Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

I understand why harvest needs a nerf, but this is a little bit too much.. that means as a casual player(less than 3 hrs a day), if I want to get to endgame content easier, I have to play meta builds. not liking this so much.

the only thing that made me eager to finally start crafting a decent endgame gear in this game, and you take it away nice! wont be crafting anymore thank you. you really know what your playerbase want

Man this hits hard... I would surely have quit the league already if harvest didnt exist. There must be a better way to change things instead of "this" and I was reading some amazing suggestions here!

Give all items a cap which prevents unlimited harvest crafting (like 10 times per item) and implement a bench craft (moderate/high cost) or currency item (high drop rate by oshabi) that can reset this value. You crafted 10/10 times? Slam the craft/currency on the item to get back 1 craft on the item. <- Was the suggestion I really liked.

Im have no doubt that GGG will find the best/a better solution - But please dont leave it like you stated in the post :(

So 95% players who was never crafting items before the Harvest finally got that possibility (because who will ever waste exalteds in their current drop ratio for gamble-craft???)
Now you ground-nerf harvest and crafting is not a thing for most players once again.
GJ.

Love it! Keep doing good work.
Everyone who are crying...take a brake from the computer go to the gym relax find a girl.

Since you're nerfing the only actual crafting system will there be any improvements to the currency sink gambling.

You say you don't want access to good items being easy and that people should work for them, filtering out the one decent item out of a tonne of garbage rates?

Try turning off the Trade site for one league, see how long everyone keeps playing when they can't buy the cast offs of people with the necessary amount of time to invest in gambling over and over.

I don't think I will be playing next league then.
Is Harvest leaving every other form of crafting obsolete? Yes, yes of course. Is it wrong? Yes. The solution is not nuking Harvest into oblivion, though.
Speaking from the average player's experience, I don't get to engage in any form of crafting at all due to it being prohibitively expensive. I don't get the, say, 50ex it would take to craft one mod on one item that has good disposition for it. Before Harvest was a thing, I used fossils to get more or less the items I needed and kinda made do. Before Delve was a thing, I never completed any relevant part of the content because I never got a build that was in any form complete.
I have been usually forced to buy the items I need, but I enjoy crafting them way more. And there is the fact that the item I need may aswell not be in the market at all.
The traditional exalt crafting is also a "win more" mechanic: you must first have a build able to farm very quickly to get the money, or one able to farm very advanced content. But such a build is either expensive or very restrictive (it forces you to play a certain class and skillset which may not be what I want to play).
There is also the fact that you made the content harder. Right now, it's getting kind of ridiculous with the amounts of HP some stuff gets to have. In fact, at some point certain skills just won't deal enough damage to chew through bosses unless you get the hyper ridiculous end game gear, and I'm talking map bosses, not game bosses. So it's not like you are adding more options for more personalization, no, you are forcing the player to spec into these options.
Of course content creators and other people who can, and are willing to, spend almost unlimited time on the game will beat stuff faster, and probably "clear" the game way sooner than most other players, orders of magnitude sooner. But I'm speaking from the average player's experience.
This league I felt that the distribution of power was just about right: I got the stuff I needed by myself while playing a decent amount of time. This league had me playing way longer than others did, because I had goals I could realistically achieve. And it's not because of Ritual, obviously. What Ritual brings to the table are a couple of new bases and a way to make money, but we had way more money available in Heist, for example. The current implementation of Harvest is very annoying, but it gets the job done. For the average player at least.
If you implemented an in-game way to trade crafts it would make crafts way more available, so rarer crafts would become very common. Thus nerfing the rarity of the crafts and the amount of crafts you get would be understandable, and necesary, at that point. But making it so that you can't craft influenced items is prohibitive. Good items, which are NEEDED to clear some not even end game content, will no longer be available to people who can't invest their life in the game, and let's not talk about SSF for the general populace.
Exalt crafting will never be relevant to the average player. It never was. I have been playing since Rampage and not even once I have slammed an exalt in an item. None of my friends, some of whom play way more than I do, have either.
A method to destroy exalted orbs is necesary for the economy to function. Currently that role is taken by the metacrafting mods, and that's kinda okay, but it might be insufficient.
One of the things that crossed my mind at some point is making the harvest craft consume the corresponding currency: a targeted annul consumes an annull, a targeted exalt consumes an exalt. This destroys currency and lowers the availability of very high grade items in a way.
You can also give more relevancy to other forms of crafting. Some, like essences, have actually been helped by Harvest. Others, like fossils, have been completely overriden by it. Bring back Delve only modifiers (or maybe not "delve only" but make them available again through delve), this will make the mechanic relevant. Make it so that architech magic items drop fractured, this will make them relevant. Etc.
I don't returning to the times when crafting was not a thing at all is a good idea.

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ibran0vski wrote:

Everyone who are crying...take a brake from the computer go to the gym relax find a girl.

thats a valid point here.
I think i just needed a reason to drop the game, and now it is.

Such a great call, worth the 300 downvotes I got on Reddit today applauding the good decision to get rid of bad design.

I LOVE that you are going to nerf Hearvest. It was so powerful that I felt obliged to hunt for it, farming Haewark Hamlet only, be it in SSF or Trade. It was by far the most viable option to craft, using chaos or exalts on your gear just felt like a waste compared to it. I LOVED everything else about the new expansion and the league, but adding Harvest in the current state had such a heavy impact on my play experience that it drained me to the point where I had to quit the current league, hoping you would be going to change it in the future.

Thank you for going this route with PoE and fixing the state of Harvest.

On a side note, if any staff member reads this: Please keep in mind that the majority of players is "silent", meaning they are not posting anything pro or contra Harvest anywhere. I think it's important for you to figure out what this silent majority wants. Since most of them, I assume, are "casuals" (not even in the sense that they don't put hundreds of hours of playtime into a league, but rather that they don't want to deal with TFT and scrolling through Affixes on poe.db etc.), I believe a not so small portion of them feels somewhat like me.

<3<3<3

EDIT: Well, after reading some other opinions and watching some videos (especially PathofMatth)... I changed my mind 180°. Reading the manifesto once agains now, it really seems that GGG is out of touch with many players.