Labyrinth Loading Times EU vs. US and Ladder Rewards

Hello GGG and everybody.

I have two things about the labyrinth ladder (speedrunning) I want to highlight in this post.

This league I decided to partake in Lab speedrunning (currently only on cruel difficulty) and have been gathering some experience on the matter - along with input from some of the other runners both in the same bracket as well as other brackets of the lab speedrunning (I am no expert yet). I think that we can all agree that, for any sort of race to be fun and fair, everyone needs to have the conditions for being able to win. However, currently, I and some others don't feel that this is the case. Through several hours of testing and running labs on both EU and US, on Lockstep and on Predictive, it is clear that US servers are A LOT faster at loading when clicking to enter the different zones. On EU servers you are sometimes (actually most of the time) stuck after clicking a zone just waiting for it to go to load screen (generally for around 2 seconds). For some people, this might not sound like a big deal, but when you are trying to push the ladder each single second is crucial. I usually play on EU gateways, but for speedrunning in the Lab I am basically forced to play on US (Washington) gateway just to save those seconds on entering each area of the lab. Playing on US servers leaves me at a strong disadvantage though as I have to play with 115-126 ms latency which also causes me to lose some seconds. For those who are curious, I Leap slam REALLY fast to get around, and timing the leaps with the added delay becomes really bad compared to playing with the regular 30'ish ms latency I have on EU servers. I have tried predictive as well, and basically, if I can avoid all desync (HIGHLY unlikely) that is the current most perfect condition for my Speedrunning as an EU player (which is sad when you think about it). This basically leaves EU players, speedrunners in particular, at a quite big disadvantage which is somewhat, if not very, unfair when considering a racing scenario (maybe this also holds true for actual race seasons - don't know for sure as I have not tried it).

The second thing I want to address is the lack of rewards for people trying to push the Ladder. I and some others feel that it is really weird that ONLY first place is rewarded with ANYTHING at all. In most races in the world, included races in the race seasons of PoE, usually, the top X players/participants get something for their effort. Lab speedrunning is basically all or nothing, which leaves you with an empty feeling when you do your best to push the ladder just to get beaten by one second at the very end and have basically nothing to show for it (especially when you know you could do it faster had you had better playing conditions). I suggest that you (GGG) implement some sort of reward system for the participants of the Labyrinth ladder system. I am not saying you should get rich from it, but some kind of fair reward for doing your best and participating would be nice.

That was my 2-cents on those matters, feel free to comment with any other experiences or suggestions related to the topic and issues described above.

Varcarian over and out!

Agree.

Have one addition: This is not just an issue for lab speed runners. Everybody "suffers" from those transition times. This should be fixed in general including other areas - assuming there is an identical problem.

If there are 100K players and every player does 60 transitions per day then we have 12M seconds == 200K minutes ~= 3333 hours waiting times per day. I think that is worth some effort on the development side of things.