Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

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SaintLucifer wrote:

Just noted but they removed this thread from the front pages by the way.

I hope this means they are reconsidering the changes. This is my first post on the forums and I hate that it is because they are about to break the game for their core audience.

Using currency items like Exalted Orbs or Chaos Orbs on your gear is a powerful, risky and exciting way to improve it.

Exciting? PoE crafting has been the worst experience I ever had in any game. It's not craft, it's gambling. No matter what you do, unless you're mega rich of the top 10, then you'll never ever craft the "so perfect" gear you guys are talking about. It's so bad that you focus the game on the top 10 and not for the whole community... Oh well, that has always been PoE flaw and you guys will never fix it but just make it worse over time. Just like how trading has been the bane of PoE, still no auction house in sight, but scammer and shit free to go...

Sigh, PoE isn't a game anymore, it's a job, so if people play casually, they'll never get anywhere.

Thank again for ruining what new hope I hope for the game.

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ZyxewNikoa wrote:

I think that you understand the issues with the current implementation of harvest across the various dimensions of power, accessibility, tradability/ease of use, and balance relative to the rest of the game's systems. I think that you understand the various directions in which changes could be made.

I think that you misunderstand what makes the game fun for many people, and I think you don't value my time. I vehemently disagree with many of the principles espoused by your manifesto, and am provided with a vision of a game that I don't wish to play or support.

By crafting your game you choose your audience. If I'm too casual for your game, that's cool, I'll go play something else.

Very well said.

That is unfortunate (lazy solution)

I was hoping you guys to have a better solution

well there's some issues with the crafts and how that gain is stored

he was one of the best systems

give some order in the randomness

personally I think that approach is unwise

to change you need to come in implementation

enough in the credible feeling when you get the best advice items cuz nobody else did even though you're sacrificed everything you did


but again I am not addicted to gambling

so I'm not sure the decision is truly wise in many reasons was great to have principals and aims they need to change with realities and become more flexible while holding the core
ideas .

I represent what I think is the majority of PoE players. Not casual, not hardcore.

I play maybe 3 hours on weekdays, a bit more on weekends. Over the course of the entire league I amass a total combined 1-3 dozen exalts (depending a lot on my luck) worth of currency and gear, I hit and clear red maps pretty easily, maybe kill some endgame bosses like Sirus and Shaper depending on how meta my build is, grind 24 challenges if I like the MTX, and then retire until next league.

Wanna guess how many times I've slammed an exalt?
Never. Not even once.

I'm sure GGG has this data on the backend.
How many players out of the total who have reached maps have had at least 1 exalt drop?
How many of these players have USED an exalt?
How many have used 2? 5?

When I get an exalt drop, my immediate thought is never "Oh sweet, just a couple dozen more of these and I can alt->regal->exalt/multimod an item that I can use in my build, or I could sell at a profit if I get lucky."

It is "Oh sweet, 4 or 5 more of these and I'm set for gear for the league."

The first option isn't available to 99% of PoE players. They don't get to craft because they don't play enough (or get lucky enough) to amass the resources to craft GG items from the ground up with or without Harvest crafting. For a game that ostensibly wants to be "about crafting", that's not a very good success rate.

Literally the only non-Harvest "crafting" I do is alt/aug->regal good cluster jewel bases so I can sell them for 30-70c.

Would I want to have the experience of the first option?

In Harvest league, I played a 100% fire conversion 2x Nebuloch Tectonic Slam Jugg.
It was not a very good character.
But, it (kind of) accomplished what I planned, and I had fun playing it.

Towards the end of the league, I set out to make a ring that sort of fit the niche of this character.



Triple warlord mod with 2 decent resists and a life roll (that I ran out of time trying to get higher).

It was not a very good ring.
But I made it, and you know what? Making this ring was the only time I have ever "crafted as GGG intended." I annuled off a junk mod that the base ring came with.

And you know what else? I felt more accomplished almost completing this ring than I did beating Sirus or Shaper for the first time.

If not for Harvest crafting, I would never be able to afford to even buy this ring already made, much less make it myself.

Please don't take away my terrible ring.

We get it. You don't like the idea of having an item editor in the game. That's understandable.

Alternate proposal - perhaps limit the augments and remove/adds to prevent them from rolling t1 mods. Similar to the crafting bench, it would allow casual players to improve their gear in meaningful ways while not guaranteeing that "perfect" items are possible via a guaranteed step-by-step algorithm.

I sit somewhere between filthy casual and pro-casual. Have been playing for years and have completed the Atlas/shaper/elder maybe twice before.

This league is the first time I've been able to craft my own stuff without relying 100% on poetrade. It's been super fun! I've almost completed my Atlas again and normally by this time I'm done with the league.. This time however, I have so many goals I want to hit because things seem achievable.

Sigh to this change.

Harvest was the only thing that allowed me to play the game. Now you are are gutting it down to nothing.

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But then there would quickly be nothing left to achieve.

But that isn't actually true. There's lots to achieve and enjoy, the problem is you made it boring and repetitive and a huge time investment that became nothing BUT a grind (no progress) AND you do that while having totally opaque build systems that require third-party systems to help make playable (seriously, Path of Building, y'all).

And even THEN, you're best served by looking at the SSFHC ladders to see the builds that actually bring value, in any given patch.

Like, as long as players have to worry about things like a "starter" build, which requires more game knowledge than new players actually have, you are going to have this problem, because you have to level an entire character you don't want, just to build a character that you do want but that costs considerably more money, time and creative energy to build.

Stop blaming shitty design and balance problems on Harvest. There's a bazillion things you can do with this game, but you don't empower players to do most of them, deliberately put a lot of tedium in their way, and that's why they burn out.

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Huntss wrote:

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bauermayers wrote:

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Huntss wrote:

Honestly this is how I imagined it would've been changed when it was announced to go core. I'm sad that so many people are whining about it, after getting another league of free OP items with harvest.

If you think people are whining, you're not really reading, are you?

They had a whole league to test it, it went core after some changes, players are happy with it. There's no logical reason to nerf it like this.

I have been reading. It's just people whining because they want easy to make top tier gear. With harvest in the game gear starts to lose any meaning because it's so easy to make items that in normal leagues would be mirror tier. Really they just made this worse for themselves by making it go core at all instead of just letting it die.

You're right about letting it die if the plan was to ruin the fun of lots of players.

What's the problem with mirror tier items being more accessible? And it's not like everyone would be able to afford or crat them anyway, even with harvest. They're just more accessible.

What that means is previous mirror tier items won't be exclusive to a handful of players and new mirror tier items will still be very rare. Go search in trade and check how many actual mirror tier items are available in the market.

Also, harvest allows more build diversity. Path of Math made a very good video about all that mirror tier and build stuff, how out of touch with reality Chris/GGG are, and how this is probably the worst decision in the game's history. It's actually one of the videos that made me change my mind about this bs of a nerf.