Who else is not going to play PoE anymore because of the lab?

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IceDeal wrote:

Wrong, pvp is in an horrible state at the moment but all the core problems has been identified and listed by the community for the devs to fix them. it's mostly values changes that can be done without affecting the pve part of the game. The devs just don't want to do it so it's getting worse and worse every patch.

Sure, it's kinda obvious what's wrong but it takes a lot of effort to tweak everything just right. Scaling is probably the biggest problem, PoE has a few orders of magnitude between a strong, well optimized setup and an average one, sometimes using similar skills or items so doing just numeric skill balancing won't cut it. Also, rock-paper-scissors game in PoE is way too strong, 'immune', 'can't', 'ignored', all those are a nightmare for PvP balancing.

And you're right about PvP, there are a few types of PvP players out there, what I meant was 'popular' rather than strictly 'good'.
1. Skill players that appreciate an even playing field more than anything, you can typically find them playing pro mod or arena shooters where everyone has the same loadout or everything is carefully matched like in fighting games.
2. Setup players that like the idea of being able to absolutely dominate the opponent with a right choice of tools, this is probably MTG territory, or any game that has a very high degree of customizability. In games like that, luck factor is used to give the mismatched player a chance.
3. A mix of the two, where you can have an advantage over the opponent but that doesn't mean he can't beat you if he plays his cards right.

Based on popularity of games belonging to the third group we could probably assume it is by far the largest one and first two are a minority. Now, we can probably agree that PoE firmly belongs to the second group, however, games in that group are exceedingly hard to balance properly, you basically need to cover all possible interactions to assure there aren't any broken ones. Considering that PoE has a high numeric variance next to an extremely high amount of game element interactions and virtually no luck factor to depend on, it would take an immense amount of effort.

I suppose they could push in some bandaids, like lowering all stat caps and nerfing some of the more broken combos but that would make PvP usable at best and it would be far from good. What I'm trying to say is that it wouldn't be good enough to attract or keep any amount of users that would be worth it, regardless if they invested a lot of time or just a bit.

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Lab is pretty neat, but a bit long. Love uber trials though, very good balance of risk/reward/time atm, nice bonus when mapping :)