Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting
" 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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" Good. Dys an sohm
Rohs an kyn Sahl djahs afah Mah morn narr |
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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.
IGN: Blip
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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. |
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Hate the changes. Probably not playing PoE again, thanks GGG.
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"We feel that the current state of Harvest Crafting runs against both of these important philosophies. We know that many players would love us to keep deterministic crafting in the game because it enables them to complete their items far more quickly than they otherwise would. But then there would quickly be nothing left to achieve."
Well... This sounds stupid as, regardless of a Harvest crafting options and a possibility to achieve nearly perfect gear, people are leaving PoE after few weeks of play and this happens EVERY league. They have "nothing left to achieve" and it is clear that creating a perfect gear for perfect build is not the reason. Every league statistics is that after one month of play there is approx. 50% of players still playing and after 2nd. month there is only 25% people left (comparing to the new league start). In my opinion a current Harvest crafting is very good. It allows for a fine "tuning" of good items created by other crafting methods. It makes great gear more accessible for players, but it is still required to spend quite a good time to "fix" not perfect affixes on the items. It is currently not a game-breaker - there is no flood of cheap nearly perfect items on PoE trade sites. Good gear is almost as expensive as it was during other leagues. What is the problem with Harvest craft trading? Let those crafts be easily tradable via poe.trade etc., like we can trade beasts or prophecies. If best crafts (like those "Divine", "Annulment", "Exalted") will be nearly as difficult to see in the Harvest as it is to drop Divine, Annulment or Exalted orb from mobs, then where is the problem? Prices of those crafts will be high enough to prevent situation that somebody will have a great gear too quickly. Seeing GGG Manifesto I have only one bad feeling - again it seems to be better to protect a business of minority pro-players, which makes real money on playing PoE, than to listen majority of people which play PoE for a pure fun and pleasure. |
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Literally the most stupid idea of you since I've started to play this game. And I'm playing it for 5 years or so. Disgusting. You just let me down every time. Why don't buff things that aren't rewarding and are unfun? You have to ruin players experience and make game unfun to play, don't you?
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If you over-nerf it people won't even bother entering a grove, at that point it would be even better removing Harvest from the game. I personally would make these changes:
- Reduce the number of crafts you are offered by a lot but increase the chance of getting decent crafts (reforge rare with common modifiers, exchanges). Also don't increase the number of groves you find. - Make it tradeable (like beasts) to solve the discord problem and avoid scams. - Make good crafts (anul+aug) really rare to the point people consider using other orbs for some crafts, but don't make them work only on non-influenced items which would make Harvest useless endgame. |
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Let's let them implement what is intended first and we will see if it really hurt the whole game play. What if few weeks into next league, you see many top tier gear easily and everyone will be forgeting this whole episode. If it turn out really bad, GGG can always re-tweak again the following league. It is a free game after all and we already know GGG is using all of this year to fine tune the mechanic for POE2. Lets give them a chance for it to prove their tweak. One can always skip the league if it is that bad. Don't murder them on just 1 adjustment when they have already provided 8 years of countless new league mechanic and gaming enjoyment.
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" My fucking god. They did that because the event is up and winners should be seen. Take of your tinfoil hats and keep watching the stars for your alien friends. |
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