Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

I honestly believed, or had hopes, they were gonna buff the Harvest, not nerf it.
As casual player that can play 1-2 hours at evening, if not too tired after work, I might find 1 or 2 groves if I get lucky. And what I get from harvesting is 99% useless reforge crafts that just irritates me a lot.
Will be better off without Harvest at all than with crap Harvest.

And now it will be even crappier as I understand. Good job GG.

humm weird. the most successful league of all, coincidence?

we'll see next league..

The point is it was finally actually possible for average players to make the exact stat items they wanted, the whole fun part of the game is chasing the perfect build and equipment, their response "we don't want you to have perfect gear", why not? Don't want stuff flooding the trade market, make any harvest item account bound. What pisses people off is getting something really cool then having it taken away.

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Fenoch wrote:

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DalaiLama wrote:

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xPiranha wrote:

Casuals.

Apple became the first public company to be worth one Trillion dollars by appealing to casuals.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45050213

There's another little company - named after a river - you might have heard of (Ama - something) that was worth 1.5 Trillion as of yesterday. They made their fortune by appealing to casual shoppers. People too lazy to actually leave the house and shop!

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-worth

You Sir are a great many things but obviously not someone who understands business.

You compare a videogame to Multinational Companies (MNCs) that have spread out in various industries and effect various appliances of day to day life.

There are entire universes between that and PoE. Depths you obviously cannot even begin to fathom as even hinting at something like a comparison or a "casual appeals" example is pure lunacy.

The person you quoted also foregot that not every business purpose ito to grow and conquer the world. Some actually enjoy operating in a niche.

People have too much these days a customer-centric point of view, while there are still thankfully some product-centric approaches.

The best analogy I can recall was a French chef who would kick out of his restaurant any customer that would ask to remove an ingredient or add another from his signature meal. The whole point of his restaurant was not to please every customer, but to offer the product he liked and make people that enjoyed this type of meal happy. If you don't like the taste of oranges, don't ask a damn "Canard a l'orange" but without orange. Same here with PoE. It has grown almost too much, at the risk of losing its soul.

At this point it feels like a conglomeration of issues caused by trade being so very out of the way and mechanics not being made for trading at all while they still have the possibility to be traded.

Good day everyone,

i am writing this from a PoE beginner standpoint playing my real 1st league in Ritual.
Obeserving all the talking unfolding on different media about the upcoming harvest changes is quite numbing for me.

1st of all players seem to ignore the fact that harvest (besides its impact in PoE) was and still is a test for the upcoming PoE2 crafting system.

As far as i understand end game crafting in PoE was and still is heavily RNG dependend except the more or less determenistic crafts offered by Essences, bench crafts, fossils & harvest.

PoE content creators tend to say that harvest is dead and the average player will not be able to taste endgame at all.....

My personal experience of my first league comes down to this:

I read some guides recommended by some friends ending up following Enki's arc witch guide for 3.13.
I cleared the acts, did quests and reached maps.
Due to some lucky drops (awakened Spell echo, some ex orbs etc) and good trades i got very good unique items to work my way up to red maps and nearly killing Sirus on A8.

After hitting my first real wall (surviving in chiselled, alced and vaaled T14++ maps i was looking for a new build to switch to, ending up with Bergerbrush's Impale Cyclone - Slayer version.

Back to leveling up getting basic gear, getting familiar with the play style, reaching maps doing labs for ascendency etc.
After getting to red maps beeing able to clear T15 canyon i started to improve the build a bit for my own taste and needs: adding movement speed, changing flask setups adding 4 different nodes in the skill tree.

In the end my cyclone was running 100% delirium maps slow but was able to clear the content, maxed out atlas passive trees, encountered the uncharted realm including a bossfight wall and failed a few more Sirus attempts.

What does that have to do with harvest?

Was Harvest the reason why i reached red maps and nearly killed Sirus? No. Enki's arc witch build does not rely on any complex crafts you need harvest for to reach red maps and beeing capeable to kill Sirus.

Did harvest make the tailwind boots I have on my cyclone cheaper to purchase? Probably but after talking to some experienced crafters the tailwind boots i am using are also easily craftable with the upcoming changes and i would have been able to afford them.

Do most of the playerbase not reach endgame content because of harvest changes? After my 1st league i would say no. Players want easy accessable progress without putting some work in. I agree that the entry barrier in PoE is outdated and should be reworked. Specially in terms of how skills work together and how to improve your gear and gem setups to get through the Story. But that has nothing to do with harvest and might be adressed in PoE 2.
In the end a player needs to have the urge to improve and read and listen to exprienced players to get started in a complex game like PoE. If this is missing you will fail no matter what.

Now some thoughts on how to actually adress harvest and potential changes and finetuning it:

- crafting on influenced items should be possible in general
- to craft on an influenced item you need to find a grove while the area is influenced (craft on hunter influenced items requires a grove within a hunter influenced region etc)
- elder and shaper influence craft can only be obrained in elder / shaper inflenced maps
- the moment a conquerors Citadel is available in the atlas, the influence affecting the grove is removed to prevent 24/7 farm abuse -> kill sirus rinse and repeat
- harvest crafts need to be more rare. specially the deterministic remove & add versions

Alternating system for rem / add harvest crafts:

Orb strengthening:
Exalted orbs can be altered by combining them with different other items:

This can include Fossils, annul, etc to create a deterministic augment / anul or rem / add exalted orb.
This makes the old harvest crafts tradeable and adds a different function for allready existing items in the game.

On top.... the loottable of maps and specially bosses could use a slight rework / adjustment.

Bye

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Zepepsico wrote:

Forgot to add:

given the number of very successful leagues WITHOUT Harvest, why is everyone complaining so much? Are they saying that all the million of players who played some really engaging leagues did it while hating the game? Really? Million of masochistic players when there are alternatives?

People got a taste of power and can't let go. Grow up, you enjoyed the game without a crafting simulator, you'll enjoy it again. And if you enjoy crafting so much, there are lots of crafting games out there.

The points is not how successfull leagues are for GGG. It is about how you can clear the content in the 3 month time / ever...

And the sad aspect of it is that you can't clear all content in a 3 month gap if you don't have the time for it.

I played the first week in ritual before going standard. I only play solo with no trade and it took me 2 months (playing 4-5 hours per day) to get from T9 to T16 maps with average gear crafted with Harvest and a no meta build.

It is not about power, it is about being able to progress even at a slow pace without playing insane hours per day abd get decent gear to do so...

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Anelit wrote:

Thank you very much for doing this GGG. Harvest was a mockery of the core ideas of ARPG's.
And most of all thanks for not bending to the whiny masses that thing: easier gear = better game ugha bugha.
You always know when not to cave in, and thats why your game is where it is now :)

I’m not sure that the game is actually in that grate of the place, that is actually pretty ironic thing to say. They cave in to third party for loot filters. They cave in to third party for trading. They cave in to third party for harvest. They cave in to ten cents too. I think what is being forgotten here is the fact that the “whiny masses” are a “masses” indeed, and those masses are making the game what it is. Without these masses, without their $, without their population this game will be in very sad state. And masses can take only so much, on the end result in riot. Look back to Blizzcon and “guys not have phones”. This was the point where masses left Diablo 3, and a lot of them moved here. GGG is on a very thin ice here, because masses will ultimately lose patience, and than the higher up club of 1%’s will actually not be able to play for various reasons.

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Ch4dwick wrote:

Good day everyone,

i am writing this from a PoE beginner standpoint playing my real 1st league in Ritual.
Obeserving all the talking unfolding on different media about the upcoming harvest changes is quite numbing for me.

1st of all players seem to ignore the fact that harvest (besides its impact in PoE) was and still is a test for the upcoming PoE2 crafting system.

As far as i understand end game crafting in PoE was and still is heavily RNG dependend except the determenistic crafts offered by fossils & harvest.

PoE content creators tend to say that harvest is dead and the average player will not be able to taste endgame at all.....

My personal experience of my first league comes down to this:

I read some guides recommended by some friends ending up following Enki's arc witch guide for 3.13.
I cleared the acts, did quests and reached maps.
Due to some lucky drops (awakened Spell echo, some ex orbs etc) and good trades i got very good unique items to work my way up to read maps and nearly killing Sirus on A8.

After hitting my first real wall (surviving in chiselled, alced and vaaled T14++ maps i was looking for a new build to switch to, ending up with Bergerbrush's Impale Cyclone - Slayer version.

Back to leveling up getting basic gear, getting familiar with the play style, reaching maps doing labs for ascendency etc.
After getting to red maps beeing able to clear T15 canyon i started to improve the build a bit for my own taste and needs: adding movement speed, changing flask setups adding 4 different nodes in the skill tree.

In the end my cyclone was running 100% delirium maps slow but was able to clear the content, maxed out passive trees, encountered the uncharted realm including a bossfight wall and failed a few more Sirus attempts.

What does that have to do with harvest?

Was Harvest the reason why i reached red maps and nearly killed Sirus? No. Enki's arc witch build does not rely on any complex crafts you need harvest for to reach red maps and beeing capeable to kill Sirus.

Did harvest make the tailwind boots I have on my cyclone cheaper to purchase? Probably but after talking to some experienced crafters the tailwind boots i am using are also easily craftable with the upcoming changes and i would have been able to afford them.

Exactly. You can finish 90% of the game on budget builds. My own build is made of 90% uniques. No need to worry about a single damn craft.
But no, everyone wants the 1 billion dps build they saw a streamer use (you know these guys who do it for a living, have a massive support network, knowledge of the game, skill, time, etc...)

The reply to one of my earlier comments almost seems to imply they used to "bear" with the game before the introduction of Harvest. What can you reply to this apart that it may not be the best game for them?????

"

Anelit wrote:

Thank you very much for doing this GGG. Harvest was a mockery of the core ideas of ARPG's.
And most of all thanks for not bending to the whiny masses that thing: easier gear = better game ugha bugha.
You always know when not to cave in, and thats why your game is where it is now :)

Na, it's a solid game, just stuck in the past and afraid of falling out of its niche which limits its overall potential.