Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

Why are people saying that removing harvest is good? They say that they barely use harvest crafting and still close all the content. But you are making currency other way and still buy fkin good items which are impossible to craft without harvest. You are able to play a lot of different builds cuz harvest makes it possible to supply those builds with specific crafted items. Are you fkin retarded or you can`t think in longrun? No harvest - far less good items - far less options buildwise. Next league you gonna spend 4 times more to get to that endgame content with 3-5 builds that everybody plays cuz nothing else is viable if you want to progress. It is that dumb people who are proud of having nothing but this game in their life and bitching when more casual players can afford good things. And online gonna drop significantly next league cuz there`s not much people who want to grind their ass off to achieve something in this game. It`s just not fun at all.

in short, thanks ggg for raising taxes on my time and currency.
I dreamed of killing bosses and going through difficult maps, and now I will run BURIAL CHAMBERS whole league

1) instead of making orbs for harvest crafting like in bestiary, so that people do not whine that they are being deceived, you remove the crafts themselves.
2) first you remove the craft with fossils -> people start whining that they want to craft, and not play in the casino -> you give them a harvest, albeit with not very well thought-out mechanics, in the plan of planting beds with your hands -> remove the harvest for 1 league -> people whine, return the harvest -> return the reworked mechanics, the most convenient from the point of view of obtaining crafts -> remove the meaning of the mechanics in the same way as they did with fossils, well, it looks logical ...
3) hello to the people on the ssf, hello to the people on the hc, hello to the people on the hc ssf, it is 100 times more difficult for them to get clothes than for the players from the standard.
4) ordinary players who are not ready to spend 5-10 hours a day playing the game got hit between their legs, because now they will need to spend a lot of time on ! Currency Farming !, instead of content farming, like maven, sirus, elder, shaper, which means an increase in the price of orbs from maven, sirus, elder watches, which again will only hit ordinary players.
5) fewer different builds. everyone will play with one because it is not demanding on things and you will again get a meta of 30% necro.
6) when it comes to keeping players in the league, why can't we make global events that appear every couple of weeks? why is it necessary to nerf what works well, increasing the difficulty of obtaining good items? here are the same races to do, but not as a separate league, but as an event: like on the weekend or in the middle of the week, the keys to the reliquary will drop out on the maps, or, for example, you can make forays into the harbinger planet or the world of beyondas, from which players will receive icons in chat or nickname backlight or emoji.

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Ruffleberg wrote:

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Peonsson2 wrote:

Suggestion: Give us a timer. When you kill one plot you have 60 seconds to craft your item. Killing another plot adds 30 seconds. When your time is up you get kicked out like incursion.
Also make everyone in your party able to craft (or at the very least see them)! It would make it the best thing ever. Please GGG!

Guff's timed crafting bench didn't go down well.

I didn't know about that one. But being forced to spend alot of time on discord to play the game is killing it for me. Have a better suggestions? Please I hate being forced to alt tab to play the game.

I like all the changes. Necessary nerfs against perfecting items while keeping target-exalts for non-influenced gear and all remove non-x and add x. I love Harvest, I agree with the nerfs, I will continue to farm groves in 3.14 and it will still feel good.

And I will definitely not go and check what reddit has to say, because right now I'm in too good a mood.

Hey GGG,

please rethink this change.
I am having tons of fun with crafting.
To me it does not seem more rare that god-lvl items are crafted.
For me the problem with harvest craft is that i have to give away my valueable item for someone else to craft on it.
Everything else is super fun as it is.

Please reconsider this change.

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Peonsson2 wrote:

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Ruffleberg wrote:

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Peonsson2 wrote:

Suggestion: Give us a timer. When you kill one plot you have 60 seconds to craft your item. Killing another plot adds 30 seconds. When your time is up you get kicked out like incursion.
Also make everyone in your party able to craft (or at the very least see them)! It would make it the best thing ever. Please GGG!

Guff's timed crafting bench didn't go down well.

I didn't know about that one. But being forced to spend alot of time on discord to play the game is killing it for me. Have a better suggestions? Please I hate being forced to alt tab to play the game.

Just make the crafts tradeable (Like Beasts)

This is a more cooked take than Quin's takes!

Terrible idea! You're just making TFT mandatory now, since crafts are rarer and harder to find.

Harvest is great and the main reason I still play the league in the first place. Otherwise I was out after 2 weeks. Very weak game design decision. :-(

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sirgog wrote:

Increasing player retention means "people are having more fun therefore not quitting the game".

That should be the primary goal. If retention is bad, changes need to be made to make the game more fun. And if Google Trends are anything to go off, retention was terrible in Harvest, and not up to 3.9 level in 3.13.

But Delirium - with a brutally challenging mechanic and no Discord powered item editor - was the unquestioned most popular league of 2020 by Google Trends staying power.

This is completely wrong and misleading. The player retention for the core playerbase that sticks around for the whole league, according to GGG's own statements, can be estimated around 80k concurrent players. It holds true for any league from the last 2 years, including Harvest.

The only difference with Harvest is that it lost casual players faster, in fact most of casuals stopped playing before GGG even buffed rare seed spawn rate a couple of weeks into the league. It is absurd to think that casual players left because they got their perfect items too fast, they left because the league mechanic was complicated and underwhelming for players who never dabbled with crafting before.

The only league that broke these numbers is actually Ritual, with Harvest available for all players in a uncomplicated form.

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sirgog wrote:

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Biszek wrote:

Based on what statistics you made these changes?

I believe you literaly made at least few % players to quit because of that.

I kinda don't understand on what basis your game balance person does these changes.

Like back in the day in 2016 i LOVED Righteous Ride on Chieftain as Pure HP build, which you literally killed 2 leagues later(because of chieftain ascendancy change to force physical to fire because 10% STR was hidden behind it and then nerf to RF to deal 20% of HP)

I kinda do not like changes to builds that I create/think of, as I was using cyclone to curse on hit flammability on it, I decided to stick with cyclone for my 'next' build..

..which you nerfed hard 2 leagues after with your awesome 'boosting 2handed weapons' patch where Ngahamu Axe got nerfed really hard (molten burst is also procing a lot less compared to before) with lowering its physical damage by 30% or so.

I am casual player, I like to stick with one build that I like (feel free to check my characters)

Harvest was one of 'in game events' that gave me option to craft stuff (in which i was unlucky and wasnt albe to btw and not that I am very good at crafting) with less RNG that makes me want to quit playing this game.

Well here goes GGG with nerfing harvest where i can't even 'roll physical' on items..

Well I guess i'll just skip Harvest as there's nothing to do in there, back to old alternation spam with regal + multicraft

Whats gonna be next?

The obvious statistic is Google Trends interest in POE, which collapsed super fast during Harvest as people got bored of the league quicker than usual.

Then it hasn't held up as well in 3.13 as it did in 3.9, despite (at least in my opinion) 3.13 being a superior expansion save the issues of Harvest being so dominant.

Turns out, when characters get too powerful relative to the content, the game gets less fun.

3.9 had cluster jewels, that was game defining, and along with the loot explosions, that I'd why delerium was popular. Harvest wasn't popular as the garden side of harvest was terrible.

Google stars show 3.13 is doing extremely well for retention, one of the best ever.