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

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goetzjam wrote:

You think it isn't that big of a deal for GGG to add AC points to malachai, but the issue is it really is, from a design perspective no act bosses at all give any rewards, they simply allow you to progress into the next act or difficulty. Breaking that setup just to appease to the people that dislike the lab not only removes the purpose of challenge for reward and going out of your way to get said reward, but it would encourage player feedback to continue to demand that people get additional power essentially for "free" which the malachai rewards are.

Kinda wrong, sorry. You said it removes challenge for reward, but why then does nearly no one malachai merciless? Because he IS challenging and player try to avoid him. Giving him a purpose (other then the prophecy challange) would be a good thing. I also think that it still doesnt make much sense that endbosses dont give any rewards. All the exiles ask for your help to save the land and when you overcome the biggest challenge, you only get a "thank you"? So rewards would make sense from a design perspective in my opinion.

And I dont think we have to discuss that lab may be challenging, but not in a way that many players like. No one said it can't be challanging to get AC points, but people just hate the lab mechanics itself (traps, you need to spent 45 minutes, can't tp in/out, desync/disconnect even more deadly and annoying in lab).

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goetzjam wrote:

Not only that it doesn't fit the whole lab scheme together, what about the last 2 points of the 8? Ideas like this were mentioned before the last 2 points were revealed, they've been left in the same empty state as stated, which is why the whole massively list all of the ideas is a terrible idea, it doesn't actually accomplish anything but give GGG a list of mediocre at best ideas to solve an issue they have with the game.

My suggestion could perfectly apply to normal lab and uber lab: alternative route, some scattared traps, but main focus is on clearing rooms full of mobs. Last Izaro Room will then be filled with many (respawning) monsters instead of traps. This would be much more in line with the classic poe gameplay and still would be challanging. And I think there could be many other (easier) solutions for uber lab. Make it a unique map with some low ele/phys reflec, reduced life reg etc. and a hard (but not one-shotting) izaro boss. Challenging, but also in line with classic poe play.

And sometimes developers have to place their priorities right: Do we want to have content that is not liked by many, but is perfectly in line with the whole theme or do we want to have content that is liked by most players and is not perfectly in line with the theme. I bet not even 1% of the players really care about the lore in PoE. People play it for the character customization and the typical aRPG hack'n slay gameplay. And AC points are very important for that. Forcing the players to play content with the trap mechanics was just a bad decission to begin with and GGG should've known that. So I think it's their responsibility to fix it. If you try an experiment, you always have to face the risk of failure and try to set things right then.

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goetzjam wrote:

The glove\boot enchantments for merc are alright, but only the endgame lab enchantments are even relevant now, nothing else, at least in SC temp league even matters. So by giving points for killing malachai, you know something you already have to do in 2\3 difficulties its 100% giving them away for free and removing the purpose of having players do new content, which they later will almost certainly bitch about the lack of content.

And why the hell don't we talk about ways to make the enchantments (especially freom the difficulty labs) more worthwhile? The thing is: AC points can only be gained once. So most people play the lab once and ignore it after that. But GGG's goal should be to add optional content (like Uniques, Enchantments etc.) into the lab that motivates players to do the lab over and over again WITH THE SAME CHARACTER. Like the people who farm Atziri over and over again, because she drops good uniques. The good thing about Atziri is, you can do her, but you dont need to. Uniques can be bought from other players who manage to kill Atziri. So this content is PERFECTLY optional. The lab however isn't. You need to go through the lab in order to get the AC points. And that's a bad decission from GGG.

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goetzjam wrote:

GGG doesn't make changes for the "majority" or "vocal players" they make changes based on what they view as acceptable. Don't think for a second that the shitty idea of just adding it to malachai fixes shit, it doesn't and it isn't a good change for the game (it won't happen anyway, if they so choose to go down that route, all future support will be lost from me)

What a tryhard... Like I said, people dont even do merciless malachai, because he has no purpose. So I dont think it would be wrong to move AC points out of lab. And the thing is: GGG will probably make more profit and make more people happy when they make the AC points available through classic ways (fightings mobs, not fiddling around with shitty traps). So if there are a handful of tryhards who would "stop their support" just because the game got changed in a way that is more in line with the classic poe gameplay, then so be it. I dont think that this has something to do with casualizing the game, since no ones asking for an easy way. People are just asking for a more classic way.

For example: Most people today buy malachai rush. Why doesn't GGG change the bosses so that you have to be present in the room? Most people only faceroll through the content because they buy rushes and can wait in front of the boss room. I think that would be a good change. It would make the game more challanging and you can't avoid malachai boss fight if you want to get the AC points (especially in merciless).

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AceNightfire wrote:

Kinda wrong, sorry. You said it removes challenge for reward, but why then does nearly no one malachai merciless? Because he IS challenging and player try to avoid him. Giving him a purpose (other then the prophecy challange) would be a good thing. I also think that it still doesnt make much sense that endbosses dont give any rewards. All the exiles ask for your help to save the land and when you overcome the biggest challenge, you only get a "thank you"? So rewards would make sense from a design perspective in my opinion.

You have a point for Malachai only in Merciless difficulty, There could definitely be a reward there, like Merc Dominus used to give a yellow map ( better reward then please lol ).
But with the next act, it won't be valid anymore.

- People don't ask you to kill Merveil, they did not think someone was capable of doing that for them.
- People don't ask you to kill Vaal Oversoul, they are blaming you for releasing the darkness and want you to fix what you did
- People ask you to kill Piety, only Grigor tells you that there is somebody behind, and I don't think that he is asking you to go kill him
- Dially does ask you vengance, but the villagers don't ask you to go after Malachai, they probably don't think it possible either. Also after you kill Malachai, the people that asked you to do it ( Piety and Dially ) are either dead, or completely powerless/pointless.

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AceNightfire wrote:

This would be much more in line with the classic poe gameplay and still would be challanging

Not as long as people one shot everything but bosses ( and even bosses now, for OP combinations ).

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Pyrokar wrote:

You dare question my Pro Mario Player skills?

Spoiler

And you know what the funny part is? I didn't do all these trials to unlock the uber lab since my char doesn't gain anything from last 2 points, but because i wanted to kill the blue monster packs inbetween traps since i was running 77+ maps. That's how trivial they are to me.

No lies. Now stop attacking my credibility with personal attacks since i am a Pro Mario Player and i will crush your puny attempts each and every time.

I concur with Pyrokar on this, he is the best pro mario player ive ever known. He usually describes the trials to me when he does them, and usually its something like this : "Fuck i dropped so low that i even run the trials now to get some exp. But dude you should totally come and see, they are resembling games like contra and frogger - you leap from a platform to another totally with mechanised moves, wait, and then repeat, like literally a platformer". To make things even better and thats a fact, even GGG realised how good of a platform/arcade player Pyrokar is that they renamed his character to : ProMarioPlayer check if you dont believe, the character's previous name was WhiteKnightInDenial.


Also ill leave this here again cause people are way too conveniently overlooking things that matter.

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Regulator wrote:

Also ill leave this here again cause people are way too conveniently overlooking things that matter.

Spoiler

Everyone's favourite time, STATS TIME! Disclaimer : The only assumption in the following (and thus not a hard fact) is that the number of the players that use the standalone client is around 4times more from the one that uses steam client, for a total of 50k active users at the moment. That number is not totally random, i took account the number of subscribers in poe.youtube, views of popular youtubers that make poe content, averages in twitch.tv and then compared to that of other games whose total active player numbers are not a secret. Also google trends graphs as well as older reddit and forum speculation numbers.


4.1k players in the proSC lab ladder (merci + endgame)

630 players in proHC lab ladder (merci + endgame)

70% of endgame proHC ladder consists of juggernauts, on the top 100 the value is 85% juggernauts. The number of juggernauts in merci proHC lab ladder is around 40%.

Around 6k total people in lab ladders throughout ALL leagues.

Now comes the even funnier aspect of the stats :

Steam chart 10k players for path of exile. Most people play on standalone though right? lets say 4times more players use the standalone client. Making the total number of poe players 50k.

6/50 = 12% of the total playerbase actually are eligible for lab ladders. If we take that a step further thats about the number of players actually liking and/or withstanding the lab due to the rewards.

Now have in mind that from those eligible for the ladders there is at least a 10-15% that only does it for the Ascendancy Points. You can see how that is true if you have a look at the previous lab numbers and check that those who got their points in the start do not run it.


Those stats also go in perfect line with those GGG released in the perandus league : Labyrinth 6.0503%. Add to that those who run the endgame lab because its insanely profitable and you can actually see that the 12% is pretty close to that.

Were does that brings us? Worse numbers percentage-wise than those PvP seasons had (at least in the start).

Were does GGG stand ? Nobody knows, they even neglected every single inquiry about the labyrinth in the Q&A (both parts for fucks shake). GGG WAKE UP, IGNORING THE COMPLAINTS DOES NOT SOLVE THE ISSUE.

Here is a question directly to GGG devs. When will you make a manifesto post regarding the labyrinth? Were is the idea, development proccess, numbers, player retention etc for the thing you are so proud of? Almost five months in, and the only info about it that you released is the one from the 2nd week of perandus that showed how poorly it was received then. Are you still gonna so arrogantly ignore it? Are you ok with it killing a huge part of the game and the fun? A simple post about the whole thing and what future holds for it, the ascendancy points and us the players. Thank you in advance

Also I'll leave that again then, because you are way too conveniently overlooking things that matter ( those were just couple of lines in the nonsense that this thread has became, I'll give you that ) :

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Fruz wrote:

Now you can remove all players that do not reach merciless to start with.
Then you can remove all players that watch streams but seldom have time to play.
And then we will have real st.... no we won't.

There is no platform literally in PoE, but the thing that makes the comparison with Mario ridiculous, stupid ( and pathetic ? ) is that the dangerous thing in most of Mario's content ( like the old ones ) is .... the void, it's when you fall and rip ( not 100% of levels are like this, but most dangerous places are ).
No such thing in PoE, just a matter of timing, something that has been there from .... oh wait, from the very start with some bosses.
funny.

About the name, let me quote GGG :

"

Hi there!

You can currently contact us by email at support@grindinggear.com to request a character rename. Simply provide the current name, and a short list of one - three new names in order of your preference. I hope this helps!

Like they will change it out of the blue when it does not go against the ToS .... sure.

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Fruz wrote:

- People don't ask you to kill Merveil, they did not think someone was capable of doing that for them.
- People don't ask you to kill Vaal Oversoul, they are blaming you for releasing the darkness and want you to fix what you did
- Dially does ask you vengance, but the villagers don't ask you to go after Malachai, they probably don't think it possible either. Also after you kill Malachai, the people that asked you to do it ( Piety and Dially ) are either dead, or completely powerless/pointless.

And in the end they still thank you for solving the problem. In any other world/game you would be rewarded soomehow for killing the main boss. Merveil, Vaal, Dominus, Malachai... They are a threat to all the exiles, maybe even the whole world. But hey, lets give a reward for killing a shitty Necromancer in Fetid Pool, or a giant enemy crab in lower sub...

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Fruz wrote:

- People ask you to kill Piety, only Grigor tells you that there is somebody behind, and I don't think that he is asking you to go kill him

Funny thing you say this, because you get 2 passive skill points for killing piety in act 3 (but nothing for Dominus, who is even worse then Piety, LOL). It just doesnt make sense that you get rewards for the minibosses (brutus, piety) but nothing for the main bosses.

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Fruz wrote:

Not as long as people one shot everything but bosses ( and even bosses now, for OP combinations ).

And what's the problem with that? If someone can afford the equipment to one-shot everything, then they have earned it. And even then there could be some easy modifications:

I suggested an alternative way with rooms you have to clear in order to proceed in the lab. Why not give every room some map mods? For example: Before you get to the next room, you can read a sign. This sign tells you what you will face in the next room. Like elemental or phys reflec or reduced life reg, reduced damage etc. This forces the player to think about how he will finish the next room without dying. If the next room has elemental reflec, you may be better of using bladefall instead of firestorm for this next room. This would slow down players and it would be challanging in some rooms, BUT it would be in line with classic poe gameplay. Huray, we solved the problem of guys who one-shot everything, because they will probably one-shot themselves when they dont plan ahead...

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AceNightfire wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

- People don't ask you to kill Merveil, they did not think someone was capable of doing that for them.
- People don't ask you to kill Vaal Oversoul, they are blaming you for releasing the darkness and want you to fix what you did
- Dially does ask you vengance, but the villagers don't ask you to go after Malachai, they probably don't think it possible either. Also after you kill Malachai, the people that asked you to do it ( Piety and Dially ) are either dead, or completely powerless/pointless.

And in the end they still thank you for solving the problem. In any other world/game you would be rewarded soomehow for killing the main boss. Merveil, Vaal, Dominus, Malachai... They are a threat to all the exiles, maybe even the whole world. But hey, lets give a reward for killing a shitty Necromancer in Fetid Pool, or a giant enemy crab in lower sub...
head...

No
This is just completely uterly wrong.
Have you played any of the FF series ? probably not
When you kill a boss, you do not necessarily get a substancial reward, sometimes you just keep going with the story and that's it.
I could take another very simple example that is being used in other threads fallaciously : Mario.
Just the two examples that come to mind.

For the other quests, the reward is a carrot on a stick, because they think you are capable of complete it.
It's different for act bosses.

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AceNightfire wrote:

Funny thing you say this, because you get 2 passive skill points for killing piety in act 3 (but nothing for Dominus, who is even worse then Piety, LOL). It just doesnt make sense that you get rewards for the minibosses (brutus, piety) but nothing for the main bosses.

which is exactly my point.
He asks you to go kill her, he wants vengeance.

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AceNightfire wrote:

And what's the problem with that?

Lack of difficulty / challenge / obstacle, what many people against the OP's suggestion have been pointing as necessary.
The last fotm build is bladefall trap, goes through reflect without any problem.
I would be for puzzles, something where to have to think, something that is not just more simple than the normal way.

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Kinda wrong, sorry. You said it removes challenge for reward, but why then does nearly no one malachai merciless? Because he IS challenging and player try to avoid him. Giving him a purpose (other then the prophecy challange) would be a good thing. I also think that it still doesnt make much sense that endbosses dont give any rewards. All the exiles ask for your help to save the land and when you overcome the biggest challenge, you only get a "thank you"? So rewards would make sense from a design perspective in my opinion.

First either I am wrong or I am not. No one kills merciless malachai because its optional content, that was left that way on purpose. It offer an alternative to mapping for those first few levels, in addition of he was somehow required to be killed, other then the challenges (which he almost always is) then he would need to be made easier, because he simply wasn't adjusted like the normal and cruel versions that were adjusted because the plebs QQ'd about how hard he was.

The only reason why people kill dominus is because you need to kill him to get access to act 4 (for the additional skill point) and dried lake. If dried lake was an act 3 zone and if you got the skill point from act 4 in act 3 or it didn't exsits at all progressing to act 4 merciless would really not benefit you at all. GGG left act 4 merciless completely optional.

You don't get shit for killing koam+durr except what some shitty map or jewel? I guess div cards can drop in those zones, but because they don't have increased quantity like the map level zones of the area could its mainly pointless to farm those zones for cards (except dried lake)

Simply put act bosses don't give any other rewards then progressing to the next act\difficulty, seeing as there is nothing after merciless malachai to get to its obvious that people don't go out of their way to kill him and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, its indended.

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And I dont think we have to discuss that lab may be challenging, but not in a way that many players like. No one said it can't be challanging to get AC points, but people just hate the lab mechanics itself (traps, you need to spent 45 minutes, can't tp in/out, desync/disconnect even more deadly and annoying in lab).

You don't need to spend 45 min to do the lab, if you do that you are either an uninformed and\or inexperience player that is unwilling to put forth actual effort into completing it. Its fine to hate traps, if you aren't willing to figure out how to complete the challenge without death, then obviously you shouldn't be rewarded with additional power, its called ascendancy for a reason, not just give you the fucking power for free because you are too bad of a player to complete a challenge.

The not tp\in out removes some cheese mechanics from it and it actually is balanced with that in mind, many many people complete the challenge without the need to tp out, if you feel you need to tp out you need to improve your build. Disconnects shouldn't happen that often, if it does figure out something on your end, we haven't had massive disconnect issues on the server side since like perandus.

"even more deadly", God forbid something in this game be deadly that isn't a 1 shot.

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My suggestion could perfectly apply to normal lab and uber lab: alternative route, some scattared traps, but main focus is on clearing rooms full of mobs. Last Izaro Room will then be filled with many (respawning) monsters instead of traps. This would be much more in line with the classic poe gameplay and still would be challanging. And I think there could be many other (easier) solutions for uber lab. Make it a unique map with some low ele/phys reflec, reduced life reg etc. and a hard (but not one-shotting) izaro boss. Challenging, but also in line with classic poe play.

Not all content has to align with traditional ARPG mechanics. Like stated multiple times already in this thread, PoE isn't even the first ARPG game to include trap mechanics into the game. Massive adds in boss fights just allow leech\flash cheese instead of allowing the fight to be challenging.

The one shot mechanics of izzaro are actually perfect. Its risk\reward, learning how and when to debuff him or make a build around farming him at his peak is part of what makes the content so great. Lets not pretend like izzaro is the only boss that can and will 1 shot you.

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And sometimes developers have to place their priorities right: Do we want to have content that is not liked by many, but is perfectly in line with the whole theme or do we want to have content that is liked by most players and is not perfectly in line with the theme. I bet not even 1% of the players really care about the lore in PoE. People play it for the character customization and the typical aRPG hack'n slay gameplay. And AC points are very important for that. Forcing the players to play content with the trap mechanics was just a bad decission to begin with and GGG should've known that. So I think it's their responsibility to fix it. If you try an experiment, you always have to face the risk of failure and try to set things right then.

Its only their responsibility to fix it if they view it as a large enough problem, which nothing indicates that they do. If anything the podcast statement he made made it seem like at the time they are perfectly fine with leaving the lab as is.

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And why the hell don't we talk about ways to make the enchantments (especially freom the difficulty labs) more worthwhile? The thing is: AC points can only be gained once. So most people play the lab once and ignore it after that. But GGG's goal should be to add optional content (like Uniques, Enchantments etc.) into the lab that motivates players to do the lab over and over again WITH THE SAME CHARACTER. Like the people who farm Atziri over and over again, because she drops good uniques. The good thing about Atziri is, you can do her, but you dont need to. Uniques can be bought from other players who manage to kill Atziri. So this content is PERFECTLY optional. The lab however isn't. You need to go through the lab in order to get the AC points. And that's a bad decission from GGG.

There are lab and uber lab only unique items and the uber lab is 100% worth running, the merciless lab is the one suffering by having a better version without really anything of its own to make it worthwhile.

Adding content that is required in order to get character progression or additional power is perfectly fine, especially when the content can be rushed, like the lab. You do have to navigate thru traps, but the most challenging part of the lab you can have someone help you with, similar to getting rushes from bosses, that was done quite a lot in the past, when the game was more difficult.

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What a tryhard... Like I said, people dont even do merciless malachai, because he has no purpose. So I dont think it would be wrong to move AC points out of lab. And the thing is: GGG will probably make more profit and make more people happy when they make the AC points available through classic ways (fightings mobs, not fiddling around with shitty traps). So if there are a handful of tryhards who would "stop their support" just because the game got changed in a way that is more in line with the classic poe gameplay, then so be it. I dont think that this has something to do with casualizing the game, since no ones asking for an easy way. People are just asking for a more classic way.

He has no purpose, on purpose though. GGG doesn't do actions based on more profit or whatever dumb excuse you want to use. They make a game and design it keeping mind that not everyone will like what they are doing.

No one is asking for an easy way, yet 4\8 of the points would be with the malachai suggestion 100% something you have to do anyway. Like the statement here just proves how wrong you are.

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For example: Most people today buy malachai rush. Why doesn't GGG change the bosses so that you have to be present in the room? Most people only faceroll through the content because they buy rushes and can wait in front of the boss room. I think that would be a good change. It would make the game more challanging and you can't avoid malachai boss fight if you want to get the AC points (especially in merciless).

Boss rushes have been a thing since D2 or the beginning of time. Not only are you now asking GGG to put points behind that you are asking them to go against a purposely designed feature in boss rushes.


Thats why even the simplest solutions are far more work then necessary. All of you guys acting like the lab is this big detrimental time sink or something that is terrible annoying is funny as hell, many players have easily spent more time shitposting about the lab and complaining then they every would have to actually spending it in the lab getting the points. Great logic there.

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Funny thing you say this, because you get 2 passive skill points for killing piety in act 3 (but nothing for Dominus, who is even worse then Piety, LOL). It just doesnt make sense that you get rewards for the minibosses (brutus, piety) but nothing for the main bosses.

The reward to killing the bosses is progression to the next act\difficulty, it really isn't that difficult to understand.

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goetzjam wrote:

Disconnects shouldn't happen that often, if it does figure out something on your end, we haven't had massive disconnect issues on the server side since like perandus.

It did happen a lot, like really a lot at the beginning of the league.
Like 2 lab rush post-Izaro crash consecutively, that wasn't a rare thing!
It still happens sometimes now, but it's not as bad.

I had a disconnection 2 days ago of that kind ( unable to deserialize packet with pid **** ), but it's kinda rare now.

Just wanted to point that out.

Basically, what the lab lovers are saying, is that the solution to the lab problem needs to not change anything about the game or it isn't worth discussing.

I agree. It isn't. Not with a bunch of hypocrites.

Nice troll, good job.