Hello,
For the last several weeks, I've spent a large amount of time in the LoF. I've tested the dynamics of how the minotaur hunts, respawn range, the best way to find malfos, and more. From that knowledge, and other knowledge gleaned by explorers on these forums, I put together a fairly comprehensive popmenu that covers everything you could run into. The menu is focused on running a league, but the project is being shelved for the below reasons:
The rewards are inferior to other events that can be done in-game.
Once the minotaur respawns, level shifts are reset and everybody is booted out of the LoF.
The motes/badges/gladiators are highly distracting to a league.
For pick-up leagues, there are simply too many moving parts to run a league.
The tools provided of actually organizing the Leagues are lackluster.
The rewards are inferior to other events that can be done in-game.
The rewards of beating the minotaur are severely lacking for the amount of effort and time that must be put into successfully beating the minotaur compared to other events such as a Hamidon raid, or other TFs/SFs that take more than an hour to complete. As a result, organizers can't use the rewards of defeating the minotaur to entice people to join. The only thing we can use to entice people are badges, and incarnate XP. When I tried to organize an XP only league the other night, hardly anybody joined until I advertised we'd be getting badges as well - a whole other can of worms that will be covered later.
Once the minotaur respawns, level shifts are reset and everybody is booted out of the LoF
This is honestly a poor decision. It effectively does 2 things. 1- It kills the league immediately after defeating the minotaur. 2- It ensures that people who don't have stealth can't get the badges on their own.
To the first point - the league must start over from scratch each hour if they want to try to farm the minotaur. I can't express how difficult it is to find enough people with a sufficient stealth radius to build up level shifts. Having to start from scratch is honestly a nightmare. I could live with losing 2 shifts when the minotaur respawns, but all of them? Hard pass, The result is that the league more or less dies after the minotaur is defeated. With no incentive to keep people around (ie: the opportunity of defeating the minotaur a second time, or the ability to continue hunting EBs), the only other incentive in staying lies with the badges, however ..
To the second point - again not many people have the 85 ft stealth radius needed to somewhat safely navigate the LoF. Even when given instructions on how to find various motes, people won't find them on their own. What you end up with is a league full of people who are depending on the organizers to get them the badges.
The motes/badges/gladiators are highly distracting to a league.
Yay! A costume change! That's .. useful? There's no major benefit to be gained from the gladiator costume change. The Mote of the Gladiator, on top of that, only applies while in the LoF - how is that useful to people? I mean even a small buff outside of the zone, like +5% global recharge, would make badge hunting more enticing as organizers. The only thing to really be gained from the hunting for badges are the badges themselves, and I guess bragging rights?
The result of this - you have lots of people showing up to get the costume piece, and as soon as they get it, they bounce. We've seen it week after week after week. We've tried getting badges out of the way early, hoping people would stick around (bad idea, people only want the badges in the zone), we've tried waiting until well after the minotaur is gone - which isn't fair to many since they often have to bounce after several hours have passed. There are other things I could say about this, but the main thing - even when you use incandescence to move the entire league directly to each mote, and make clear there's only going to be 1 teleport to each mote, you still have a good 5+ people saying "I still don't have jealousy", "I'm missing greed", "I'm missing despair and greed". Sorry but - I refuse the relive the night where I spent an additional hour and a half getting all the stragglers the motes they missed.
For pick-up leagues, there are simply too many moving parts to run a league.
The idea of having roles in teams to defeat the league is cool in theory, but in practice it doesn't work well at all for pick up leagues. Week after week, without fail - even with dedicated macros that distill and explain every facet of what needs to be done - organizers are bombarded with questions about whether x or y should be hunted, questions about the motes and badges, etc. The league almost needs a person dedicated to just sitting in the lobby and answering questions. This all leads into the next point:
The tools provided of actually organizing the leagues are lackluster.
Yesterday, I experienced the joy of trying to organize members of the league. When I moved Player 3 from Team 4 to Team 5 - Team 5 swaps with Team 2 and everybody else gets re-arranged. Hurray! What fun!
I really do expect that, when I say move Player A to Team 5, that Team 5 stays Team 5. None of this re-arranging teams based on seniority BS. I don't have the time or energy to write down the order in which people joined.
Plus - the league leader doesn't have a way to chat with each team individually, just the league as a whole. It would be game changing if there were dynamic chat channels where the league leader could send message directly with all of just Team 3, or just Team 4, without having people needing to join the channel. This would help cut down in the noise that each team sees, since in the LoF there's usually a stealth only team. The whole league doesn't need to see the wall of text regarding what stealthers need to do. This really ties my hands in the toon I can play - just stealth, more or less - because at least if the stealth team is on team 1, I can use Team chat to talk directly to them.
There's no way to audibly ping the Team to make sure they don't miss messages. There's no way to format text, make it bold, no way to have some important text repeated on loop every x minutes .. no way to really make sure the important bits aren't missed. It's 2024, surely we can support formatted and looped text?
League leaders should have an option to promote somebody on Team 3 to the leader of that team, but we don't.
There's just so many needed tools missing to effectively organize and communicate with a LoF league that the end result is an absolute cluster.
In summary
There are too many moving parts in the LoF to run a pickup league, most people's motivation to be there is badges and nothing else, and the tools needed to organize and communicate with a league just aren't there. So, I won't be running these leagues anymore. It's an absolute nightmare. The real labyrinth is in organizing the league to run effectively.
To fix some of these problems:
Significantly improve the minotaur defeat rewards. People aren't turning up for the current rewards, they're too weak/undesirable.
Add the ability to make sure people can't teleport through the fog to you. I can't tell you how many times this has gotten me killed as a stealther.
When entering the zone, or a league in the zone, prompt the player whether they want to turn on Prompt Teleport. An incan, without fail, pulls somebody away who didn't want to be teleported (because they were exploring or doing whatever).
Stop resetting the level shift completely when the minotaur respawns.
Remove the mob spawns around each of the motes. Especially the Fury mote.
Grant a 1 hour temporary stealth power toggle to all in zone after defeating the minotaur, so people can get the motes on their own if they miss the Incan.
Add more tools and fix some current tools with the league organization system:
Ability to change Team 2, Team 3, etc leadership (Promote X to Team Leader).
Ensure that Team order is retained when a player is moved around.
Add the ability to have a custom message or 2 or 3 repeated every X Y or Z minutes.
Chat channels that the league leader can use to send a message directly to Team 2/3/4/5/6, without the people having to join those channels
Add the ability to change the Team Number - ie: move Team 4 to be Team 2.
