideas and/or points of view.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

The Labyrinth discourages exploration (and fiercely discourages it at that), and all content in PoE which discourages exploration will necessarily be a lot less fun than content which does not. Fixing this is not difficult, nor expensive, nor likely to meet with much resistance from Labyrinth fans.

I agree with that point overall, however :
The game almost never encourage exploration, at all.
It encourages efficiency, because that's the only way to "beat" the RNG in the long run.
Sometimes, efficiency means clearing most of an area.
Sometimes, it means destroying everything you see and keep going ( linear layouts ) until you've done enough, and then give up the remaining monsters because they are not worth the time.
Sometimes, it means just getting quicklt to the next exit to reach the next area ( during the story, mainly ), killing some monsters on the way.
Sometimes, it only encourages to get to the next exit as soon as possible.

The Labyrinth does overal put more emphasis on that two last options, and the last one when farming it, which is what you don't like, and I agree that some more incentive to go to the side areas ( when it's not a treasure key or intricate locker, which alreay are pretty good imho ) would be nice, and slightly less pinatas at the end maybe.
Darkshrines might be a fun concept, but are really not worth the time+risk, at all imho.

But saying that only the lab is like this ( you are almost implying that the whole game is lot less fun that what it could be ), is not true.


Note that the challenges encourage it even more, which seem to indicate (to me) that GGG are fine with this.


About the "you want everything for free", it definitely isn't true for all, but there is a big part of truth for many imho.
But generalizing, is of course bad.
I think that it wasn't just about the thread title (it wasn't for me, but for the people "suggesting" putting all the points after Malachai ....), although many used it as an excuse I guess.

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Fruz wrote:

I agree with that point overall, however :
The game almost never encourage exploration, at all.

You keep saying this, but you've never explained it in a way which refutes my point. Encouraging efficiency and fast play is absolutely not the same as discouraging exploration. You appear to be conflating the two, and I think that is the root of your disagreement with my statement.

I've described in detail what I mean by "discouraging exploration," both in this thread and in others. But I am happy to point it out again.

From this thread: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1897324:

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gibbousmoon wrote:

2. The reasons the Labyrinth lends itself to playing for profit and not for fun are as follows:
-a) The piñatas are mostly at the end. This discourages exploration.
-b) The piñatas which are not at the end are published daily on reddit. This discourages exploration.
-c) You make a mistake, or the client makes a mistake and disconnects, or the client makes a mistake and gives you too much latency or a frame-rate spike, and your entire run is toast. This discourages exploration.

I then go on to explain that the Labyrinth's rewards are balanced around the fact that the Labyrinth does not need to be explored to obtain its primary rewards, and that that balance thereby discourages exploration (you already know where all the primary rewards are; hence further exploration becomes a waste of time which could be used running the Labyrinth again). It is true for your first run (to get the Ascendancy points), and it is true for your 100th run; thus I don't see a need to distinguish between the two in service to my argument.

This set of qualities is unique to the Labyrinth. It is not present in the rest of the game.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

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gibbousmoon wrote:

2. The reasons the Labyrinth lends itself to playing for profit and not for fun are as follows:
-a) The piñatas are mostly at the end. This discourages exploration.
-b) The piñatas which are not at the end are published daily on reddit. This discourages exploration.
-c) You make a mistake, or the client makes a mistake and disconnects, or the client makes a mistake and gives you too much latency or a frame-rate spike, and your entire run is toast. This discourages exploration.

Point b&c is exclusively reserved to labyrinth and point a is a much stronger truth for labyrinth. Which directly counters the point that Fruz was making that it was pretty much true for all content not just labyrinth.

edit:
-d) Trap game play is not as much fun for many people and is more tiring for others than normal PoE game play.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

This set of qualities is unique to the Labyrinth.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

I agree with that point overall, however :
The game almost never encourage exploration, at all.

You keep saying this, but you've never explained it in a way which refutes my point. Encouraging efficiency and fast play is absolutely not the same as discouraging exploration.

Not necessarily.
However, if efficiency means not exploring ( and exploring does definitely lower your efficiency in many cases, and significantly ), then it does.
Do you think that running shaped strand and the most linear maps is encouraging exploration ?
Because I really don't.
Of course this is one of the most obvious example, but if you want to go fast, and are in the riverways, are you going to check the forest south to explore it, or are you going to run on the road, blowing up apes on the way, and jump over the rivers ?
The way to the wetlands is even indicated, how does that encourage exploration ?

In many areas of the game, you just want to go to specific spots, which are basically almost at the same place, which is nothing like exploration, quite the opposite.
Sure, it feels like exploration the first time you do it, the same way the lab does.
This is essentially the same thing, however the motivation to go forward and do it isn't a huge carrot, it's just the need to keep going with the story line.

The Labyrinth does put emphasis on this phenomenon, which discourages even more exploration.


If there were areas where you need to pick stuff at different unknown location, and the more you would have, the better the rewards, then it would be something that would encourage exploration for example, and it could be efficient to look for these spots (to a certain extent).
But there is not such area afaik, is there ?


I think that I had read your thread already by the way, or at least most of it.

I do agree that people are free to do whatever they want and some things are nice to explore, I like exploring even in PoE (not always), but when you want to get the better of the RNG .... that goes with a minimum of efficiency (and that minimum is already quite something if you want to go anywhere, basically).


About the randomization thingy, we agree, as you know already.
If there was a high enough chance to get rewards in side areas, and people would not know which ones, then ... it would maybe encourage explorations.
However, given that everything is RNG, it needs to be really good rewards, with a set of potential drops like treasure keys or deathdoors.

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Turtledove wrote:

Point b&c is exclusively reserved to labyrinth and point a is a much stronger truth for labyrinth. Which directly counters the point that Fruz was making that it was pretty much true for all content not just labyrinth.

It clearly doesn't.
As I just explained, and had explained before I'm pretty sure.

Lab is by far the longest maze in the game, with far more backtracking than anywhere else. Not everybody wants to feel like a mouse in a maze; distributing cheese across more locations than just the end wouldn't fix that. Randomizing the maze each time would just reinforce that lab is a maze and removing reddit as a resource for lab maps would make some dislike or hate lab more than they already do.

Also, lab feels like deux ex machina to a degree that other parts of the game don't partly because it's a platform mini-game in an ARPG, partly because as of 3.0 it will be the most repetitious part of character progression before endgame, partly because it's easily the longest maze in the game, and partly because the lore is particularly weak for lab.

On that note, the lore given for lab leans heavily on two key ideas that don't make sense:

1. Chitus was either insane or somehow unaware of what was needed in an emperor, given the method he picked for finding an heir. Given that he'd done the job for a while, it seems a bit weak to claim he didn't know what kind of skills, knowledge, and traits were needed to be a good emperor. That leaves "he was insane" as the best explanation for why he chose a trap-laden labyrinth as a way of finding the next heir.

2. There is literal deux es machina at work in that some goddess riding on the shoulders of a skeletal corpse somehow has both the power and the motivation to fundamentally alter the power of any number of people who successfully run through a gauntlet and beat Izaro. I guess she doesn't have much else on her social calendar, or something.