I’m going to go off on a massive rant about lab. There’s a pretty heated thing on reddit going on regarding the top lab runner and how he RMTs by selling the daily jewel from lab and how recently, it’s become insanely pricey. There’s so many design flaws in this whole situation, it’s worth writing a blog on the whole lab system.
First, let’s just get one thing straight: lab in PoE sucks. There’s no other way to put it. It’s a pain in the ass for the most part as the only reward is a semi-forced gating of abilities hidden behind the Ascendancy system. Now, supposedly PoE 2 will alter this, but the mechanism hasn’t been specified. The truth is that this system by itself should just be shut down because it’s unfun and a real deal breaker.
I say this just in the nature of how builds that don’t offer high life regeneration pretty much turn this system into a pile of steaming shit. Also, the fact that you have to go through trials every single league is like anticipating sex with an aids infested hooker that her pimp has forced upon you because you owe him for the rest of your life. None of these things really add much to what an ARPG is outside of a side game that I’m sure most people never wanted in the first place.
Add to this the whole enchanting system and you simply want to take a shotgun to blow your toes off one by one. I mean, it’s such a joyless, pointless system that I wonder what someone was smoking or injecting into their arm to conceive of such a horrible idea. I think the only people who enjoy this are lab runners.
Now, the crux of where this started was the daily reward from being a top lab runner. Because of how certain meta builds have evolved in this current league, the jewel in question has become an overpriced piece of bullshit tied to a system that only a single person can profit from. It’s mind boggling stupid how bad of a design this is.
The main issue here is that most of these elements restrict end game builds. In short, a tedious, unfun mechanic has a function that prohibits people from progressing. As delusional as the designers and head of GGG are, this is not a great system for encouraging the growth of their game. In fact, it just shows a desperate desire to add themselves to the nefarious concept of e-sports, which isn’t really even a sport if you think about it.
This is the same issue where old school WoW players believe that vanilla raids were the best thing because gear was a bragging right. Any gaming system that creates artificial gates behind randomized strategies and ties progression to a functional aspect is just flawed. This is the equivalent of saying that your ability in the world to succeed depends on whether you pull a lever every day for the rest of your life to get a 1 in 1 million chance at hitting the jackpot that will allow you to eat. How stupid is that?
I’m hoping that this problem that is being highlighted shows just how horrible of a system this is and that GGG finally wakes up and makes a drastic change to their arrogant inability to get rid of highly flawed legacy systems for something better.