Solution to POE's Lab Problem

Lets face it people hate that thing already. I mean hate it! It's way too long and repetitive to only have one shot at it. And that's not even the real problem. The real problem is that you can't even step away from it, for any reason, particularly if you DC or if you just need to pee, or take a phone call, answer the door maybe.. no.. forget it.. its not happening. And why do the traps do so much damage in normal difficulty? Anyways whatever on that but here is the proposed solution.

Lab Hub

You enter the Hub from Act 3 town.

Upon Entering the Hub there is device(not so different than another device that shall remain nameless)

When activated the Map Device... I mean Lab device opens 6 portals to the Lab

When you enter or re enter the Lab from the Hub It consumes a portal but takes you to the furthest checkpoint, yes checkpoints.

If you DC in the Lab, When you log in, you go straight to the hub, Lab still intact.
If you die, you go to the Hub
If you portal out of the Lab, you go to the Hub
Upon leaving the Lab to the Hub, all portals disappear in Lab
You cannot portal out of the Izaro fight!

There thats it. People can take away or add to it if they wish. Good night.

btw: Sorry for the long run-on sentence up there. It seemed appropriate at the time.

I could live with this.

As it is, having let my adrenaline cool down for an hour since my last death ejected me from normal labyrinth, I am coolly considering quitting the game for good. It was fun while it lasted, but when a game becomes work, it's time to go to my job and make money for my work instead of investing more of my valuable time in a game whose devs seem to have decided that hell stuff for me (switch puzzles and mazes and traps) is fun for them and everyone they want to continue to play their game.

Something like that would be nice.

That's fucking amazing.

just make waypoint in none random area. Maybe between each lab section there is fixed seed with waypoint.

This solution is great because it wouldn't require a new or reworked tileset for the entire instance. Also get ready for people to assume that you are bad for valuing your time(as seen in every other thread).

One day, one unstable day, and you're already trying to fix what isn't broken. Amazing.

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HeWhoAnswersTheCall wrote:

One day, one unstable day, and you're already trying to fix what isn't broken. Amazing.

The stability problem isn't the worst of it. The chore nature of the whole goddam thing is!

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joachimbond wrote:

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HeWhoAnswersTheCall wrote:

One day, one unstable day, and you're already trying to fix what isn't broken. Amazing.

The stability problem isn't the worst of it. The chore nature of the whole goddam thing is!

What you call a chore I call a rewarding, engaging experience. Then again, I see mapping/end-game as a chore that results in nothing but stronger gear and bigger numbers.

Now we've seen a handful of negative posts here today, and only a few positive. I'm going to assume it's because the majority of people are playing and enjoying the new content. I've been playing and enjoying it for a little while on alpha now, so I'm not rushing for it on Live.

...Point being, GGG hopefully know better than to think even half a page of negative feedback represents anything even close to the overall reception of a new feature.

Entirety of PoE up until now: designed around the concept that players can log out at will to instantly save their character, and thus relatively forgiving of disconnects and server issues

Labyrinth: Designed around a single attempt with a 24 hour logout penalty

What OP is trying to do isn't fix a problem so much as pave over the new with the pattern of the old. The whole portals thing is a fundamental change disguised as a compromise - 6 attempts is a hell of a lot more than 1.

Although I must admit: the design of the Lab does run completely contrary to PoE's previous logout/disconnect policy, in a rather jarring way. It's not really the same game, and it's completely unforgiving on connection and server issues.

The closest I could think of to a fix, which unfortunately would require significant programming effort (but perhaps still less than OP's), is:
* There are two options in the Options menu to have a character remain in the Labyrinth during disconnect. One of these is for non-Hardcore (On by default), on for Hardcore (Off by default).
* In the even of a disconnect, your character remains in the Labyrinth, in their current position, completely vulnerable, until you log back in
* When you log back in, instead of going to the Character Select screen, you immediately resume control of your Labyrinth character (if you go to Character Select, it means you died).
* Players entering the Labyrinth with the option On have a warning box they have to click OK to, before proceeding (similar to creating a Hardcore character). Same deal for turning the option On while in the Labyrinth itself.

Of course, none of this helps in the event of an instance crash (nor OP's suggestion, for that matter); my suggestion mostly pertains to connection issues local to the player. If GGG intends to keep the core design of the Labyrinth, preventing Labyrinth instances from crashing, even under stress conditions, should be a top GGG priority.