Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

I agree that harvest is too strong and needed a nerf. Game became a path of havest at this point. That said a more incremental changes would be much easier to balance and adjust too. A buff to some of the weights would be a nice compromised between deterministic and supper rare RNG.

Spreading out the power for harvest to other leagues would go long way to solve a lot of the issues listed.

We all got by the leagues except ritual and harvest league without harvest, im sure that it make us players reluctant to remove something that feels good, but im looking foward to whats next :)

One more time, you try to nerf the "1%" and you end up simply annoying us, the 99% who are left with "exalt slamming to improve your gear" (A.K.A. best way to brick your gear if you're a casual, ending with +14 mana or 8 dext and therefore unable to get rid of it. Or should we use annul of godlike luck maybe ?) while the casual crafting system mostly is about poorly designed gambling system for normal players.

You know what ? Harvest was a formidable thing for casual players, at last we were able to build ourselves decent/good gear, and it was making a lot of people staying for longer than usual in the league.

But NO. The famous 1% grabs even more money than before, time TO NERF. And it all falls down on casual's head at the end of the day, while the rich people do not even care.

And this isn't the first time you do so. How's that aura stacker nerf going btw ?

Nerf Of Exile is starting to make me yawn a lot. Give us a break, or we'll be the ones doing so with you.

I mean this was written in stone from the start. This is what GGG does:

1. Add a new fun mechanic or ability to the game
2. Realize players found a way to abuse sed mechanic or ability
3. Instead of slowly nerfing to bring in line with other mechanics/abilities and bring about some balance, nerf it to oblivion and add to the cluster of useless mechanics/abilities in the game that no one will ever interact with again.
4. Add a 4% buff to the mechanic or ability 5 leagues later to try and make it slightly less useless and make the players think you tried to buff something when in reality it was a 4% buff when a 50%+ buff was needed to keep up with the current meta and massive monster buff they added to the game.

On the bright side I will be saving a lot of money on next legue.

Next league you will see that player retention will be far lower than this league.
The idea of crafting your own gear in a more deterministic way made "projects" actually something you would want to do.
Seriusly rng is fun, too much is awful and it just excuses poor design execution

"

"We don't want to take away the feeling of closing your eyes and Exalting an item, scared to see whether you ruined it or not."

That's not a good feeling. That's actually a shitty feeling. And do you know who feels it the most? Average players who aren't rolling in currency so they can casually exalt and item and if it's ruined oh well they can easily buy a powerful replacement.

I usually put at least 100 hours into any league I play (between my two characters I'm just shy of 300 hours this league), and I've NEVER been anywhere near that rich. Ever. Even when I've found a few "big" items that sell for 20ex.

I can count the number of times I've exalted an item over the years of playing on one hand. Why? Because exalts are still insanely valuable to me and far more valuable as currency than they are to pull the slot machine.

I'm with it, let's go!!

Mods, you're still reading this, we know you are. We watch you handle your jobs, so here's a request from us players. Make Chris sit down and read this. Every page of it. Make him do it. Don't ask him, don't plead with him. TELL him to sit down and read. Let him see what the base really wants.

I want well for this game. I have since it began. However, casino gambling is not crafting by any definition. Yes, you are making items, but by rerolling them randomly, augmenting them randomly, etc. It's literally all one big casino gamble.

Harvest fixed that for me. Harvest removed the one detail from the game that plagued me most. So I'll chill around here and see how this plays out, my only hope being that somebody actually does tell Chris to sit down and read this feedback.

Thank you GGG for letting me go.
I was a new player who joined in 3.12, and I've been playing 8-10 hrs non-stop every day for 2 leagues. Since I invested a large amount of time, crafting was not a big deal to me. But I have to study also, was planning to play much less(2-4hrs) to focus on my work. Thanks for the nerfs, now I know there's 0 chance I can get the crazy gear in future leagues anymore, I can stop playing.
Thanks!!!

Gonna level with you.. crafting always felt out of reach and impossible for me until harvest.

I finally felt like I was allowed to play the game. Think bigger. Learn and research. Test and iterate. Think, plan and be bold. This was a massive upgrade to my relationship with the game and how it's played, considered and discussed.

Before harvest I had to recognise that crafting was essentially out of my reach and I would have to console myself with ignoring it and treat the game as a shop window, not a laboratory. Which feels awful to me, as I actually want to craft my own items, but it always felt too daunting and unknowable beyond chaos spamming bases, and anulling mods with no way to fix it when something goes wrong, which I feel like is a pretty awful option to have - a view re-enforced by a number of such horrendous experiences.

After harvest, during heist, I was once again presented with an impossible crafting situation, and had to sadge my way through the league only being limited to buying other people's trash to get through... I was in the void of post-harvest sadness, and ultimately never reached an above mid-tier power level throughout the entire league, I literally didn't succeed in crafting anything usable.

When harvest returned, it was like my incinerated workstation sprung out of the ashes. We were back, with our passion re-ignited.

The ability to take some level of agency over my own game plan has always been hugely appealing to me. While I understand that many other people get a ton of enjoyment out of the trade economy and group play and guilds and all of this stuff, for me, it's very much a personal journey, and I feel very let down and cheated whenever I am forced to diverge from solo play to progress or achieve my goals... or literally buy the items like some kind of pay to win Path of Ebay mechanic. It feels like harvest offers that middle ground where you can still achieve greatness through solo play.. and while it's a lot more difficult than the alternative, it's still hugely improved by the presence of harvest, and you can achieve comparable things with enough time investment.

I mean it's not as though items are easy to craft still by any means (it still takes a lot of time and currency investment and risk to craft truly great items) but it made it possible in a way that it isn't without harvest. I feel that the changes to things like remove, add/remove and aug will mess it up pretty bad to the point of only the most clued on full time gamers being able to make items again.

Feelsbadforme.

This is pretty disappointing news.