Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

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RIP

Blizzard must be very happy right now.

Really Bad GGG. please Dont do this.

Thinking about this, I think I just want the Discord problem solved. Sure, balance changes, but not removing what makes it awesome and fun.

Certain deterministic harvest crafts could add a soul-bound property or trade could be time-gated by harvest adding a property (like those harvest flask mods/incubators, can't trade for X monsters/whatever).

Just anything to avoid feeling like I need to use discord to play PoE - I want to play PoE! This manifesto doesn't solve it, and meanwhile also just makes what has sparked absolute joy for me this league and got me back into it fall away (avoiding Discord like the plague even though it's inefficient).

It's so much fun now. All for change, but telling me that what I don't enjoy about PoE at all (mind-numbing crafting) is actually what I should be enjoying while not fixing the problem just feels a bit tone-deaf.

I dont want to farm 2 weeks to buy a mediocre item and stay with it because theres no way to change it, i want to farm to try and make it myself +40ex cause its not cheap. I dont know how to craft outside harvest or like craft of exile says, try 6520 times with fossils to get the rolls you want... pretty easy according to you and your easy and well explained crafting tutorial.

Nice new end game boss, the item killer for next league or Maven for the majority who never will get to face her

anyway maybe diablo mobile would give me other goals rather than studying crafting for years to be able to craft endgame gear :)

Add more storage to the crafting station. SO i can store 1000's of reforge crafts. ;)

After pissing off 95% of the player base they immediately make a news post trying to sell MTX and get more money from us.

Yeah, no thank you.


Chris needs to hire someone whose ONLY JOB is to pull the emergency break whenever the out-of-control conductor running the dev train is about to close their eyes and exalt slam into players.

I have to admit I'm somewhat baffled by the borderline incestuous love affair that GGG has with what can only be identified as an 'extreme' manifestation of RNG.

I do understand that ARPG's have traditionally and historically involved significant quantities of randomness involved in a wide selection of its elements. In this way, it does form a core part of the genre, in a general sense.

But what we have here is a company which seems to be committing to a 'tunnel vision' approach and is doubling down on extremely punishing forms of RNG.

I don't deny the possibility that GGG's "vision" for the game includes a stronger focus on this punishingly random gameplay loop than is currently present. I think that's probably true. Communications from the developers certainly seem to indicate that the creators are hankering for the 'golden random age of yesteryear'.

However, the idea that using exalted orbs and 'praying to Jeebus for a successful outcome predicated on the roll of a dice' is a fun, engaging mechanic or is core to the appeal of PoE can only possibly be true for a very, very limited subsect of the playerbase.

Anecdotally, I think relatively few members of the playerbase engage in that sort of RNG clusterfuck with any regularity, which is why harvest was so popular amongst such a large selection of players.

As an additional observation, the popularity of leagues in which trading is possible in and of itself represents a peculiarly potent demonstration of the fact that a substantial number of people do not connect with RNG as a fundamentally enjoyable mechanic. If enjoyment of extreme RNG were really so widespread, then we'd all be rolling our currency orbs on items and loving it whether we won or lost the gamble. But obviously very large numbers of people don't do that. They are happy to save their currency and use it to buy items from other players precisely because they DON'T find RNG crafting to be an engaging or fun experience and will take any opportunity to avoid it.

To make fundamental philosophical changes on the basis of your vision, for your game is entirely GGG's prerogative. Ultimately you, GGG the company, will dictate the direction for the game. However, it should be clearly pointed out in no uncertain terms that decisions which are made in direct contravention to, and in spite of, the vociferous preferences of large swathes of the people who patronise your game is.....dangerous.

When players demonstrate their preferences through behavioural responses to gameplay mechanics, its a useful litmus test in determining what they hope to take away from the PoE experience. To act in defiance of player enjoyment is certainly well within GGG's rights, but ware the company who chooses to potentially alienate large portions of their playerbase for the sake of their own 'vision'.

PoE is obviously a labor of love for the members of GGG, and it is that very passion which has made it so successful in defining both itself, and a genre over many years. That said, this recent decision has a number of alarming hallmarks of a process which is both devolutionary and has the potential for detrimental effects to both the player experience and company reputation and sets a concerning precedent for future decision making.

I do hope you, GGG, are acutely aware of, and have thought long and hard about, the potential risks involved in prioritising your own vision for the game in a way that may come at the cost of enjoyment in a large number of its players. To place the development of a game into an adversarial state with a significant number of its participants seems questionable and potentially problematic for the future.

Just a few of my thoughts.

just want to make a post in this thread cause this is kind of historic for PoE


the way that you guys speak in this post is really out of touch and almost insulting. most people don't particularly enjoy the harsh rng in this game, we tolerate it because the core gameplay is incredible and you keep the game fresh.

things like essences, fossils, etc. are good forms of balanced deterministic crafting. i agree that harvest is too powerful and it needs nerfs/changes, but these changes aren't going to solve the issue or probably even help it, and it completely ignores the underlying issue that harvest-crafting helps solve.

the casual players of this game will be mostly unaffected, as they typically just buy gear and don't bother with crafting. the top 1% will be mostly unaffected, as they can still make the same GG gear and control the market through split-beast bases, it just takes them some more currency and it's not as deterministic. the problem i have is that you don't acknowledge how badly this hurts your players in the middle of this spectrum. currently, there is gear at multiple different price points for every build in the game. budget, middle-tier piece, GG item. with harvest getting so gutted, there's going to be way less middle-tier items and so the price will skyrocket, making it not affordable for the middle-tier players anymore.

HARVEST CRAFTING BRIDGED THE GAP BETWEEN SHIT GEAR AND TOP TIER GEAR, IT DID NOT MAKE GG GEAR TOO EASY TO OBTAIN. YOU ARE UNEQUALLY HURTING YOUR AVERAGE PLAYER

with harvest I could just craft whatever I needed (with an adequate amount of TIME and CURRENCY, mind you) to take on all the content and then eventually improve my gear to trivialize the content, which was fun and had me spending a lot of time playing. removing (basically) harvest in it's current form is going to massively hurt player retention as upgrades will reach a point of unobtainability for people who don't spend 15 hours a day playing your game.

Not many people can play the game for 8-10 hours a day. People work, people have other responsibilities, and ultimately families. It becomes dull to play without a harvest, since it is extremely difficult to craft good items. But those people who play 8-10 hours a day will be able to do these items.