Cobalt Arachne

This is correct, the whole zone is static, the doors were seeded randomly once, then the zone assembled from the results. If you enter the Yellow portal from the lobby, hang a left and take the elevator door, you'll always end up on the same Green Praetorian Lab floor. It was never meant to be secret, and as you can see from this post, it won't be for very long... 😛 Players creating their own maps was something we did expect / didn't want to discourage, players who don't want maps, can ignore them and find the secrets on their own.

Primarily two reasons: 1. The zone was concepted as an open raid zone. This means the zone is consistent and a space shared by all players, it's not locked off unless the zone caps players. This is a contrast from when a player owns an instance, they feel more secure within it, as it is their personal space to play around in and complete. On the flip side, an open zone belongs to nobody, is more vast and unknowable, and that leads to a better fit for the 'vibe' of the zone, which is to encourage exploration and keep the anxiety of the Minotaur present, which is accomplished more when the zone is not owned by anybody, and you're venturing into the unknown blindly. It also encourages players to team up, since you're in a maze together. Why this matters is that open zones don't have any interior maps, they have a singular zone map (there was no logistical way to realistically draw/map 40+ floors onto a single image), so instead the zone was designed to be a liminal maze with no map, because... 2. Specific locations don't matter for the raiding. Players are given a free teleport tool power that allows them to recall themselves to any target on their Team or League with a 1 second cool-down. This means it's trivial to stay together with your group, and the raid's goals in the Labyrinth can be accomplished from anywhere within it. There are Elite Boss mobs everywhere, so being in any specific place matters less for the raid, with the exception of those hunting for Malevolent Fog, which is a raid sub-task that will appeal to explorers, much akin to the way during Halloween leagues will often have a few scouts who go out and teleport the League to Eochai / Jack In Irons for Merit income. Lastly, the Minotaur raid boss will come to you, so you don't need to go out and look for him, just prepare your raid to challenge him, then pick a spot and stand your ground. For these reasons, the map wasn't required as the elbow of all organization, the idea was that players would actively play and stay with their groups while they're undergoing Labyrinth runs, this also plays into the Minotaur's mechanics, and they're more than happy to say hello to players who are going AFK while inside.

No problem; I have very little attachment to any badge names; If you have a better alternative, I'm happy to swap it out, a lot were first-thought placeholders that nobody commented on so they ended up going out as they were.

Per an earlier suggestion in this thread, I wrote up a short intro to the zone, it will be included in the next set of patch notes. That being said, there's a lot more lore to this zone to be discovered beyond this:

Gladiators ignore combat mods, so they always fight you at +0, no matter how many shifts are in the zone. There's also a secret that can be discovered (more a solo player discovery) that will cause 100% of the Gladiators to become hostile to you every time, that's a trigger you can set with every trip to the zone. It involves the motes.

I like pioneering new tech (primarily Lua right now) so we have a wider variety of methods and tricks we can use to create better content. There's no 'sinister master plan' here with new tech other than it's more interesting for me to work on personally, and it pays higher dividends to the team over time with the tech I come up with they can re-use and adapt later. There's not much room for actual conversation if you so heavily taint your response with layers of bias and mistrust. We're not evil people trying to ruin the game. We as individual developers pitch our projects to the whole team and then we approve them based on their individual merit after discussion, and if approved, the pitching developer is responsible for seeing their project to completion. I have a passion for content that forces Teams to actually work together as teams and pay attention, that's how the game HAD to be played when I got into City of Heroes as a kid in early 2005, and it's the style of gameplay that crashed and died the hardest when IO's and Incarnates were introduced later on and then, bizarrely, people started attacking the notion that this game could be one that had content where you had to actively play. So yes, I have a personal interest in making sure the style of content I enjoy actually exists in the game somewhere. I've been working on the Labyrinth of Fog (by myself, it was a personal dev project that didn't pull anyone else on the team away from anything else) since August 2023, and it started as an experiment on liminal space maps. It will likely total over 12-months of work before the Labyrinth sees release. The Aeon Strike Force took me 10 months. I'm not paid to do this, I work on what interests me because I'm donating thousands of volunteer hours using my personal free time to strive to create production-quality content. If at any point, we start to hate our work, then we slow down or stop working. The only compensation we get for our work is the appreciation of fans of our content, and we do have fans, I've had people send me personal messages thanking me for the Advanced Mode content because it got them to join an active super group and it helped them meet a bunch of their current friends they play the game with. This is the core reward for me, seeing people have fun and make new friends. The above reason is exactly why I do this content, and it's been a success in that, even if niche. I've spent a large amount of time adding enormous breadth and span of content that benefits all kinds of players, not just Advanced Mode players. The game had thousands of missions worth of easy content, but very little for those who want to actually engage with the game in a meaningful capacity. We aren't just robots who work on whatever we're told, we're driven creative individuals with our own focuses, interests, and ways of enjoying the game and we hope to pass that passion on with the content we create. I hope people can understand that at the end of the day I consider myself a servant of the game and the players who enjoy my work, I barely find time to play the game because that time ends up going to development work instead 9 times out of 10. I'm also not the only developer, sure Cobalt projects end up favoring certain things, but there are a dozen other developers all adding things to the game and deliver completely different stuff from my own style of content. I don't disagree, and that's why it was a priority to ensure it was here in the Labyrinth. If you have alternative ideas on how to implement narrative/story elements into an open raid zone with no contact or story arc text, I'm open to suggestions and other ideas.

The Draught of Fog inspiration only provides a Level Shift while inside the Labyrinth of Fog; Outside of the zone, it cures and provides immunity to the Diseased debuff that all Minotaur enemies inflict with their breath attacks, so players could potentially use it while running ITFs if they really hate that debuff. It cannot be stacked with Ultimates. The hope is that people will use Draughts of Fog instead of Ultimates, since the Draughts last 15 minutes each instead of 5, and are far easier to collect than to purchase/stock many Ultimates from Luna.

There's a known issue right now, where mobs are not correctly displaying their actual Level Shifts until they are interacted with. We're looking into a solution.

I'll double check that the descriptive text on the inspiration alludes to it, it was something added later in development as response to asking for hints to the maze.

These are all really just one thing, and well, meh. I figure it's the same as every other hardmode TF, just open world, and those aren't fun, so why would the new zone be? The Labyrinth of Fog is not advanced/hardmode content, it's not even Incarnate content, no more so than something like a Hamidon or RWZ Mothership raid is considered as such. The Labyrinth of Fog is more... another style of group content aimed at providing a similar format of consumption to that of the popular Halloween leagues + GM hunts combined with a 'once a day per character' raid boss payout to engage with/target, and a variety of rewards that can be prioritized/optimized by the individual raid leaders. It's not meant to be difficult, it's meant to be engaging. But the zone is also a liminal space maze, with a variety of sights, discoveries, lore, stories, and prizes to discover that encourage exploring, a lot of which was designed to be doable solo with some stealth, independent of raids going-on. I encourage anyone curious to give it a try, it's pioneering a lot of new approaches to things. As with everything we create, there will be fans and those who decide it's not for them, which is normal for any work. At least for me, I'm always looking to explore the horizons of new experiences, but I understand some prefer less complex experiences and that's okay too.

I like this idea! I'll look into writing something up for an introduction for the next patch notes. There is a lot of lore to the Labyrinth, but parts of it are hidden, and those who want all the answers will have to look for it. I wrote a lot of extra lore and details specifically for descriptions.... Powers, inspirations, badges, buffs; If it had a description, I snuck lore in!

There's actually clickable geometry in front of the portal we added so it can be clicked from the ground without needing to jump; Move the mouse around and it should register.

As part of Issue 28, the Midnighter Club is being added to Long Range Teleport with the only unlock criteria being the same single badge that unlocks the zone. That should make the zone one-click accessible from anywhere in the game with LRT. Additionally, the Labyrinth of Fog appears in LFG which can be used to reach the content as well.

FYI: For those wondering why, Blarf was a low-risk feature that helped us prototype precise NPC AI control and interaction in Lua, the fruits of which went on to be used in building the Labyrinth of Fog's Minotaur In The Fog. Blarf's excitement at being alive is meant to represent them being thrilled that they were greenlit as a feature. It's great when prototyping can also double as enhancements for the game! 😄

Typo on Puncture's power grant; Fixed in an upcoming build. Thanks!

Bugged, missed from an older build where there were only two pets; Will be fixed next build. Thanks!

For Stealth, the mobs in the Labyrinth have the standard-amount of perception and Super Speed + Stealth IO will work on almost everything, with a few exceptions: The Minotaur In The Fog; Any floor (they ignore stealth) Soldier of Rularuu eyeballs; Violet / Orange floors (these ignore stealth) Rikti Drones; Green / Orange floors (these ignore stealth) Praetorian Resistance; Red / Orange floors (increased perception per Targeting Drone) The Family; Red / Orange floors (increased perception per Targeting Drone) For everything else, the bare minimum in Stealth will get you around the Labyrinth.

There are seven motes in the Labyrinth that can be found and provide small buffs when approached that last until you leave the zone, these are also key to another puzzle that ends in another reward. These puzzles are most reasonably tackled solo, but could become a group activity if everyone is working on the same goal. What purpose do the mote anchors serve? They pulsate with most malevolent energy... There's also unique Labyrinth-themed prizes, one prestige costume (that has six customizations) and two vanity pets to figure out their unlock methods and earn. Finally; I added special lore text to almost every single thing's description in the Labyrinth, if you're a lore nerd, there's a LOT here to begin piecing together, there's a story here, it's just not fed cleanly to you in a story arc directly. If you want the full picture of the lore, read those item descriptions! 😄

I've always been of the opinion that using voice-overs was not inherently / objectively bad, only their original usage in the Galaxy tutorial that people didn't like. So, I've been experimenting with them in ways that don't detract much from the content if you decide to turn them off (flavor dialog in the Labyrinth, encounter cues in LGTF). As long as you are constantly moving, the Minotaur will likely never catch up to you as he moves to a players position when he hunts, but doesn't dynamically follow them; He's most dangerous when his target is currently in the middle of something else and he shows up uninvited to complicate things. This will be most noticeable when a raid is clearing mobs to build Level Shifts and he appears while clearing a floor. Hint: From the starting point of the Endless Colonnade, use a Draught of Fog inspiration (or have somebody else in the zone use one, anybody using one anywhere will trigger it) and the path will become clear, but only briefly. Alternatively: Have somebody else run / clear the maze for you and recall to them. If it's the fog maze inside the Endless Colonnade, the only escape is using your recall power... That being said, I can include an escape door at the beginning, so people who aren't interested can re-randomize their location. I've received some feedback that it's a bit too common to end up there as well, so may reduce that chance slightly. The purpose of the Malevolent Fog pinatas are to increase the zone-wide level shift counter, as well as be a source of Reward Merits for a league that has people searching for them and using Incandescent Destiny to move the league to them for clears. Think akin to Giant Monster clearing during Halloween Leagues, where some people are searching the zone for Eochai / Jack-In-Irons. The Malevolent Fogs are a side-prize to strive for that adds Reward Merit income to the League's earning totals if hunted.

We're aware of some sort of crashing issue with the Minotaur's Hoof Stomp attack; I am looking into it. Source of the crash was an FX flag error in Hoof Stomp, should be fixed next build.

One click = petting. One death = feeding. Click Blarf enough times to be consumed and the badge should ding.

Very, very few limitations. Right now, there's just LGTF's final mission on Advanced Mode, and the mission inside Sister Psyche's mind in SSA1.4.

Team credit for Safegaurd Mission objectives was on a to-do list; I'll see about getting that done sooner rather than later.

You are most welcome! 🙂Thanks to everyone who's played my stuff! 😄 It's been real great seeing players engaging with the advanced content, I'm glad they're an experience people can find fun with and enjoy together.

Vandal and friends use a giant max/min donut radius to locate a suitable pre-existing spawndef point on the map that is far enough away the from the 'instigator' player (whoever triggered the phase transition) and then spawns the ambushes with a behavior to run to their instigator, which accounts for the delay between their trigger and them arriving. What this means, is that there is no pre-set locations where they spawn, and the exact spawn def the ambushes could change every run depending on where the team is positioned when the ambush trigger fires. I would assume the game would just pick the very first, closest spawn point that meets all the eligibility requirements, meaning you might be able to manipulate where he spawns, but that's just conjecture on my part, so it may not be as helpful.