A New Proposal for Addressing Labyrinth Hatred

There was a lot of enthusiasm for the Labyrinth before it was released, and I do think there are plenty of hardcore PoE fans who would be willing to reevaluate their opinion of the Labyrinth if some of its perceived problems were addressed.

That itself is a thorny issue, because we don't all agree on where the problems lie. But here's my take, and I'll go out on a limb and predict that the following will ring true for a lot of PoE players:

1. The trap issue is a red herring. Labyrinth antipathy primarily comes from the fact that most people don't play it for fun. They play it for profit. (This is true of both Lab "lovers" and Lab "haters." There are exceptions, but I think this is generally true.) Now, traps are certainly relevant to that, to the extent that they make the process of running through the Labyrinth even less fun. But the fundamental issue here is that 95% of the joy to be experienced comes at the very end: the Izaro fight for those who like a challenge and an adrenaline rush, and the treasure room for those who like loot explosions.

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.

3. If you agree with me that ARPG content which encourages exploration is almost always going to be more fun than content which discourages exploration, then you'll also agree that encouraging exploration of the Labyrinth will make it more fun. So let's go back and look at the fun that we experience at the end of the Labyrinth:
-a) The challenging boss fight, and
-b) The loot explosion,
and look at how we can distribute it throughout the Labyrinth:
-a) Raise the difficulty of the monsters so they are more than just trash. Add more mini-bosses in random spots throughout the Labyrinth (existing ones are fine, such as Rogue Exiles or Beyond/Invasion monsters). Argus is a perfect example of this, but he alone is not enough.
-b) Have the mini-bosses randomly drop a silver key, a gold key (rarely), or no key at all. Make silver key caches more rewarding, such that they are always worth taking the time and trouble (and risk) to go after. Have better rewards hidden behind secret passages, including some of the mini-bosses above.

4. GGG CANNOT and SHOULD NOT implement idea #3 above at the current time, because then the Lab would be far too rewarding. Why? Because of the fucking reddit meta, which emerged due to the lack of randomization. Players will simply run the Labyrinth extra on the most profitable and/or least painful layouts. Like they already do! So what do we do? Easy: We kill it. Randomize EVERY run through the Labyrinth. And THEN implement #3. The current reddit situation is the equivalent of a sanctioned maphack. And maphacks will always, necessarily, interfere with any attempts to balance reward distribution throughout content. That's why they are a bannable offense, right? Get rid of this stupid maphack already--it hurts your game.

5. We have a new problem now: the races have been killed. Or have they? The races will still be a thing, but they will rely on luck to a much greater degree than they do now, due to every run being different. This will be hated by a small group of elite players, but how highly should we prioritize them, honestly? Furthermore, skill will still be required, so that group of players objecting to this change on the basis of racing may be even smaller than we predict.

6. The two biggest objections to this change and the most appropriate responses are as follows:

Objection) You want to randomize the Labyrinth and keep me from using reddit to cheat, OK. But I already hate the Labyrinth. And now you want to make it even harder to get through? The fuck is wrong with you?
Response) You hate the Labyrinth because it is not fun to play, yes. This change will make the Labyrinth harder, but it will also make it much more fun throughout the entire time you play. Is it really so bad for the Labyrinth to be harder and more time-consuming, if it's actually fun to play?

Objection) This is going to kill my carry business.
Response) Your carry business is partially based on a cynical utilization of others' unhappiness for your own material gain. The number of people you carry through the Labyrinth due to their being underpowered for the content should remain the same. The number of people you carry through the Labyrinth due exclusively to their disliking the content will drop a great deal, yes. But this is as it should be.

Can this change be implemented in time for the 3.0 release? Hell no.

But it is not, by any means, difficult to implement, because it uses existing assets and code:
1. Lab randomization algorithm.
2. Rogue Exiles, Beyond Monsters, Invasion Monsters.
3. Loot tables.

Take my idea and run with it please, GGG. Sooner rather than later. The sooner you can address this issue, the sooner you will bring a huge swathe of fans back into the fold. Many of these fans have deep pockets. Surely the potential profit-to-labor ratio is high enough to merit putting this higher on your team's priority list, is it not?

EDIT:

Thanks for the all the great responses, guys. I just want to add one clarifying detail.

The purpose of adding more rewards throughout the Labyrinth is not, in fact, to make the Labyrinth even more profitable. Here is why:

I take it as a premise that randomization is a necessary prerequisite to any of the balance changes I propose, and it should be fairly obvious to anyone who runs the Lab regularly that such randomization will make the Lab considerably less profitable.

Why? Well, it's simple: wealth / time = profit.

Creating more rewarding side areas will make a full clear more profitable than it currently is, for sure. But doing a full clear will, in almost all cases, be less profitable than restarting the Labyrinth to do another run after finding your way to Izaro through the (genuine, now) Labyrinth.

Why? Well, it's simple: wealth / time = profit.

And that is THE #1 reason why the current absence of randomization and condoned reddit meta will continue to interfere with any attempts to balance the Labyrinth away from its current state of discouraging exploration.

good idea. i agree to most parts. randomization would be outstanding.

but what prevents these "i have a zillion runspeed so i dont care for anything in the lab"-dudes ?

edit: btw, think of randomized maps. woohoo!

wouldnt say 'no' to that, with some minor changes

however, while current lab underlines general POE situation (speed-meta, min-maxing, efficient-or-bust) - it is still coherent with current POE. you use the same mind- and skill-set in lab as during map clears

i know it is a pretty dumb skill set, but it is what it is. GGG gave us clear-speed-meta with anything non-top irrelevant. we havent asked and certainly havent done that ourselves

so both the lab and maps feel the same - zoom zoom zoom, pew pew the easy stuff, avoid any kind of risk, fat loot. it-is-the-same!

if you hinder that WITHOUT curbing the general game speed - youll create a real 'separate experience'. something that stands out from general POE too much

this is my first major gripe with this change

second is what has only been briefly mentioned - disconnects etc. as long as logout crap is in the game and HC players have it literaly bound to their skill bar i want Lab to be one-time entry only

i hear the sad stories describing perils of bad internet and 3digit pings. i hear them. but sorry to say - world has to move on. multiplier always-connected games have requirements - one of them is working internet connection. constant 350 ping + random drops is not a connection. it is 'eventual connectivity' if you get the joke

not to mention that some of these stories are just lies masking chicken scripts usage

GGG made a great mistake balancing the game around cheats like logouts. people are so used to that that there wont be changes. but this not-so-smart decision bites them time and again..

These ideas would help in my opinion. Would it be enough? I don't know. GGG has been improving the labyrinth a little bit at a time. It is better than it was. But it started off as total shit at first release. It was such a pile of garbage that the release was far and away the buggiest piece of crap that GGG ever made. The design was horrible and the quality was just as bad if not worse. I'm just saying that it has gotten much better since then. It is going to have to be improved significantly from where we're currently at before it can be fun content, at least as far as I'm concerned. Gibbousmoon's suggestions might be enough, I wouldn't really know until I saw how GGG actually implemented it.

An important consideration is implementation cost. If for example it was expensive to make it a random layout for some reason (which I kind of doubt but we can't know) then there might be other solutions that should be considered since making it random would be a key to this solution.

I do occasionally crash in the lab and that makes me explore it less (less time spent there -> less chance to lose the run). So I would suggest that in the überlab you only lose the offering if you die or reach the final room. That way a disconnect does not cost you the offering.

Yes, it does "unlock a new map: lab" as long as you don't enter the final room. But so what? lvl 75 maps drop in such quantity that you can already run them all day if you want.

And yes, it does allow chicken scripters to save their offering. But you cannot always use these chickens as an excuse to punish the normal player base. Just remove instant logout and this problem (and many balancing issues) disappear.

I would change the level of the zone to around 80 so people don't confuse it and think that it should be yellow map difficulty, buff the silver key door rewards (especially the map boxes wtf), and rework the trap damage so that it's not easier to do with es than life based characters. I'm sure that the developers are aware of technical problems and are working on that already since they would not want people to have their experiences ruined by game freezes and things like that. I agree that encouraging exploration would be nice, so hopefully buffing the side rooms and monster levels would help do that.

I never understood why trap damage was percentile damage. Maybe they wanted to promote skill (or as i like to call it Mario-skill) over stats. But then why didn't they do it for all the stats? Example:
-No one has any regen in the lab
-Everyone runs at a certain speed
-Movement skills disabled for everyone
It seems so half-assed and required tuning already (by making trap dmg less for es), but then there are builds that have both life and es at different ratios and since they mostly have a different number of life and es, all trap damage is varying among those builds.

And now we have a situation where a lvl 100 char dies on a lvl 35 area because of that failed attempt to create equality among all builds to seemingly promote skill which backfired so much in their face, it's not even funny.

Not only did they not create something skill-based, since there is no equality, but also created a situation where your defensive stats, in some cases, made you weaker as you increased them.

Promoting softcore -look at how fast i am going- speed meta much?

Exploration will still be a bad idea when running for ascendancy points. You don't want to risk anything on those runs and normally they're just done to gain power and get out. Your suggestion won't do anything to address lab haters' problems. It will only make lab runners richer.

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Exploration will still be a bad idea when running for ascendancy points. You don't want to risk anything on those runs and normally they're just done to gain power and get out. Your suggestion won't do anything to address lab haters' problems. It will only make lab runners richer.

It isn't just exploration, from my point of view. It is more importantly making it fun.

What is fun about PoE? Kill monsters get loot, that's what. Right now the lab has crappy boring white monsters. Those are less fun and exciting with little loot. Throwing in some blue and yellow monster groups would make it fun. This raises a new problem though that I thought of last night.

More exciting monsters should mean more loot. This is good BUT leaving loot that one would usually vendor is frustrating. With the horrible lab you can't go to town whenever you want. So there needs to also be a solution for this. Some potential solutions would be:

A) Allow portals into town, limited somehow?
B) Allow stash access in more areas than aspirants trial?
C) Make lab shorter so that less loot gets accumulated?