Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

Just ran out of popcorn. Thanks all!!

Time to go buy more.

Logically explained, why this is stupid idea apriori, no matter what they say:

You don't want to have 1000 players who play 12+hours/day in your game online.

You want to have 100 000 players online who play 2-4 hours/day.

I assume you know maths here, why don't you make basic calculations?


It's not just that, there is more maths incoming:

Those 1000 players will still play your game, no matter what you do to it.

Otherwise, 100 000 players... They aren't that much in love in your game to play it no matter what.



I'd personally ignore full-day gamers opinion in this case, cause you can do anything you want with them, as developer to player, they wont leave you.

Are you sure ready to leave urself with that low active player count in next league?

great way to fuck 99% over due to fear of the 1% having too good items.

"slamming exalts" how can you be so disconnected from your own game.

I'm so glad I did not buy the sirus pack even though I was so tempted to. Harvest enabled the vast majority of players to do crafting themselves, because the current crafting system is utterly worthless outside of for professional crafters that have the knowledge of exactly which mods are worth anything and the odds being fractions of a percent chance of rolling. There is no way in hell people are gonna use exalts to yolo yeet with chances like those. On top of having to redo story every league being a massive hinderance to enjoyment and new movement skill restrictions during ritual which are really annoying. Pretty uncalled for nerf to bossing for deadeye (SURPRISE THERE ARE NO WALLS IN NEARBY IN MAJOR BOSSES). I hope some good competition shows up cause this is no way to go for game direction, harvest craft basically solved everyone's problem with the crafting system. Although it still felt like shit cause of all the alchemy orb crafting options, like who the hell has enough scourings for that. Also surprise chaos crafting is not meta incase you havent played for the last few leagues, which I doubt any of the staff reaching this manifesto's conclusion has.

Honestly just remove harvest if you're going to go through with these changes.

1. No one in their right mind harvest crafts a significant amount on uninfluenced bases. How about you just remove the ability to roll influenced mods with harvest instead. That way we can still Alt regal maven split imprint aug imprint regal maven with then clean up with harvest. This process is still super RNG based but at least it doesn't feel like absolute shit.

2. Targeted annuls removed entirely is kind of too far. How about just remove the MASSIVELY OP REMOVE/ADD craft? I seriously question the rationale behind keeping deterministic slams but removing deterministic annuls. If you are serious about removing deterministic annuls then how about you add a baseline roll to the augment crafts in general? Nothing would be worse than getting your double elevated base and hitting an aug life only to hit T9 life on an ilevel100 base. GG your item is bricked and you lost AT LEAST 50ex. This is not "fun."

3. This brings me to the next point I have. No one likes to brick an item you have spent hours crafting and dozens of hours farming currency only to brick it on a super low probability slam. I've quit leagues on situations like this. Harvest and more accessible crafting HELPS player retention and will only sell you more juicy MTX.

4. If you REALLY have an issue with TFT why then, does it seem, are you balancing around TFT? How about you actually address the core frustration that necessitates the service. Make it work like beasts with infinite or close to infinite craft space so you can, as you stated you want players to do, save your crafts for end game. Then allow the ability to create crafting orbs in some capacity. This will create an open market for crafts and give your team more insight into the actually problematic crafts and tweak their rarities on the fly if needed.

5. Harvest does not "invalidate" other crafting options. If you toned back the nerfs like I laid out and buffed delve back to as it was than literally every crafting option is still relevant. Essences are still used quite extensively, especially while leveling and with metacrafting. The top end crafted helmets still use essence crafting as well.

TL:DR All in all, I understand Harvest needs a nerf, but take a step back and REALLY think about what you are doing before implementing actual changes. Your heart is in the right place but these ideas are out of touch. Players are mad about how out of touch you guys are and not so much that harvest is being nerfed.

Imagine a game made by the people who comment in forums, it would be fucking awful.

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Fenoch wrote:

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namespace wrote:

Breaking my many, many year forum silence to point out that this kinda sucks. All this is doing is, one again, catering to the absolute top 0.01%, streamers and 15 hour a day players, complaining that the plebs may perhaps get a chance to get some ok items; Not mirror-tier (come on lol) but like, influence and some good rolls.

It's weird how progress like shards are good, but progress like tinkering on an item without bricking it is bad? I guess thanks for saving me the MTX costs by posting this early, I and friends were getting back into the game because filthy casuals such as ourselves with only 1-3 thousand hours were actually able to build some neat stuff without being 100% glued to the meta and just trading all day.

And as others said, "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 is AWFUL this is "Don't you have phones" no one does this I have been playing since alpha and I've exa slammed like... A jewel once with three good mods because I just didn't care about mod4 because of an odd build.

Same goes for you. Many many many years of enjoying a free game. Yet you feel the need to jump on the complaint bandwagon. Cool-. You should know better and know that this not even half as bad as the crying babies make it look to be.

How is the amount of money one has donated on a free product a measure of his opinion's validity? I play since 2013 but bought my first packs only a couple years ago. Did my opinions become valid and my arguments better the moment i pressed "pay now"?
This product is given to people for free. Everyone that uses it can state his thoughts about it.

Only reason I continued playing after finishing the 36 challenges was to have fun with harvest crafting....

GGG, without harvest crafting, you're going to lose a lot of people

As I see it this manifesto was posted so early because of one of two reasons:
1. You knew there was gonna be a major backlash and wanted to get it out of the way and give people time to cool off before the preview season so you could hype them with the new stuff without the harvest nerf ruining everyones mood or
2. You wanted to communicate the intended change early enough so in case of a major backlash you had time to react in time for the next league.

I hope it is the latter and this is the reason why I post when i very rarely do so.

I am not a game developer myself but I have heard several game developers express that when the player base of a game is angry they try to identify what is the people's real problem with the game behind those angry posts. So i am not gonna write an angry post but I am gonna try to exmplain why this manifesto makes me feel disapointed. And angry.

"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."
First of all this quote. So in your mind the premium crafting currency of the game should be a vaal orb that gives you your item back 1/6 times? (by annuling the slammed mod if it is bricked). Really? I hope it is clear how hard it is to improve an item by slamming it and why using exalted orbs for what is written on the orb description is highly inconsistent ergo it leads to way too many bad experiences in the hope of a good one. Humans like to "chase" highly unlikely goals but if something has a way too low chance and the cost of trying is high enough they will eventually refrain from chasing that goal. This is why people dont slam their items and this is why people love harvest slams.

Slamming a harvest targeted orb rarely gave you what you wanted (usually you got the thing you wanted, but not at a high tier enough). But through a reasonable amount of attempts with targeted annuls/exalts and with a reasonable amount of cost you could eventually achieve what you wanted (keep in mind that even with tft trading a really strong item would cost minimum 30-40 exalts in currency to make(and that if you know exactly what you are doing). Also keep in mind that one perfect item does not make or break a build. You need to stack multiple of them to make a significant difference.

So, when people ask for Harvest to be back what they are asking I believe is a deterministic path with slow and steady progress towards a perfect character. And I see no problem with that. You may say "But if people get a perfect character they will play it for an hour, delete all the content and then stop playing". I agree. But that is totally fine. This is where the league ends for them.

As the game stands right now you can do all the content with items that are at about 30-40% of the power level of perfect items. If it is EXTREMELY unlikely to craft multiple great items so you can get more meaningfully powerful you will stop playing the league as soon as you are done with the content. But a crafting system with a clear path and a clear deterministic goal will make you keep playing and grinding towards that goal. So all in all having more attainable stronger items does not make people stop pleying the game early. It makes them stop playing the game later.

I do understand that harvest greatly limits your design options. Fine.
Remove most of the powerful stuff from harvest. But I believe it is going to do wonders for player retention if you reimplement the crafting options through other (new and old) systems (it is fine if the new systems make you go through more non-rendom loops). And to support my argument I will remind you that Synthesis had one of the better player retention levels of all leagues exactly because people could craft powerful synthesized items (accomapnied by the pre-nerf fossil crafting).

TL;DR: People like harvest because it provides a clear way to powerful items and characters without the risk of going back to square one. Although I do recognize it is restricting the design space for future content in its current form, I would like to see a like-minded crafting system/s reintroduced to the game.

From someone who has been part of the community since January 2013 this is the most disappointed I've ever been in the direction of the game. I especially think the point about not liking players trading crafts over discord and using that as a reason to nerf the system into the ground is rather weak. You want to make mirrors worth more again? What do you think happens with mirrors? There is no in game mirroring service. Maybe we should also nerf mirrors to not be able to mirror influenced items. When did we start to care about 3rd party trading? I still have Acquisition installed on my laptop from before premium tabs.

This is a direct slap in the face of the casual player. The irony of this is the reason it's being nerfed is because the 1% who ran maps getting 30 Zana mods to maximize harvest chances and then selling them on discord are the same people who will benefit from it being nerfed. They'll just go back to rolling perfect maps and fracturing them or selling their mirror item services over discord. I imagine the vast majority of the player base has never traded a harvest craft on discord.

As a casual player harvest is not deterministic enough to break end game crafting. You can still roll bad tier levels or not the right mod. There are a few situations where it's overpowered because there are only 1 or two deterministic options but those can easily be remedied. I've never even tried to exalt and annul craft because frankly I don't play enough for that even to be a possibility. Without harvest 90% of the time it's more economical to buy your item with exalts than to try and exalt it yourself.

A more nuanced approach to Harvest would have been to limit the number of harvests an account can get within a 24 hour period, make them tradable (just like you did with beasts), remove harvest as a Zana map option, and fix the handful of crafting situations that were too deterministic.

Harvest needed precision tuning with a scalpel, not to take a sledgehammer to it to appease the top 1% of your player base. I can't stress this enough, the people creating the problem with Harvest are the only ones who stand to benefit from your solution.