Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

I very infrequently post in the forums but I will put my two cents in here. Harvest saved the game for me... Heist was less fun and I stopped playing very early. This league was one of the best in a really long time and it had zero to do with the actual league mechanic or rituals. It just kind of bums me out that fun seems to be under attack here. Maybe I am different than a lot of the playerbase in that I really enjoy targeted farming (I used to run pindleskins in d2 for hours on end) and I really really enjoy being able to min-max my characters for efficiency. Anyway these changes really bum me out and I hope that there is some change to them. I think that if you offered me current harvest crafting as an option in a private void league I would never return to a standard league again.

So to preface, I've played seriously for three leagues now.

Harvest was my starter, but I didn't know enough about the game to progress until the final month, so I ended up farming seeds for others. Spent some money on MTX and finished league killing Uber Elder with Stone Golems, overall proud of my progress. At the end of this league, I was informed that Harvest was a one-off test that would not be returning in the same form to the game. OK, got it, some of the gear I had this league will not be easily obtainable again.

Heist, I didn't really like the league mechanic especially because it overtaxed my laptop with all the dead bodies but my understanding of the game improved significantly, to which I rolled a Carrion Golem to 100, then built a 600-700ex aurastacker and had a blast rolling it to 100 as well. Got 40/40, overall enjoyed the game and spent $$$ on MTX.

Come Ritual league, beyond stoked about the announced changes. Patch notes roll in, just start laughing to myself about the 40 "improved" skills (read - nerfed into the ground alt quality gems that had been introduced 4 months before). Nerfs to both the builds I played previous season, OK, well let's try something new but not spend any money on MTX unless it is truly justified. Also, let's try out Harvest since I didn't the first time!

My experience: a buggy, crashing mess of an update that forced me to drop from 4K resolution to 1080p because ???? changed. An abysmal trading experience for the first month. Sirus dropping double spinning X beams on me and in general not seeming quite right based on my previous two leagues of experience, but eventually I guess my DPS will get him to zero before he teleports so just be patient until then. An initially interesting league mechanic that I eventually stopped doing.

However, in the midst of all this frustration, I was able to craft a set of gear myself that I am very proud of. I am currently wearing one piece of gear (unique corrupted annointed gloves) that I have not either found/crafted/improved/linked myself. This is the first time I spent my league not farming currency to buy gear, but actively taking part in crafting it.

I had spent the last weeks of Heist practicing crafting, and I bricked 50% of the items I put an awakener orb on because the annul hit the wrong modifier that I needed to remove so I could make the item worth more than the base cost + awakener orb. Based on this experience, I wasn't much set out to waste half or more of my currency for that 'feeling of slamming an exalt'. Give me a break - I have exalt slammed once, and it was when exalts were worth 30c and it was essentially free to do so. The result of my 30c was laughable.

Crafting with fossils is also not fun - I have some new experience with that this league, and guess what - it still costs me 5-10ex to get a properly awakener orbed item to 30% quality, then spam fossils into it until I get the basic mods I want BEFORE I can even start hunting with harvest crafts for the final product, which are at least 1-3ex apiece and far from guaranteed to hit the mod I want. My gear is far from mirror tier, but I suppose could be considered impossible pre-Harvest. However, you intentionally added the Maven orb to the game, so my gear is considered just so-so at this point.

In summary, I have suffered horrendous performance of the game so far this league because I have truly enjoyed being a part of making my character what it is now, and not paying someone else to make my gear for me and charge a huge profit margin. The end result of the fact that Harvest was added directly back into the game with ZERO changes except for the rarity of it occurring should have been seen as an obvious outcome - extremely good gear was going to be crafted. If you didn't want this outcome, then why even bother re-introducing it to the game?

I have thankfully held out against spending any money on this game since mid-Heist league, and the constant performance problems have been a daily reminder of why I don't want to spend a dime on it. However, last night me logging in to the game to try and suffer through leveling an alt and seeing the development manifesto on Harvest was enough to make me just close the game and go to bed. Plus, the fact that the elephant in the room of the TFT discord being the only way to trade Harvest crafts being completely ignored is laughable.

Perhaps this nearly 300 pages of very dissatisfied feedback will finally make some people in charge pay attention, but until some sanity in how changes are applied to this game starts being evident from both a gameplay and performance standpoint, I will not be spending another dollar for my 'experience'. If you don't like a mechanic from a gameplay standpoint, don't f@#%)*g add it directly back in with no changes.

Sigh... Carrion Golems it is then...

"

Devs,

You are truly out of touch with the player base. You are either going off the suggestions of a team member who doesn't even play this game, or listening to streamers and other elitists whine that regular people don't deserve to have good items because they are unable to play for 40 hours a week +. You are decimating SSF, forget HC / HC SSF, and hurting the casual player base (which is most of your players). Those who are able to play this game all day every day will not suffer much, but to most of your player base, this is a very ignorant and out of touch decision. Also, please don't make the wildly inaccurate assumption that people want to "close their eyes" and be nervous if their whole build is ruined when slamming an item. That is was vaaling is for.

This is the same road the so many games are going down these days...out of touch decisions which harm the average player and cause people to leave your game. Especially wise to do in the year that Diablo 2 remaster, and Diablo 4 are coming out. It's not a smart business decision.

Don't worry yourself about us in SSF. We'll do just just fine as before harvest. And the SSFHC kings will still make 100 in 5 days and kill all bosses within 10. We like it hard to obtain items thats why we play it. Harvest while good does not make or break any build.

"

Kilgu wrote:

https://www.craftofexile.com/ -> Emulator
Test out your crafting there and see how OP harvest is.
I think we should keep harvest with some of the weirder crafts like Change Fire to Lightning Resist, Add Random Fire (but not remove).
No need to have a system that defeats the whole purpose of another crafting system.

Click a button that costs you nothing is ofcourse easy.
Try getting 1 T1 res, that's atleast 8 Remove/add res.
Now imagine having to get 3.
That's 24 tries on average.
Now most likely you need to get another prefix (assuming you're working with 2 good prefixes).
That's ATLEAST 40ex for an item without any special influence mods.
40 flipping ex for a semi-good equipment part.
Now multiply that by 10 to fill all the slots.
That's 400ex for a semi-perfect equipment set even with "easy harvest".
How many people do you think get above 100ex per league?
Only top 10% probably.
And above 200ex is probably the top 1%.

Here's the thing you're not keeping in mind.
1) league lasts for 3 months, meaning your time is limited
2) Most people are casuals, not saying we should base the game around them, but atleast take it into consideration
3) Since time is limited, most people only get to do 1, at most 2 builds in those 3 months. 1-2 builds in 3 months? probably not even close to being at the end game of that build.
4) the 0.1% that play the game for 16h a day like streamers SHOULD always find something to do, play another build, go for the absolute most perfect items, so many varieties.

But yeah, click click ez pz right?
I've had to use 20ex on remove add life just to hit T2 life on a ring, not even T1. No casual would even have 20ex laying around to try this craft.

"

bauermayers wrote:

These nerfs are fine. POE crafting is gambling, no matter if you know what you're doing or not, and harvest goes against that.

It will continue to exist, so there's no reason to whine, but obviously part of this whinny community will whine until the next league begins, just like they do every time GGG change/nerf something. In this case the casuals that want the game balanced around them.

People are complaining about "gambling" for more than 3 years. GGG already addressed that with the introduction of Harvest making the crafting process more fun and encouraging more people to try crafting their own gear. People going against what the community wants are very short-sighted. Harvest needed a tweak and the current implementation is REALLY good, the problem still exists regarding the trading part where scammers are at the order of the day. But bringing back the "gambling" part of the old crafting system is something the community doesn't want anymore.

The problem also is the "give and take" cycles which are being quite repetitive over the course of the years.

As casual player that struggled to kill Sirus, harvest crafting was great and my only hope to make a decent weapons to take on end game content.

Exalt craft and gambling was never a thing for us casual players, we don't have enough currency to gamble.

It's fine if GGG needs to rebalance or nerf harvest, but at least give us something back so casual players can enjoy the game.

If harvest is nerf and there is nothing in return to empower casual players, then 3.13 would be the last season for many of us.

I find this news disappointing. As a player who is primarily engages with SSF (and recently a private league), harvest crafting is more engaging and faster than the older forms of crafting. I do not look forward to going back to alt-regal spamming, chaos spamming, or beast crafting to get influenced mods on items. Surely, there could have been a way to reduce harvest's effectiveness in a trade context, since that is clearly what the goal was, without damaging SSF and private league players.

Alot of valid points of view here. While I understand some need for harvest changes, I feel this misses the mark. Sad day for PoE.

Just remove it. Was a decent league experiment that you cannot control. Let it be outside the game and let it go.

Hil