Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

I agree with much of the analysis such has Harvest giving a way for the average player to use high end currency throughout the leveling process, that a discord should not be the way to trade the crafts, and Harvest being too strong. However, the plan does not address the first two things at all. It meets the goal of reducing power, but it does it in a way to make the other issues with it worse.

There is nothing to address the ability to use it during leveling. Actually, they just removed certain currencies from harvest, so now casual players never get to experience using those.

This does absolutely nothing to discourage using an external discord to trade the crafts. Harvest will still be the strongest way to craft most gear since they kept remove-add, but by heavily decreasing the number of crafts, the discord will be mandatory if you want a very specific one. In effect, this makes every single craft more rare.

The power of Harvest is undoubted. The nerfs will affect the very top end of the players the most since casual players didn't actually get enough Harvest to do any of their own crafting anyway.

Here are some potential steps to improve the situation from my point of view:\
1. Limit outcomes with multiple tiers to T3 (and potentially make them lucky?) and increase the rate of remove-add and other extremely powerful crafts significantly. This would make Harvest the absolute best option for players wanting to make usable gear that will get you to red maps while only being a stop gap for more experienced players who want better gear.
2. Begin Harvest in Act 2. Let players fight a difficult boss to assess their gear and realize what they need. A secluded garden in a forest is appropriate as well. The ability to simply switch around resistances or change sockets especially make gear from other sources actually usable (that early in the game, sockets are the most important, so Harvest allowing you to selectively change socket colors without wasting more chromatics than you have makes leveling feel much better). This would enhance rather than replace any other league mechanic.
3. As against it as you are, simply make crafts tradable similar to beasts. Either this or making gear account bound are the only options that I can think of. Either allow trading or prevent it. The second option would remove much of your current issue with Harvest since it is the trading aspect that allows players to get so much out of Harvest, not the garden itself.
4. While GGG is aware Harvest is strong, the real question is, Does Harvest decrease overall player satisfaction, play time, or money spent on the game? Yes, Harvest is the best option for crafting gear. Is that actually a problem? Streamers have the opportunity to play builds using objectively weaker skills since their gear can make up for the power. Casual players can get farther in maps and maybe kill some bosses they have never encountered before. For these groups, I feel Harvest is healthy. The ones Harvest potentially is hurting is those that play as much as streamers, but don't have an incentive to play multiple builds and therefore stop playing more quickly. Only GGG knows the actual player data here.

Overall these changes will limit the upper end as GGG intends, however, they do nothing to fix the other complaints that GGG acknowledges in their post. Hopefully there will be additional tweaks to this philosophy during the implementation in 3.14 to address these issues.

Im sorry to say but I do not like these nerfs to harvest.

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.

"

Ruffleberg wrote:

"

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.

"

Peonsson2 wrote:

"

Ruffleberg wrote:

"

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. :-(