Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

Rip, would be nice to get a breakdown like this is why the servers are hyper shit and the streaming textures is still terrible. A man can hope.

ggg's only concern: more than 1% of the players have good items. They want to satisfy the egos of the 1% privileged players

they cant make itemised harvest crafts. but why? you already know..

Never before have i played so much in a league, and never before have so many friends and guildes played more than a few weeks. Never before have we crafted items ourselves.

This nerf is just stupid. Harvest as it's now is ok. Make the game for a few streamers that play 10+ hours a day / 50+ hours each week... or for your actual playerbase ?

I am disappointed by this decision. What you have done is taken away some of the mirror-tier item crafting potential, but not all. I feel like this is favoritism towards certain builds, which can still fully utilize Harvest crafting.

Furthermore, I hate the potential of being scammed for other players' crafts, and nothing has been done to solve this problem. Perhaps I'm still salty about being drop-trade scammed in D2 in middle school, but we shouldn't have games designed where entrusting our items to other players is the best option.

You guys had like, what, 9 months to think about implementing harvest, right?

And you tell me that is the best you can do? Jeez.

Extremely disappointing and completely destroys the benefit and role of harvest. These changes will likely put harvest slightly above incursion in terms of usefulness around 2-3 weeks into a league. You'll use it early on to fix basic gear resists and after that you'll likely just ignore it. If not that you certainly won't be going out of your way to farm it that's for sure.

The weight of an item gets brought up consistently by Chris and other GGG devs. Well being able to continually work on the SAME item over an extended period of time to make it right for your build was such an amazing thing. It gave WEIGHT to the item. Now that's gone and we're back to gambling. It's not even like you can do all the leg work on an influenced item to get the influence mods you need then use harvest to get mods such as resists or life.

I get that you all are caught in between a rock and a hard place with Harvest. Leaving it in as is has the tft issue. Obviously we can't do that. So we have to find some form of solution. I'm just disappointed this is the route you all have decided to take.

Tldr: gambling sucks, harvest killed gambling but also allowed players to make things GGG doesn't approve of so GGG killed Harvest.

As long as we can sell harvest on TFT - who cares. top 1% will still buy them and craft them, while the rest will keep on doing what we do best - just play the game.

Before this league started i said probably i would skip it (i still don't agree with the nerfs made in general prior to 3.13), and yet, i didn't. Ended up enjoying the atlas changes, and the fact we could choose an obective in terms of type of content to run with.
Ended up farming mostly for Harvest and the rework it was made to include it into core was really good. There are a lot of players that don't like to go to tft to be able to get some of the crafts, and i understand this is an issue (even tho i don't mind using tft to trade them), and could be fixed for example with itemised crafts as for instance beasts.

But once again, and as someone said in this comment section, you decide the game experience of 99,99% of the player base, based on the feedback from the 0,01%, that spend 12/16 hours a day in front of the game doing ssf hc, THAT DON'T TRADE AT ALL, OR INTERACT WITH OTHER PLAYERS! Just make a sandbox for those that have so much of an elitist taste, and try to understand that your WHOLE player base doesn't agree with the direction and "philosophy" you try to apply to your game.

At this point, you can't even get your API to be stable so players can actualy trade in a trade league, not to talk about your "engine improvements" that made the game worst for at least 3 leagues straight... But destroying Harvest is the priority.

So yeah, remove harvest already, and just uninstall after.

Problem "People who share crafts on a discord server make mirror tier items to easily."
The solution of making harvest rarer or taking away powerful items isn't going to fix this it pushed the bar of entry higher. You say people haven't been using other methods of craft such as the basic currencies but I would say people have been we see alterations be worth 1/3 of chaos orbs why because we need to alt spam the mods to awakener orb them together, we need to alt spam watchstones for the mods we want. People aren't using exalted orbs like we want to, 99% of the community still won't its more cost effective to farm out a leo if you need a generic exalt for alot of the community. I love this game and after reading through the comments 90% of your player base who plays past 36 challenges is saying this a bad change.

Don't base changes just off your yellow map community base it off the people who take time off work to grind to 36 or 40 challenges we mater too.

Even with this change the issue will still stand people will get scammed in discord by trying to make powerful items. Just itemize the crafts so people can make upgrades themselves. The feeling of showing an item to someone and them asking how much did you buy that for and saying oh I made that makes me keep pushing and grinding after 40/40 the feeling of getting an item that literally can't be better is what makes me keep going. Now I buy the item and if someone looks at my PoB and asks me about my staff I will just say o I mirror'd it because I don't want to gamble for it.

Bad Change

Hey @Chris, it seems as though no one proofread your post, so I took the time to do so.

"

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

Fixed: Using currency items like Exalted Orbs or Chaos Orbs on your gear has always sucked and will forever suck, because gambling isn't crafting. Only a masochist would call this form of gear alteration "fun" in any capacity.

"

Original: 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?"

Fixed: Our problem with all of this can be summarized with the following thought: "Who is the person that thought using Exalted/Divine/Annul Orbs could even be considered crafting? Do they not understand the English language? Who even thought up of the term "deterministic crafting", when crafting (by definition) is deterministic (no one sets out to make a bench, then gets surprised with a cheese sandwich instead)? Why even have those mechanics in place, when Harvest made crafting a reality in a game that should have had that mechanic in place since its inception?

[Fixed for Will_GGG's sensitivity censor. At least I spelled "summarized" properly.]

"

Original: The entire rest of Path of Exile's crafting system is somewhat redundant with Harvest Crafting in its current form. While we are glad we tried the experiment of keeping all the crafts and balancing by rarity, it's unfortunately going to have to change.

Fixed: We're going to ruin the game's only true form of crafting again, and not address the glaring technical issues of the game's item over-abundance."

"

Original: When you craft an item, you receive a random modifier.

Fixed: When you craft an item, you get a desired outcome (since that is the definition of the word). We want you to just smash your face against the keyboard as many times as possible, so we're going to force you to gamble on items.

"

Original: 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."

Fixed: We here at GGG are just diehard masochists, and we want nothing more then to just make horrible gear mechanics a bigger issue and ruin the playerbase's. We LOVE to miss the mark on what the player's ACTUALLY want, in favor of introducing more ways to sink needless time into boring, unfulfilling, and ultimately unrewarding systems.

Maybe instead of investing in more ways to annoy the players, spend that time investing into why your servers are unstable, why Heist mechanics are still buggy, and why you don't have a functioning trade system yet. All of your focus seems to be on killing the enjoyability of game mechanics that actually work... or on not understanding the English language (in this case). I think you need to find some better hobbies instead of self-destruction, bud. I bet if you took a poll as to why player's left Harvest, I think you'd find very little complaining about the crafting system put in place and more complaints on setting up a grove or the beyond buggy, unappealing, and uninspired Oshabi fight.