Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

Hey GGG,
these streamers speak for me aginst your Harvers balance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7dczHG4M44
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCnhymJQlio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdpA_xHXhEA

I use Ex to buy stuff, never used one for crafting in 1500hrs of play and I still have crappy gear.

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FuRi0s wrote:

Ufff.. i really liked the more or less "save" progression of the gear with harvest. It made me come back to the league even after weeks... stil playing it currently for some hours a week.

With harvest its not like you play 40 hours and if you are unlucky you still have the same gear after the 40 hours playtime.


I think its a step in the wrong direction.

Agreed.
Harvest has actually given me a reason to hold onto gear for modding and attempting to make better gear. thus lengthening my play time in game.

They remove this bad news from the main page news and push a bunch of microtransaction posts. WTF Seriously

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"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."

I hate this feeling. I use exalts to buy items. The fact that you can ruin an item is not fun. Not everybody has the time to start crafting from zero with each item every time the rng goes bad.
As humans, we generally are more inclined to determinism rather than randomness and gambling. Harvest needed changes, but not like this. It is sad that you are ignoring the majority of the players with these changes.

The purpose of a game should be FUN!

"

Using currency items like Exalted Orbs or Chaos Orbs on your gear is a powerful, risky and exciting way to improve it. But because these items work equally well on both low- and high-level equipment, it's generally considered best to save them until you're crafting your end-game gear. Many players would even argue that it's best to save them to trade for already-crafted items. In either case, using valuable currency items on your levelling gear is generally perceived to be non-optimal.

I would argue that 99% of players go an entire league, every league without having an item where the expected value of exalt slamming is worth more than an exalt.

This goes doubly when that exalt can irreversibly ruin your item.

What is the goal here GGG?

You seem hellbent on forcing people to trace for gear, yet will do everything in your power to keep trading as the inconvenient, irritating experience we all know and hate.

Listen to the mid tier players more. Your streamer pandering is ruining your game.

"

MichaelKnightro wrote:

Terrible decision. The game finally went into a direction where every player was able to feel satisfied with gearing no matter how much time they invested, but now we're going back to playing builds that feel terrible to play unless you find/use broken mechanics or are willing to invest hundreds of hours per league grinding boring content for currency. Currency that you're going to spend on a trade site mind you, NOT on crafting items. No-one with half a brain will ever use an exalt or a chaos orb on "crafting", unless it's a guaranteed bench-craft. This is the most disappointing change to the game in recent memory and that is after the terrible disaster that was Heist league and some of the awful changes that have been made in the last couple of leagues. I wish I knew this was going to happen before I bought a supporter pack this league, but I guess I've learned my lesson.

Seriously, I finally spent some money on the game cause they were moving in the right direction for once.

Looks like it's back to fossil crafting, beast crafting, and RNG for crafters.
Back to trade league for the rest of us.

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0phidian wrote:

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MichaelKnightro wrote:

Terrible decision. The game finally went into a direction where every player was able to feel satisfied with gearing no matter how much time they invested, but now we're going back to playing builds that feel terrible to play unless you find/use broken mechanics or are willing to invest hundreds of hours per league grinding boring content for currency. Currency that you're going to spend on a trade site mind you, NOT on crafting items. No-one with half a brain will ever use an exalt or a chaos orb on "crafting", unless it's a guaranteed bench-craft. This is the most disappointing change to the game in recent memory and that is after the terrible disaster that was Heist league and some of the awful changes that have been made in the last couple of leagues. I wish I knew this was going to happen before I bought a supporter pack this league, but I guess I've learned my lesson.

Seriously, I finally spent some money on the game cause they were moving in the right direction for once.

Looks like it's back to fossil crafting, beast crafting, and RNG for crafters.
Back to trade league for the rest of us.

Good.

As someone who never even got to the stage to make a nearly mirror tier item with the harvest mechanics during harvest league, never mind its current nerfed state, this extra nerf makes me think harvest will be worthless for basically anyone with a job/family. Seems GGG are balancing yet again around people who play constantly.

An attempt at providing my biased feedback on the mechanic.

Hello, as far as I see I can see roughly 5 tier of players with a layer of ssf arching over it. I'll give you a rundown as I've been all of them apart from t1 and t5 player. My hypothesize is that the dislike for harvest comes from t1 and t5 players. And that harvest, overall helps player retention. This of course is anecdotal and exemptions may apply.

The rundown:

T1. There are 5 tiers of players as I see. The super super hard-core, the 0.1%, streamers etc. I've heard that they don't like harvest because it lowers stuff they can do endgame, as they can do endgame within a month. I get it, they'd like to prolong their game time.

T2. The almost super hard core players. The ones that still have a job, but do play the game during the entirety of the their free time, or at least the vast majority. These people are disadvantaged, compared to t1, and harvest allowed them to bridge the gap and push themselves closer to t1, if not almost equalize themselves in power to t1 players. Harvest gave them a late game purpose in the form of crafting their gear deterministically - henceforth I'll call this a sense of purpose.

T3. The medium core players. People who get to red maps, do meta builds, don't have time to play during all their free time. But can pepper in the odd hours here and there. These people typically juice their builds to around 10 ex and then without further possibilities of progression quit the league. However, with the addition of harvest, it allowed them to have a sense of purpose. After roughly putting in 10 ex into a build the next upgrade step is incremental and it might be anywhere between 5-20 ex investment to BUY, their upgrade. Harvest allowed them to interact with their gear and gave them a sense of purpose/progression. Without a sense of purpose many of these people quit the league.

T4. Non meta build meta gamers. Much like t3 players, they rely on harvest, however more so. Without proper tools they can't play non meta builds and will quickly reroll if they have no avenue of buying or crafting their endgame gear.

T5. People who do not metagame and as such don't care for harvest. Harvest is not their endgame and probably they will either become one of the tiers above, or quit the league after novelty wears off.

T.??? Ssf players, the people that get what they put in. These also divide into a sublist of tiered players, but the general outlines are the same ones I mentioned before.

My conclusions: Harvest overall helps player retention, and allows most devote t3 and t4 players achieve what t2 and t3 players achieve. Furthermore it bridges the gap between the t1 and t2 player base, giving a fighting chance at being one of the the best in the game without having to go without a full time job.

T2, T3, T4 players have an ADDITIONAL endgame goal.

Furthermore ssf play becomes viable for the t2-t5 population.

Personal opinion: For me it's never been about killing Sirus 100x times, it's about getting that next gear piece, and if I have to map and hoard my currency, then there is a no way I can continue playing the league. If that happens I'll drop this one and wait for the next one. Every single time I've hit a wall of 50 ex I've considered my build done and dropped the league. The exception being harvest and ritual league. Because I can make my own 50ex item... And I feel freekin good doing it.

Hate the changes. Probably not playing PoE again, thanks GGG.