Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

yeah 100+ player got super cool item but one more timew avarage players lose.

The ideas above is pretty darn good. i hope ggg revert this patch change

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Anngrat wrote:

It took me 2(two) months to make good gear on ONE character, playing ONE build. I NEVER played this game so much before, without the harvest I would quit league much earlier. Why? Because without harvest EVERY single item, which is better then multi-modded base, would cost mirror+. I cant farm multiple mirrors and absurd mirroring fees to upgrade my gear, while playing like 3 hours after work.

ggg developers and game designers, please look at this and realize it's what you are doing. These changes effectively remove most uses harvest crafting - removing the main progression system of your endgame (even though you may not realize it). What will happen now is that people are going to quit soon after they get mediocre gear and hit the new endgame progression wall. If you don't have feasible goals, you are not going to play. This is what happened to all my casual friends in every single league before harvest and it will happen again.

This hurts the core 20% - the people who buy the most tabs and mtx. The people who play hundreds of hours per league but don't make poe their job. These people take this game seriously, and become brand ambassadors for it, getting their friends to play and contributing to the community. This is who your target audience should be with this game, if player engagement/enjoyment (and the money that comes with those) are your bottom line. Those people are going to hit that progression wall and QUIT. It happened to all my friends, every. single. league. Before harvest that is - semi-serious players can actually set attainable goals and strive for them themselves now.

As someone who makes poe his job - this hurts me as well. I like being able to make gear for some janky build and have fun with it. Trolling the trade site for specific gear is NOT FUN. Since off-meta items are just rolled over it is impossible to find them and now it will also be impossible to craft them. This takes away poe as a creative outlet for me and i will be back to crafting purely for profit instead of fun.

Overall, this is a terrible decision. And - don't get me wrong here i am not disparaging the character of any of the developers. The core developers in charge of this decision just want to protect the original spirit of their game. Sadly, they wouldn't have that philosophy if they actually played their own game actively. It is much more enjoyable now and this decision will drive away players. The best people can make the worst mistakes.

Please reconsider this, and thank you if you read this

pls do not do this to us GGG at least leave as it is

As a new player I do like the harvest system as it is because it gives me even a chance to make a good item and compete with other more advanced crafters. I am sad about these changes.

Why is harvest crafting free? Why not pay with an exalt orb + a tradeable special orb (or item) for example to use an augment fire harvest craft.
That special orb could be a less common drop from specific monsters. For example monsters that do mainly fire damage can drop this special fire orb. And with that special fire orb (+ exalt orb) you can augment fire mods in harvest.
That way people still could use harvest but with an investment.

Also what if an item has a limited harvest craft use before it gets broken. For example after 5 harvest crafts the item has a 50% chance to get "broken" so you can't use harvest crafts on it anymore. Not corrupted in that sense that you could still enchant/change sockets/colors/... that item, but you could not change it in harvest anymore.

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SimonAdebisi wrote:

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Here is a simple and effective solution to the problem.



1. Discord is no longer needed.
2. We will be motivated to use the currency. And we steel have feeling of closing your eyes and Exalting.
3. Let the reaping enchanted orbs cost X10, but the players should have the potential to do what they want. Otherwise, the players simply suffocate from the lack of the ability to make the items they need, as a result of which they leave the game after 3 weeks, (like me befor Harvest).

P.S. In Heist league, I had a cognitive dissonance from the realization that even if I had 500 exalts, I would not be able to complete my character and make him good. Since any little thing with the t3 stats I needed was worth 30 exalts. I felt breathless at not being able to finish my build.

And no. You need to make it atleast 10 exalts to be balanced.

I can get behind this. Actually removing currency rather than just having crafting be in it's stead.

I would say who cares if 0.1% of the top make their 6T1 elevated items. Let them do it. Not that I would be able to craft or buy one anyway.

The problem which is apparent new is not Harvest in itself. It is that your time is not valued, but to be honest I don't quite see to what extent does it have to be like this.

If someone plays a new league of course he would like to reach the endgame content. Why in the world would I want to play my 40th character in Xth league in a row to not reach the new content.
But If you are trying to gate it behind RNG upon RNG upon RNG without any sensible way to progress the build i'd like to try ( and not the same starters every time ) why would I ever want to spend more hours in the game.

I'll give you an example of progression. I got a Phys Axe with T1 Phys/Hybrid, T3 Flat Phys, T2 Crit, T7 Att. Speed and Open Prefix. That is in itself quite decent, better then I could probably spam with Chaos ( as it is so exciting... ). And altough I could benchcraft % Phys and it would push it to around 800PDPs, I'd still need to get rid of the T7 Att.Speed.
I could:
1. Grind Harvest for Att.Speed Add/Remove - which would in itself be a goal
2. Craft the Phys and be done with it
Guess which one would make me play more and would give an achievable goal to strive for...

And I don't mind people treating this game as a job, they can do whatever they want. But with those strange decisions the gap will not be smaller.

For me all decisions being made are just to prolong the grind.
For example:
1. Nerfing the Unique weapons like Starforge - too accessible with 700 PDPs yeah can't have that cause the gap to Rare Crafted weapons is too small
2. Nerfing all of the defense options like % Damage Reduction on notables, Divine Flesh etc.- yeah cause we can't have that you'll live long enough with 200 influence mobs shooting at you and Rain Of Stars from behind...
3. Pushing the power into crafted items and not generic gems and ascendencies - again forcing you to RNG your progress
4. Giving mobs more and more HP each league
5. Endgame is mostly DPS check - no matter how survivable you are If you got the whole arena littered with degen spots with nowhere to hide anymore.

This is a game and not a life simulator where you win something at the end.
"Don't you like this excitment of dumping all of your salary into this Forex trade with closed eyes and not knowing if you are going to have to survive on just water till the end of the month?" yeah thought so...

Games are supposed to be fun, but lately POE feels more like a chore. A task list which is the same each league and with more and more stuff added on top, the list just gets longer and longer each time.

I wouldn't care if the 1% have their items etc. I just want a smooth progression that is fun and not something where I almost have to develop a stockholm syndrome to fight through a grind which I already did x times in the past.

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TheRealMrDeath wrote:

Starforge

Starforge is partially due to the basetype damage change. Can't remember the net dps loss due to unique mod nerf + basetype buff

Oh Great. Once again. Anything that increases your ability to clear all content gets shut down. Its like they WANT everyone getting bored using the same 4 builds. BUILD DIVERSITY?! Cant have that. This gets so fucking old. Perfect weapons should be hard to obtain? They are unbelievably fucking astronomically difficult to obtain. and you just make it harder. I hate this. Can i get a refund on all ive spent? Seriously tired of playing POE. maybe diablo 3 or Diablo 4 will be funner. The Last Epoch or Grim Dawn dont look that bad. the money ive spent on this game is wasted cuz you turn it to crap after ive payed.

I am less upset with the changes rather than with how out of touch your Dev team seems to be with the players and the awful wording used to write out this manifesto.

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

First, Exalted Orbs are the only thing that can possibly improve an item. This was much truer years ago when there weren't a thousand different affixes that could be hit. If I have a decent item, there is no way I'll ever use a chaos orb on it. I will, 99.9% of the time get garbage rolls on an item that is usable. So this statement is inherently false in terms of being powerful or exciting because we know the outcome from average statistics. I'll give you risk because you'd have to be a moron to roll over gear that already works well for your build with a chaos.

"We hoped that this would still keep the most valuable crafting options available while limiting the most abusive crafting to just very lucky or successful players."

I'm pretty sure that is exactly what happened. This is the first league that I target farmed to gain 100ex of currency, even had my first mirror shard drop and yet I had to blow 40 ex trying to get a single elevated mod on a pair of gloves. This was a huge change for me since I've always bought gear through trade and never made it to true end game content as I just give up after a month of playing from frustration with trade, not finding what I need or gear being out of my price point for my build. I understand you want to stop the super special snowflake mirror items from existing, but people like myself who work 40 hours and have two hours a day to play do not care if they exist or not because I will never use them. I also have the money to buy micro-transactions, but it always seems that there is no point in buying them because I just quit after a month of playing. The difficulty of playing an off-meta build with no crafting options for the gear I need basically forces me to play one or two skills a league and that's it. I'd absolutely love to play other builds, but without a decent concept of gear progression, I don't. It's not optimal or efficient and it makes the game less fun overall. The very lucky/most successful players will always get "mirror tier items" every league. No balancing change will affect them, only players like myself.

The last thing I want to say is that you have made an incredible game with an incredible amount of content. I've had a lot of fun with the game over the time I've played, way back to the times of the beta. The dev team is smart, but as of right now, I feel they are playing a completely different version of PoE than the majority of the playerbase. 20-30 streamers and groups of no-lifers are not your player base. It's people like me with a handful of spare time that wants to spend money on the game. You guys are so much smarter than this. There is absolutely a way to add some form of deterministic crafting to PoE without absolutely ruining the game that fits in your gear progression beliefs. Harvest was flawed from the beginning, but take bits and pieces of it, spread it around or implement it in a new league down the road. Revive old content that is stale and boring. Breathe life into old crafting systems that don't have the power they used to. Delve fossils were amazing! Until all the interesting mods shifted over to influence and nothing interesting was left on fossils. There has to be a way for the team to figure out how to make better gear progression for PoE, I believe it can be done.