Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

Why did you remove this from the news page? Strong leadership

Ok, so considering all you did was remove the annuls, im fine with that. I was afraid that u intended to remove deterministic crafts entirely, that wouldve made me quit and find another game. Your argument about exalts being obsolete is stupid though, complete nonsense in fact. Chaos and Exalts are THE standard for player trades, they will NEVER EVER EVER be obsolete because of this. Just because less people are chugging Exalts for their listed effect does not mean that now people dont want exalts. The only things harvest makes obsolete would be the metacrafting mods that protect either prefix or suffix mods, but you didnt even mention those, and anyways, those arent useless when compared to harvest crafting, just slightly less necessary. Honestly, if you want to help accessibility how about you include an actual IN GAME player shop system that doesnt require your players to go to a third party website just to buy items? I dont mean the half-assed pile of garbage you have in the console version either, I mean a real listing mechanism with real filtering options. An actual IN GAME loot filter editor is also something you should do. The fact that a loot filter is 100% absolutely required to reasonably play in end game but you have to go to a third party website to get said filter is absurd. Literally any other dev would look at the fact that loot filters and player item listings are a part of the game but have no in game mechanism to use those features and say the game is unfinished. How about you stop screwing around with crafting and actually give us a finished product after more then a decade.

Lets talk about something else thats absurd and has gotten zero attention since the games creation, framerate drops and stuttering. Before you say anything, no, I am NOT playing POE on a toaster and I dont mean the console version either. I play POE on console AND pc because I have friends who only have a ps4 that I like to play the game with. Now that thats done, the real point here, I have a computer on my desk here that can run CYBERPUNK AT MAX SETTINGS WITH PERFECT BUTTERY SMOOTH GAMEPLAY! When I fire up POE fresh off an install, however, I get framerate drops when a lot is going on and I get that stuttering where the game randomly hangs for a second at some arbitrary interval. Only by going in and doing a plethora of performance tweaks am I able to get the game to run as intended without framerate drops and arbitrary hanging. This is obviously the result of poor optimization. There is no reason why, with a pc that can run a new release game, a game that was hyped mainly for its insane graphics, at max settings, I should be getting any loss of framerate or hanging or any sort of loss of performance on a dinky little free to play mmo that is MORE THEN A DECADE OLD! Not only that, but the game obviously has a memory leak somewhere. It is common knowledge no matter what system you play this game on that if you dont restart the game every couple hours, it WILL eventually crash on you. This is usually preceded by a gradually worsening drop in framerate and responsiveness of the controls. This is textbook memory leak behavior. Somewhere, someone didnt do trash collection right or something of that sort and now every time some script runs it leaves an instance of something in memory that never gets removed and when that script runs again, a new instance of that thing gets stuffed into memory along with the old unused instance and before long, all the games allocated memory is taken up by unused garbage that wasnt properly taken care of leaving not enough room for the game to function any longer, resulting in a crash from lack of available memory. Restarting the game causes anything and everything the game used, including those unused trash bits, to be cleared from memory, which prevents the eventual crash. How about you work on fixing your optimization and tracking down that memory leak instead of messing with crafting?

Heres another absurd thing, Lockstep vs Predictive vs useless console hybrid mode.
Lockstep prevents rubberbanding, but comes at the cost of a loss of responsiveness, you get a tiny bit of input lag. Predictive gives you responsive controls with no input lag, but it comes at the cost of constant desysnching resulting in rubberbanding forever. Hybrid mode on the consoles gives you the worst of both worlds! Im sorry... wait, no im not, there is no excuse for this garbage. I defy you, name me ONE SINGLE EXAMPLE of another game, any game anywhere on teh goddamned planet, even other games of this type like Diablo or Torchlight, where the devs have to choose between desynching or input lag, go ahead, il wait... didnt find any? Ya, thats because thats not a thing unless you screwed up really bad somewhere. Most devs would look at that and go, "huh, well good controls are pretty important, both accuracy and responsiveness, maybe we should fix that BEFORE we release the game?" Not ggg though, you guys looked at that and were like, "well, I got nothin, whatever, just release it and let them pick which kind of broken they want their controls to be. Whats that? its been broken for more then a decade now and we wont even acknowledge that its broken let along provide any sort of a fix? I KNOW!! Lets expariment with powerful deterministic crafting!"

Dont even get me started on how effectively unplayable the console version is once you reach red maps.

TLDR: MAKING YOUR GAME FUNCTION ON A FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL IS AND ALWAYS WILL BE VASTLY MORE IMPORTANT THEN ANY CONTENT UPDATE OR BALANCE CHANGE WILL EVER BE! STOP WASTING TIME ON THIS GARBAGE AND FIX YOUR GAME FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIVES!

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Demonoz wrote:

So eliminate the ability to trade the crafts. Only YOU who finds the crafts can use them and once you do use them on an item that item can no longer ever be traded to another player.

The game is already set up that way, except for making the items non-trade-able afterward. That will result in wasted crafts, as people either use crafts they don't need on junk items, or delete them to make room within their 10-craft limit. Meanwhile people that are desperate for them can't buy them from you for all the tea in China. NOBODY is happy.

In my opinion the problem isn't trading crafts anyway, it's the fact that you can't. You're forced to use outside avenues and forums where you have to hand over your items to strangers, trust them not to brick your shit, and people are getting ripped off left and right - rather than networking everyone's horticrafting stations together so that crafts can be directly transferred using the game's own, safe internal trading mechanisms.

GGG you are too distanced from casual players. I am in my 40s and and I squeezed extremely hard to get 2 hours of my midnight time to play POE after working and family life. This league kept me playing consistently since day 1 because there is finally something that I am able to chase.

Taking away Deterministic harvest is going to kill the hope for players like myself. I am sure my comment probably won't even be seen out of 3000+ comments. But I want to put my opinion out there!

You guys are doing it wrong!

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Pelagoth wrote:

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HowToGusta wrote:

GGG, if you're looking to replace your project leads, look to your forums. Your players seem to have more sense than you. xD

These "players" are maybe 5-20k vs over 500k that don't complain/post at all because they are happy or don't care.

What is your point?

I'm sure you're not trying to say that the opinions of the people on these forums who are complaining don't matter? Or that they are not speaking for the majority just because the rest of the player base do not voice their opinions? How do you know that they are happy/unhappy? Are you psychic?

Instead of acting like that, how about you contribute something to the community? If you don't care, why even post a nonsensical and illogical comment like that?

FYI, I couldn't care less about this nerf. I will still play POE.

What I care about is GGG making these poor decisions and not addressing things like the trade issue on TFT amongst all the other flaws that people have taken time explaining on this thread.

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LittleForBig wrote:

GGG you are too distanced from casual players. I am in my 40s and and I squeezed extremely hard to get 2 hours of my midnight time to play POE after working and family life. This league kept me playing consistently since day 1 because there is finally something that I am able to chase.

Taking away Deterministic harvest is going to kill the hope for players like myself. I am sure my comment probably won't even be seen out of 3000+ comments. But I want to put my opinion out there!

You guys are doing it wrong!

QFT

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Obright wrote:

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Demonoz wrote:

So eliminate the ability to trade the crafts. Only YOU who finds the crafts can use them and once you do use them on an item that item can no longer ever be traded to another player.

The game is already set up that way. Please tell me how the game is going to know whether you place your own item on the bench, or someone else's.

In my opinion the problem isn't trading crafts anyway, it's the fact that you can't. You're forced to use outside avenues and forums where people are getting ripped off left and right, rather than networking everyone's horticrafting stations together so that crafts can be directly transferred using the game's own, safe internal trading mechanisms.

No the game isn't setup that way.. Make it so once you apply ANY Harvest Craft that items is now tagged to no longer be tradable what so ever. Cant be listed, cant be dropped on the ground and doing so makes it show opaque like when in party with short allocation loot but, forever. Its not that hard its just something GGG have stubbornly not wanted to do but, something has to give because trading the crafts is 90% of the problem and exactly why its being nerfed like it is. Trade actually creates a large portion of the issues with this game but, they will never remove it nor make it easier to do. But, Harvest really showcases how detrimental trade is.

And making it even easier to trade Harvest crafts will just mean even further nerfs to the point it wont even be usable anymore...

i am so disappointed, i cant even find the right words, how much am i.

If the next league isn't amazing design wise, I won't be a part of it. I almost haven't touched harvest crafting this league and could have done without it. However I don't like nor understand that design choice at all, and hence I don't understand it, my trust toward GGG as a company has taken a hit.

I consider the excuses in the post as BS, and on top of that I was fairly certain that the introduction of harvest as it is was geniously made like that to appeal for the 50% of the playerbase that is good enough to plan stufi n the post game but has not business hoarding hundreds of ex each day.

So yeah, it's a big slap in the face, it breaks lots of things in my relationship to this game actually. Not particulary angry because it's life, but fairly afraid and pretty disapointed.

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LittleForBig wrote:

GGG you are too distanced from casual players. I am in my 40s and and I squeezed extremely hard to get 2 hours of my midnight time to play POE after working and family life. This league kept me playing consistently since day 1 because there is finally something that I am able to chase.

Taking away Deterministic harvest is going to kill the hope for players like myself. I am sure my comment probably won't even be seen out of 3000+ comments. But I want to put my opinion out there!

You guys are doing it wrong!

I hear you bud, unfortunately you'll have to put up with the old fashioned way if GGG don't do a u-turn. I can't see them changing their stance on this - in most cases when receiving criticism on this scale people/organisations tend to become even more adamant about their decision/s so as not to lose face.