Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

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.

Well if you realy want to ruin the crafting like it is now, which is good because now also casuals can craft what they need without spending tons of exalts or chaos Orbs they don't have cause they do not play 8 hours per day, then I am realy out here.

The implenting of harvest as it is right now was exactly what the community needed.

But you are making it like roulette now again which is more or the same as gambling with lootboxes in other games.

Now you are feeding all those farm bots and currency sellers again, maybe you earn money with it too who knows?

But yeah PoE will be dead for me if this goes live and I hope many other players will boycot the game then, cause you are far away with your decisions from what the community wants and what it needs.

Worst announcement ever.

This is abysmal. Removing harvest crafting after the league was okay, people expected it and although it wasn't great - it was okay.

Adding harvest crafting back and then practically removing it again is just indecisive. Make up your mind Chris and, I suggest, let the game evolve.

Gambling is unenjoyable and requires massive amounts of time to achieve. Being *annoyed* by gambling is ridiculous and frustrating. That's the common experience, that's what happens to most of my friends who invest all of their currency (a couple of ex) into one item which fails and they stop playing 2 weeks in the league.

I'm not mentioning SSF which was finally a viable option with Echoes of the Atlas.

After all this comments we will see, if GGG listen to the community or really only to a few streamers...
I am sure it will decide, if in future there are a lot community players or only a few last lost streamsrs who play POE...