Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

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.

i told (something like that in french) my girlfriend that the responsible of my activity change a thing so that it would profit the big bosses, and her answer was 'which republican?'
that pretty much sums up what's going on with this change: the 1% will barely see a change cause they can spend thousands od exalt crafting and own the maraket, and sell even what they consider garbage. Meanwhile the average player will strugle to buy anything cause it will be overprice

btw, who slam an exalt on items? the 1%, i'm not even sure they do

as a long time player and lover of your game i can tell that i'm very happy that you adress the issues that the harvest mechanic in its current itteration creates.

while i do like and understand the idea behind having a more deterministic crafting system, it has the potential to completely dominate the ways you
can approach the game and even pidgeonhole the endgame in this specific direction.

at least that is, what harvest does as a mechanic in this league.
it ticks way to many, yes almost all the boxes.

items, currency, div-cards, fragments even gems. it does it all.
i like the ideas and get where theyre coming from, but if i start comparing this one mechanic to all the other existing ones, nothing really can compete.

heist comes close in some scenarios, but well its a lot more dangerous, time consuming and outside of maps so you cant progress atlas and encounter all the other intersting atlas stuff at once.


with the reintroduction of harvest, people are now expecting to get "perfect items" for their builds. a thing that before harvest was either a achieved by players in standard or a couple of people in league, which then showed their "succesful crafting projects" which they probably dedicated most of their wealth and time into.


now we have a situation, where people achieve "perfection" for a all items a character is wearing after couple of days in the league.

while we all know that feeling powerful in a videogame is fun and crucial to rpgs and their characterprogression, i dont think that the benchmark for having fun has to be "perfection" and 50mil dps to trivialize every content the game has to offer.

but this is, what this perfection enables players to experience. feeling overpowered, facerolling the game and its content, winning the game.
and thats tough, because people wanna win. now that winning has become easier then ever before (because item-perfection is realistic and kinda became the new benchmark for any build) most people dont see how they can enjoy the game without that perfection beeing achieveable.

after harvest i actually hoped you wont bring it back.
id love to pick up and ID items again, having a thrill to find good upgrades or stuff for other builds.
knowing that the harvest box or pandora exists, im hoping to find good seeds instead.


i hope you guys will find a way to make the HarvestingGearGame a
GrindingGearGame again.

people will adapt and love the game anyways, because they know about and feel the dedication you put into the development.


keep it up and stay safe and healthy everyone.

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Eviltachyon wrote:

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Fenoch wrote:

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noheal wrote:

this is a really crazy change...


I hope they take this feedback, and focus on fixing the game performance rather tham nerfting the few features players like.

So you joined the game 8 years ago, havent spent a single dime except maybe for a stashtab. Yet you opt in to complain after playing a free game for 8 years not spending a single cent.

Just wow.

That doesn't mean their opinion matters less than yours. Some civility would not hurt.

+1

I hope GGG can read this as it is not a perspective I have seen yet.

One of GGG's core philosophies is that they do not want to force players to do any particular content, this is why in all of the recent expansions, you can get their rewards in other content - eg you can get fossils from ritual, delirium, heist, blight etc, the same goes for oils, fragments, scarabs, deli orbs, and so on. It allows players to choose the type of content they want to play without missing out on much. Obviously every expansions has items you can only get from that content, but at least a significant portion of the content you can get elsewhere - eg fossils and resonators you can get in a lot of places but you have to delve for Aul's, rings etc.

This rule is true for all of the recent expansions except for one - harvest. To compound this, because harvest is so powerful you are forced to interact with it whether you like it or not. The problem is that this goes against GGG's philosophy AND it is even worse because not only are you forced to interact with harvest, you are forced to interact with the discord as well which makes things even worse. Even if they made it 100% SSF, like if you can only enter the sacred grove once and get 0 storage, it solves the discord problem but players are still forced to do harvest whether they like it or not because it is so powerful.

Now here's the problem - they only really have two options, which is to nuke it, or they could apply their philosophy and make harvest rewards available like all other rewards are. They could turn all the crafting into new currencies that are available in all other content just like scarabs, fossils, etc. The problem here is obvious, it completely and fundamentally changes the core of the game in a pretty extreme way and they are obviously not willing to do that. I think it would be interesting but I doubt they will make a change that dramatic. Personally, I have no problem with players being able to create such powerful items in a game with a resetting economy, but the discord thing sucks, I love harvest and hope they don't go through with nuking it.

Hello!

I'm somewhere between casual and wife-leaving-me playtimes (6.9k hours logged). I've never killed the Shaper, Maven or any of our endgame friends.

So here: I don't craft, I trade.
There's no way I'd waste an exalt on crafting, I need it to buy a 6L cloak of defiance or whatever my build needs.

I understand having a design philosophy, my work requires it too. That's fine.

Harvest league came up and for the first time it felt like there was a point to crafting, beyond adding resists while leveling up.

I'm not even saying don't make the changes. I'm saying these crafting options are making it fun for a player like myself. I'm not a fan of Harvest per se, but the crafting options are making the game more fun.

Fun factor is why there are that many icons under my avatar, over there ->

"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."

No statement could possibly underscore exactly how out of touch you all are with what the base wants

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trdelin wrote:

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

We couldn't build a car too,but we can still recognize a shitty one when we see it. But yeah,game would be broken from day one. It would be epic.

back to "slamming exalts" will be time to uninstall ;) anyway, nice league and expansion. More type of builds and more fun, so let's destroy fun because 1% will be unhappy. Go back to metaonly. Even if i wasn't using harvest that much i feel that people who wants to do that, its fun. Didn't even see that perfect items on poe trade, so what are u talking about ggg?