Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

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Chris wrote:

Our problem with all of this can be summarised with the following thought: "Why would I use a regular Exalted/Divine/Annul Orb when I can get one through Harvest that has a deterministic result?"

The entire rest of Path of Exile's crafting system is somewhat redundant with Harvest Crafting in its current form.
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Path of Exile's Item Philosophy
At its core, Path of Exile is a game about the acquisition of powerful items.

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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."

My concerns lie more with the reasoning behind the decision than the impacts to Harvest crafting. I was surprised to see Harvest crafting go core as it did and personally agree that it was too powerful. The design team knew this long before analyzing the effect that it had on Ritual league.


I think that Chris hits on two of the key problems that I find with the loot mechanics in the game, while brushing aside their root cause and using them to justify why Harvest has to be changed.


- First, the core design philosophy of the game was for players to acquire powerful items, but the game provides mountains of de-valued loot that most players ignore. Other than providing currency and high-level influenced bases, the loot in POE is redundant and serves as a time sink for 'inefficient' players trying desperately to find some meaningful interaction with this part of the game. Loot itself is redundant. Power creep only continues to make this worse. At a certain point, the oft-repeated assertion that one must have bad loot to appreciate the good becomes a specious argument (I think that we are well past this point).


- Second, why indeed would an average player actually use an Exalt? Players hoarded their exalted orbs long before Harvest crafting or other forms of deterministic crafting, because they didn't see the risk ever being worth it. Instead, for most players the Exalted Orb became a stand-in for that other currency that your core game philosophy despised: gold.

I would be quite interested to see statistics related to how many players have never actually used an exalted orb for its main purpose, outside of a void league but including within SSF.


I have several reasons for being an 'inefficient' player. I actually didn't think that Harvest should have been added to the game in the manner that it was. What it did do, however, was bridge the gap between the playerbase not being able to meaningfully interact with item crafting and being able to do so. It overreached, but perhaps your design philosophy can find some room for an intermediate solution where the player can look forward to tinkering with the actual loot they find in the game.

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As far as Harvest, I also wonder if a possible solution is to have Harvest influence your existing currency to transform them into a deterministic form (as suggested by other poster(s) in this thread). This currency would be easily tradeable and could replace the horticrafting station limit while still requiring planning and investment on the part of the player. It doesn't do anything to solve the issue of rich players being able to effectively edit items, any more than your current solution does. It would also greatly limit the extent to which an early player could interact with the mechanic, with currency acquisition rates, so that might need some thought.

Thank you for an amazing game. Please continue to find ways to enable your players to meaningfully interact with it.

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ph3l0n wrote:

Stupid decision. You refuse to fix the fact that ALL end game items are crafted. Instead you just make it harder to craft them again. Don't bother fixing the fact that most loot filters filter out 99% of the loot because it is absolutely worthless to pick up. Instead you take away the only viable way to get decent items for people who don't play this game like their life depends on it.

I am sorry Chris, but you have lost your pulse on what players want. You talk about how most people quit before hitting yellow maps, then you have a league where people play into yellow maps, you take away the reason they even played in the first place. I can't believe how absolutely out of touch you are with your own player base and the design of this game.

Basically this, the only reason im still playing this far into a league is because i am finally able to make some good gear, see a lot of the endgame, and am exited to play because i can set (high end) goals witch were way to tedious (farming currency for weeks to be able to buy 1 item and do it all again) before integrated harvest.

Bad call.

Grz Shape

2 months have passed since the beginning of the league and online is still high, you need to change this, you need to spoil the harvest because we are used to people playing for 1-4 weeks and leaving.

This was the first expansion in a long time that I really enjoyed and this makes me never want to play the game again. What purpose does a game serve when the devs remove the fun from it?

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Saristas wrote:

They did this because Tencent told them to do this. You see, they sell exalts through an "unofficial" website and sales were really down this league even though it was the most played league with highest player retention.. Because people could craft their gear and if you can craft your gear you don't need exalts to buy it.

fuck tencent!

Good thing Diablo 2R is coming right when GGG intend to lobotomise their game.

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SuperDrop wrote:

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astrartea wrote:

Hilarious to see people saying that it is too easy to make GG mirror tier items with harvest who don't have a single GG mirror tier item on their characters.
Like if it's so easy why tf are you running around with t6 ES on your gloves and 20% MS boots lmao.

bcs they have listed them for sale. they dont need those items. they want currency to gamble hh. think before you quack like a crow.

bruh... do you even know what you're talking about? I consider myself bad at poe and even I know that headhunter is now like 65ex. a month ago it was around 80-ish, not even near half a mirror. if they really have mirror tier, they wont be struggling to get hh, and they also wont use low tier gears.

and also, you can get infinite money by just mirroring them for other people. I might be wrong, but this is also the reason why those things are called "mirror tier". they are worthy to be mirrored.

The two leagues that I played the most were Ritual and Harvest. Do I need the power, of the items I have crafted to beat the game? Not at all. But do I enjoy the slow, deterministic process of crafting? Yes! Do I enjoy my off-meta build I theory-crafted having Ritual in mind? Yes! Can I focus on playing the game instead of trading and flipping to get any meaningful progress? Yes, yes, yes!!!

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sprawdzampoczte wrote:

The two leagues that I played the most were Ritual and Harvest. Do I need the power, of the items I have crafted to beat the game? Not at all. But do I enjoy the slow, deterministic process of crafting? Yes! Do I enjoy my off-meta build I theory-crafted having Ritual in mind? Yes! Can I focus on playing the game instead of trading and flipping to get any meaningful progress? Yes, yes, yes!!!

true!

Deterministic crafting is good. You guys are taking a major L on this one and I hope the player base sends you a message to start the next league if you refuse to bend.

The real problem is you can trivialize Harvest mods by abusing a discord server. Find a way to solve that problem instead of breaking the only thing that makes crafting decent in this RNG infested game.