Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

8000+ hours into the game over the years, I never use exalt or chaos spam unless I am about to quit league to burn my currency. I never aim to be to top 0.1%, I just enjoyed playing at my own pace.

GGG makes it sound like having harvest we are like playing Diablo, that’s not true at all, the amount of time we still have to invest to still find the craft to be able to perhaps sell it, or the amount of time we get to save because we can use our hard earned (grinded) currency to buy a craft is very satisfying.

This is the best league that I felt like I am enjoying actually trading with people and spending currencies on meaningful actions. I have also learnt so much about crafting because of harvest.

In fact, harvest is the reason makes me playing so long this league. I would have stopped like a month ago. GGG really helps me to make the decision to skip the next league or more.

context, am in the top 0.1% of players or whatever, this is a stupid change and hurts everyone. Harvest makes the game more fun, with a more reliable gear progression that keeps people engaged and interested as they have a tangible and semi-deterministic way to craft their own gear.

Implore GGG to revise their approach here...

GGG once again show hoe potent they are in destroying fun. Had big plans for next league, but if this stupid change lands i'm out.

Once again GGG show they don't play their game. Whoever decided this is a good way to fix harvest (does it need fix at all?) clearly doesn't play PoE, never leveled to 95+,never crafted anything of value, doesn't nkow shit about how player feels.
And yet, here we go again.

I'm a very casual player who doesn't do pretty much any crafting in Path of Exile, yet I feel like these changes possibly touch me too or the issue is just blown out of proportions and GGG is only changing the extremely good and valuable crafts.

I've always dreaded Currency-based Crafting in PoE. First, it's nowhere nearly guaranteed that you'll get the craft you were looking for. Not saying this should be the case, but if you have a limited amount of these Currencies (like I usually do), it's just better to buy something pre-crafted than try to craft it yourself. The randomness of crafting poses a huge barrier to entry to crafting (if you have very limited Currency).

Second, there are quite a few options in Currency Crafting, from Chaos Spamming to Essences and from Beast Crafting to Fossils. Harvest Crafting was unified as a concept and everything you needed was in a single menu or at least in the same area of the game. Of course, you could supplement your Crafting with Currency Crafting but you didn't need to.

What I wanted to say is that this kind of deterministic Craftin (Harvest Crafting) should stay as an option to Crafting in the game. There is value here for those who dread the randomness of Currency Crafting or don't have access to large amounts of Currencies (not selling items for example).

As a solution for making items too powerful they could just remove or change the most powerful and valuable crafts or make good crafts apply a mark to the item which would make it untradeable. Not sure if that idea is too much and would go against the basic game design of PoE. Another idea was making valuable crafts more luck based and there could be a possibility that the item would be ruined (Corrupted) in the process.

I love crafting, it’s its own little puzzle game. And damn, I loved every minute of 3.13. Hands down my favorite league I’ve played. Harvest was one of the main reasons for that. Between figuring out the optimal way to use the crafts and, yes, even buying and selling crafts on TFT. It was amazing! Even so much I bought the Harvest Supporter pack to say “Hey GGG, I really enjoyed this league!”

However with this announcement, my excitement for next league and beyond is just flat out… gone. Sorry GGG - you’ve lost me with this one.

I had a great time playing while it lasted though, thank you so much! :)

From a perspective of a non 16h played a day player, because unfortunately I have to work to earn money, i completely disagree with this nerf. This league I enyoyed a lot trying things to happen in harvest and I can say I didn´t make anything great (top tier o mirror tier) but decent to sell for an exalt or 2 and improve a little bit my build.
Also liked this mechanics because I´ve seen more different builds viable in endgame than ever.
And lastly, this league I encouraged myself to try SSF for the next league as with what I learned from harvest I think I can do end game just by myself.
All this things are broken dreams right now. i feel sad for that.
Please reconsider this for a moment.

Very poor problem solving!
Bringing Harvest back was like evolving into something so much better as it is right now and it motivated me to chase more and different goals (and play longer). But if these nerfs go through we are back at the stone age of gambling, unclear grinding goals and playing only top meta builds if you want to do endgame content. "So much fun, thanks GGG!"
If you don't want Harvest crafts to be sold through 3rd party software then just make them trade-able like Bestiary crafts. Simple.

In Ritual league, I've told a number of people that poe is in a really good state. They made great strides in letting people have agency on what they're doing by the atlas tree changes and by reinstituting harvest. I've talked it up to a number of people. By going back to slot machine crafting, you are removing agency and putting the game in a worse space.

Just a heads up for people unwaware.

There's a post on leddit (obviously the official forums) where the lead CM says that for now there's no plans to change this decision and they are "watching the feedback" whatever that means.

Harvest is not dead, it will still be in the game. It will still be the absolute nr 1 choice for crafting items. In fact you will have more access to it. It will still help gear progression just like it did before. It is only the very top tier of crafted gear that is being toned down (the 6 high tear multi influence mod items and those kind of nonsense) - gear that you do not need at all to fully complete 99% of the content. Decent to Great gear which you need for progression will still be available in large quantities because harvest will still be strong as fck.

Do not overreact so hard.