Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

So, yet again crafting is gonna be for the rich huh?
Oh wait a moment, nothings gonna change since the perfect items were well... unexpectedly made by rich people

Also... If you never liked this much of a deterministic crafting why did you implement it this season without pretty much changing anything? (The deterministic crafting aspect)

"

Gaspardwc wrote:

"

smplx wrote:

"

Fenoch wrote:

Reading the flood is super entertaining.

I am utterly amazed how many hidden geniuses exist and how they all happen to play Path of Exile.

So many inventors, business insiders, fortune tellers and flat out altruistic human beings who have only the best interest of the casual gamer in mind.

Nobody cares about raking in those profits with their min-maxed perfected characters. Nooooooo. Nobody. All for the greater good of the community.

I also enjoy reading all the warnings about suddenly only 2 people playing PoE because it will all be so bad and boring and dreadful.

I am amazed that any of you have any time whatsoever to spend on the forums complaining with your well paying jobs, 10 children and 59 wifes and all.

Besides such great minds of foreshadowing a great many things surely are too busy explaining the mysteries of the universe to the world right?

xD

Exactly. We are all doomed because of a small change in one mechanic out of many and POE will be a barren wasteland. And our life in ruins because we wont be able to add/remove life to roll tier 1 on a 6 prpperty multi influence elevated explode chest to take it to the next level. The game will surely be unplayable and meaningless without this. Very amusing reading the comments. :-)

You lack a severe understanding of the overall sentiment of the posts here. They're making the game less fun and detracting from their own game. It's the overall direction GGG is taking with their game that is troubling rather moreso than the one change.

Not troubling for me at all. The way I see it the game will not be less fun because of this change. It has almost no effect. People are overreacting like always, come next leage and noone will care about this change at all.

"

smplx wrote:

"

Gaspardwc wrote:

"

smplx wrote:

Exactly. We are all doomed because of a small change in one mechanic out of many and POE will be a barren wasteland. And our life in ruins because we wont be able to add/remove life to roll tier 1 on a 6 prpperty multi influence elevated explode chest to take it to the next level. The game will surely be unplayable and meaningless without this. Very amusing reading the comments. :-)

You lack a severe understanding of the overall sentiment of the posts here. They're making the game less fun and detracting from their own game. It's the overall direction GGG is taking with their game that is troubling rather moreso than the one change.

Not troubling for me at all. The way I see it the game will not be less fun because of this change. It has almost no effect. People are overreacting like always, come next leage and noone will care about this change at all.

Fortunately, you are the minority.

[

Minority is right in this case. As always majority overreach and overreact , only time majority didnt is when they killed Coc/Mjo discharge once and for all.

"

Obright wrote:

Why are we even needing to argue over which camp is in the majority?

Put a poll up, and let's sort this.

I am not sur eit is much to argue, the poll will be like 98% this change is [Removed by Support], 2% - I havent ever played this game but this makes sense

"

Aim_Deep wrote:

I hate how ppl over react to every nerf here.

Agree people knee-jerk react to any nerf (I remember the ES nerf in 2017! "this will kill build diversity! etc etc"), but not every thread has 340+ pages of replies. I think the reason is because people feel pretty passionately about this one (including me).

Change is good. Harvest in its current form is not perfect and needs changing. However, the core problem in my eyes are related to the fact that buying and selling crafts on Discord both is a terrible experience and stops me playing the actual game, and then pooling crafts to the items that need them is too much of an efficient market and floods the market with too many 'good' items. Neither outcome is good.

I find it fun to play the game, and also progress, improve my items and experience the content, so I put a self-imposed ban on using the TFT Discord, and used Harvest 'SSF', and had an absolute blast. My items are still not mirror tier, but they are mine, and I experienced a ton of content along the way! I hunt for influenced bases, I use fossil crafting, I use a bit of alt-regal crafting and trade for 'imperfect' items I know I can personalise over the next few weeks of maps via a mix of Harvest & currency as a bit of a project. I can then tackle the bosses that I struggled with at the start of the league. It feels great. This is PoE as I want to play it, not sit on live trade search looking for good deals on items I need for my build with the currency I've saved up.


The solution is some combination of:
- Actually solving the Discord problem - If Harvest is worth doing next patch at all, Discord will still be the 'best' way to use it, which sucks. Making harvest crafted items soulbound or trade-limited in some way, so you have to find the crafts yourself by playing the game. If everyone loves the system but the core problem is pooling the crafts lets people complete items too fast and the most efficient thing to do is camp Discord rather than play, why not limit that trade so they have to play the game rather than gut the system?
- Limiting the potential to 'great but not mirror tier' items - If it's too strong to deterministically craft mirror tier items, why not limit the mod pool to not being able to hit certain T1 affixes via Harvest. That way, Harvest isn't the way to access the very top tier items, but lets people like me actually have a path to achieving my goals (which I never was motivated to achieve after my pure repetitive currency grind to 40 challenges in Legacy).
- Making rarer crafts require a 'recipe' involving e.g. exalts + annuls, to act as a currency sink and put on a more even playing field with other forms of crafting which require resources. Determinism then has a clear cost both time in maps & currency, just like you can deterministically 6L a chest if you don't want to gamble.

I finally felt I could actually have the fun I've tried to have every league I've played since Legacy, and feel a journey this league with my few builds that felt achievable (but still required 100s of hours). This league opened up the game for me and let me experience PoE as I wanted to experience it.

That's why I want to put my voice forward towards where I want the game to be, because it finally is getting there after so many years, and I don't want to see things revert to where they were when I wasn't having fun and quit every league before I achieved what I wanted to!

C'mon Chris, you're hiding bad gamedesign decisions under saying it's your 'philosophy'.

Just admit it: you lost your touch and you aren't a visioner anymore.

This lame situation with harvest nerf is a sad signal for us all: Akela missed his prey.

And that another part of your 'philosophy' about being inflexible with current trade system.

What else should we fear of, Chris?

It's obvious: you've stepped on a straight way to losing most of your players.

This sucks. A lot. Been processing since I read yesterday.

I know that they wont undo these nerfs. But hopefully they can give us fun buffs, like chance for a chaos seed to guarantee a T1 roll of the specific type.

I.e. a reforge phys seed would guarantee a T1 random phys roll.

This is just off the top of my head. But it seems to fit in their gambler mentality and is basically still just a less powerful essence craft in many cases since essences determine a specific mod

"

Aim_Deep wrote:

[

Minority is right in this case. As always majority overreach and overreact , only time majority didnt is when they killed Coc/Mjo discharge once and for all.

I think you have small misunderstand. Let's take an average guy who has experience but not invest a lot of time to get currency. He is doing in average 30-40 ex per league. In heist, good rare build would worth like 5-10 ex with something like unique chest and other 2-3 unique items. Now it is possible to build fully rare character, which means, that unique price is lower than previous league, much lower than expected (asenath gloves previous league was 12 ex, when exalt was already 40:1, which is 480 chaos, now it is 20c - 24x times less, same with skyforth or other unique, which could be used by meta builds). Which means, that next league economic will drop down. Rare items will grow in price again and as a result - uniques will be more useful and more pricey. So even if you are not using harvest, you still will notice changes, unless you are playing SSF, which is not common for average or casual player.

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

and fails so often no one uses it...