Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

- This sentiment was summed up by a member of our design team who recently said "We don't want to take away the feeling of closing your eyes and Exalting an item, scared to see whether you ruined it or not."

This. As a game developer myself, I totally understand that statement.

But it's designer-masturbation to force that sentiment upon your players. Don't make the same mistake Blizzard did by being disconnected from your player base. Players don't use exalts for raw crafting. They use it as currency. They've been for YEARS.

Well it's time to go back to all unique builds again.
Also the only way 99% of players would use exalted orb on any item and not just buying it would be if it was are common as chaos orb. Way better option is to just buy better item you 'might' get for that exalted orb.

I can understand wanting to lower the power of harvest crafting, but this was way too far. There are plenty of other ways you can reduce our reliance on harvest without outright nerfing it into irrelevance.

Also, figuring out mod tags and how to actually make those harvest crafts work actually made crafting fun, and will always be a million times more interesting than exalt slamming. If these changes go live, you're going to be removing a huge part of what made this game enjoyable, and I guarantee you player retention will plummet.

"

made many, many mirror-worthy items.

I would be really interested to know what fraction of players is getting these mirror-level crafts done. It would be hard to believe it is more than 5%.

Harvest crafts have been awesome for someone like me who plays only 1 hour a day - some builds became achievable thanks to it.

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"Why would I use a regular Exalted/Divine/Annul Orb when I can get one through Harvest that has a deterministic result?

Why would I use exalted orbs for crafting anyway? They do not rain from the sky.
You want us to feel excitement when using exalts for crafting?
Never had enough to use them directly on items.
A few times I used them in the crafting bench (e.g. multi-mod, or +1 support gems) and even that felt harsh at the time.

This league I've been able to make a few exalts by selling harvest crafts - I don't think I would have had enough currency to enjoy Ritual league otherwise.

Sorry for the rant - but taking options from average (or below - no idea, don't have access to the stats?) players feels wrong.

Just make items non-tradable after harvest-craft, add "Harvest orb" to store crafts in order to sell them (like beasts) and let us have some fun.

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arrasator wrote:

PLease GGG dont touch . this game is good now . stop please or more people leaving.

What more people leaving? dafuq are you talking about? player numbers have consistently increased. Some bs.

POE is a free to play game, and GGG earns money from selling MTX.
There is a clear relationship between play time and MTX purchase, statically longer play time usually means more money spend on MTX.

How to make people play longer?

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CyBeas7 wrote:

Umm... The simple fix is to just make craft's untradeable. Is it really that hard to figure out?

Economy based game ''Untradable'' Really now?

This is clearly the wrong way to go about making changes you want.

You are punishing people who can't play several hours every day. I have never slammed an exalt on an item, and probably never will. For people who can't play all that much, the only value in exalted orbs are for trade, cause it is too much of a risk to use it, since it is so (relatively) rare.

This shouldn't be only about what GGG want, take the feedback to heart and have a discussion with regular players about what they want. We're after all, the people that ensure that you can have this job.

For the first time since I have started playing I feel like certain builds are actually attainable for me. The changes being made to harvest are extremely discouraging, and very sad. GGG you can shape the game however you feel you want to, more power to you. Really doesnt matter to me, there are other games I can play.

As a player since beta days, who's seen and gone through it all, that's really sad to read.

I for one, will skip next league for sure and will check from time to time, in wich direction the game is heading, from this point onwards.Changes like this, show that the Devs are totally out of touch with the common player base.

Leagues like Harvest and the current one have the longest player retention period, and that is because of Harvest and the fun it enables for the "normal" player to continuously improve your character.

Harvest is perfectly fine in its current state, IF and that's the whole proplem in my opinion, they would get rid of TFT by some meaning.

Just try to play the game for yourself without TFT, crafting your own items, grinding for Harvest. Count the days of "played" till you have your full set of items, if you even manage to accomplish that in one league for one character...
Some may say it shouldn't be possible in that time frame, but it's about the ~3 months of the league, standard doesn't count and again the time it takes is somewhat balanced if you want to call it that.

Should the game be balanced around some discord, streamers and or 10h+ a day of grinding/trading?

I really hope GGG is taking a good look at the comments from the playerbase and maybe rethink their decision.