Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

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.

.

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.

By no means this will encourage more players to play again Path of Exile, or it will banish away enthusiasts that wanted to play a really niche build because they really like the mechanic of a specific skill and achieving a really DECENT gear not PERFECT gear to make the build work, less likely to enjoy the build progression and gear crafting because without it, it is literally impossible to actually PLAY the game and waste your TIME spending crafting the gear with the currency that MOST OF the community might not even get it by the end of the league to craft a really good item. I hope i said enough, listen to your community and actually improve alongside with them not being delusional and not considering every single aspect of the game, don't stay in the middle age when you actually started to make the game, you guys improved alot, i really love and enjoy the game but this is by far the worst ideas you ever came up with removing the only tool that will make more people play the game and ENJOY their SPECIFIC BUILD that they came up with, that is also random, people have freedom of choice, nerfing that harvest is like taking away the possibility of people making their own builds that they enjoy the most.

Love your game, don't get me wrong, consider all aspects and have someone listen to your community, that will keep your game alive.

One of your most respectful, lover, big time player of Path of Exile

Best regards,
Voicu