Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

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Vensatra wrote:

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awoak wrote:

Game design decisions in 2021 have to primarily be made with viewers in mind, not players.

With harvest, streamers and content creators playing 8+ hours a day can easily achieve a position in a couple of weeks where they can craft a few "finished" items, and the path to the remaining items will seem mundane and rinse-and-repeat to the viewers. Compound this with the fact that for creators playing in a trade league, much of the "action" will be happening off screen in TFT, and the reality is that for streamers, content creators, and their viewers, the league is over in 2-3 weeks.

Some will say it's unfortunate that streamers, content creators, and viewers seem to have such an outsized voice in the game design feedback loop, but the reality is that this is a trend across all gaming (not just POE) and it has been happening now for quite some time.

Removing harvest ensures that viewers will be able to enjoy a full three months of that feeling of closing their eyes and listening to their favorite creator exalt an item, scared to find out whether or not the creator's item was ruined.

I am not a viewer/spectator, I do not follow any PoE streamers anymore by a long time. I used to follow only ZiggyD and Neversink back a few years.

I am a PLAYER. And I want to have FUN playing, not be frustrated playing unique-only builds and dying for whatever the f--k hits me. I really hope you were being sarcastic, sir.

So you just want instant gratification instead of hardship and longterm joy?Describes all the whiners.You want these items without putting too much into it.

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SimonAdebisi wrote:

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Vensatra wrote:

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awoak wrote:

Game design decisions in 2021 have to primarily be made with viewers in mind, not players.

With harvest, streamers and content creators playing 8+ hours a day can easily achieve a position in a couple of weeks where they can craft a few "finished" items, and the path to the remaining items will seem mundane and rinse-and-repeat to the viewers. Compound this with the fact that for creators playing in a trade league, much of the "action" will be happening off screen in TFT, and the reality is that for streamers, content creators, and their viewers, the league is over in 2-3 weeks.

Some will say it's unfortunate that streamers, content creators, and viewers seem to have such an outsized voice in the game design feedback loop, but the reality is that this is a trend across all gaming (not just POE) and it has been happening now for quite some time.

Removing harvest ensures that viewers will be able to enjoy a full three months of that feeling of closing their eyes and listening to their favorite creator exalt an item, scared to find out whether or not the creator's item was ruined.

I am not a viewer/spectator, I do not follow any PoE streamers anymore by a long time. I used to follow only ZiggyD and Neversink back a few years.

I am a PLAYER. And I want to have FUN playing, not be frustrated playing unique-only builds and dying for whatever the f--k hits me. I really hope you were being sarcastic, sir.

So you just want instant gratification instead of hardship and longterm joy?Describes all the whiners.You want these items without putting too much into it.

You describe the society we have at the moment..
who are you to tell ppl what they want?

you don't like it. good don't use it.
i worked hard to get my necro how it is.. this items are not done in a day nor in a week.

you point would be valid if those items would stick in a "league" for long.

hardship and longterm joy? lmao in a 3 month league...

Exalts slam is not gambling at all.

When someone gamble, the person has an acceptable percentage of success, otherwise he/she would not gamble at all.

When someone use an exalted, he has an extremely low possibility of getting something that is not terrible because it has three layers of RNG:
1) The MOD it rolls (very big pool);
2) The TIER it rolls (too many tiers);
3) The VALUE of the mod it rolls.

Nobody is dumb enough to waste an Exalted (valuable currency) to get a trash mod, unless the person is a very new player that doesn't know how much an exalted is worth...

The Exalt slam feeling is NOT excitement to see the end result, it is feeling bad for getting a terrible mod and wasting valuable currency. So, nobody does it.

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jacarishe wrote:

Exalts slam is not gambling at all.

When someone gamble, the person has an acceptable percentage of success, otherwise he/she would not gamble at all.

When someone use an exalted, he has an extremely low possibility of getting something that is not terrible because it has three layers of RNG:
1) The MOD it rolls (very big pool);
2) The TIER it rolls (too many tiers);
3) The VALUE of the mod it rolls.

Nobody is dumb enough to waste an Exalted (valuable currency) to get a trash mod, unless the person is a very new player that doesn't know how much an exalted is worth...

The Exalt slam feeling is NOT excitement to see the end result, it is feeling bad for getting a terrible mod and wasting valuable currency. So, nobody does it.

Wrong.....the game does not roll mod and then tier

For ex slam. High tier and low tier mod are in the same pool.

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SimonAdebisi wrote:

So you just want instant gratification instead of hardship and longterm joy?Describes all the whiners.You want these items without putting too much into it.

No one wants instant gratification. At least, almost no one.

Harvest isn't instant gratification. Harvest league was the league I played the most or second most, definitely at times more than was healthy. I didn't produce a single mirror-tier item that league.

Stop hyperboling. That "instant gratification" you get with Harvest still takes a lot of effort. The only thing that kind of breaks Harvest is the fact that if you live off the Exalts farmed by others through cheesing trade, you can buy crafts off TFT. If you don't like that, don't do it.

Nerfing harvest crafting in this way doesn't look good. It will most likely kill it for average player while making a external community trading forums/tools mandatory to craft a desired item.

Imho better way of handling it would be to make most powerful crafts non tradable.

The idea I came up with is to:

1. It should not be possible to store most powerful crafts (targeted exalt, annul, divine, reforge) in the horticrafting station.

2. Horticrafting station should have a storage space, where you would place items for crafting. The most powerful crafts can only be used on items that ware placed in that storage before the map with sacred groove was opened.

3. the most powerful crafting options can only be used in sacred groove.

That will eliminate trading for crafting options. It will also allow GGG control on how rare these crafts should be. It will ensure that every player will get access to these crafting options at roughly the same pace.

If harvest is nerfed it will be very harmful towards the small console economy and console players will be limited to a hand full of builds if they want to do true endgame stuff. All this on top of the performance issues POE suffers on console.

Also nerf aside, they should do something about the time it takes to to the garden an sort s*it out, it completely breaks the flow of mapping.

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Lvzb3l wrote:

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Kairuto2020 wrote:

they need to introduce new bosses that are 10x stronger than Maven just to keep the players engaged and not zoom-zoom everything.

So whichever group you fall into above, if you can have any solution that makes every single group happy...by all means do share.

Dude, to "zoom-zoom" the actual end game bosses you need a full TFT equip character, which each piece costing between 600-800ex. How many players you think gonna "zoom-zoom"??

I think you misunderstood my paragraph on zoom zoom. It was related to buffing up all other mechanics as good as Harvest. Example, Incursion Apex may drop Headhunter. Syndicate give you top tier upgrades and even those not available in Harvest ( Catarina dropped 6 T1 influenced super item ). Bestiary give you unlimited split and imprint. Deep Delve give you dozens of mirrors. By then, all the power creep will make many just zoom zoom through the game ( if GGG buff all other mechanic til you do not want to touch Harvest )

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EvilPayaso wrote:

Nerfing harvest crafting in this way doesn't look good. It will most likely kill it for average player while making a external community trading forums/tools mandatory to craft a desired item.

Imho better way of handling it would be to make most powerful crafts non tradable.

The idea I came up with is to:

1. It should not be possible to store most powerful crafts (targeted exalt, annul, divine, reforge) in the horticrafting station.

2. Horticrafting station should have a storage space, where you would place items for crafting. The most powerful crafts can only be used on items that ware placed in that storage before the map with sacred groove was opened.

3. the most powerful crafting options can only be used in sacred groove.

That will eliminate trading for crafting options. It will also allow GGG control on how rare these crafts should be. It will ensure that every player will get access to these crafting options at roughly the same pace.

AGREE!

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Kairuto2020 wrote:

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Lvzb3l wrote:

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Kairuto2020 wrote:

they need to introduce new bosses that are 10x stronger than Maven just to keep the players engaged and not zoom-zoom everything.

So whichever group you fall into above, if you can have any solution that makes every single group happy...by all means do share.

Dude, to "zoom-zoom" the actual end game bosses you need a full TFT equip character, which each piece costing between 600-800ex. How many players you think gonna "zoom-zoom"??

I think you misunderstood my paragraph on zoom zoom. It was related to buffing up all other mechanics as good as Harvest. Example, Incursion Apex may drop Headhunter. Syndicate give you top tier upgrades and even those not available in Harvest ( Catarina dropped 6 T1 influenced super item ). Bestiary give you unlimited split and imprint. Deep Delve give you dozens of mirrors. By then, all the power creep will make many just zoom zoom through the game ( if GGG buff all other mechanic til you do not want to touch Harvest )

I wouldn't go to an extreme that you presented, but if you think about it it does make sense in a certain way.

Let me elaborate.

in ARPG no only the "end goal" is the goal but the journey is the goal as well. We have two progression curves the vertical and horizontal.

Vertical are new bosses and everything that goes on top. Horizontal are previous leagues and content related with them.

This expansion made a good step in the way of making progress more enjoyable by target farming specific content that you like, and that in itself is already good.

But a lot of content gets neglected anyway because it doesn't give any meaningful change to something that was already seen so many times.

I know it might be complicated and not worthy for the devs to reiterate on the leagues they already did, but I don't think that is entirely true.

Think about some possibilities.
1. Add an endgame boss to Metamorph which does give some good drops.
2. Add an endgame boss to Blight which gives some good drops.
3. Add new chase uniques, that are worth using like Badge or HH, with a lot of variety.

This game has over 1000 uniques but how many are really used? No one thinks this makes the game more complex but just bloated. And why introduce uniques that are all worthless anyway (aka. Harvest unique Oshabi drops).

But to the problem at hand with the Harvest.
Wouldn't it be that bad to just add the harvest crafts to different bosses across the whole game? Like:
1. Add/Remove chaos drops from UE, Remove chaos drops from Elder/Shaper
2. Add/Remove fire from Enslaver
3. Add/Remove defence from Minotaur

Some synth crafts from synth bosses.

And maybe give the normal map bosses the lower ilvl drops of those crafts as well where the top ones being ilvl 83 ones.

Make the whole process engaging and not just forcing you to run 1500 atolls to try to get this one thing etc.

And trading crafts? Wasn't it the GGG that said that everything in the game should be tradable within the game? Why back on that now? Just because some people have some crafts that GGG thinks are too powerful? so what, it's just a 3 month league, no one cares. And in Standard those items would cost a mirror and like 5 - 10 mirrors fee, so who cares as well. If the inconvenience of trading through TFT is going to stay just make the crafts tradable in the first place as orbs or like in case of beasts.

From the psychology standpoint people aren't engaged because they want to get this big win at the end. Only gamblers think that, which is really bad.

People are engaged in the content because it gives small meaningful increments at a steady pace in a longer journey to the end goal.

In my personal opinion the middle part of the game is just not fun anymore when the only thing with each new league is something "on top" with the rest being nerfed and neglected. That's not good for longevity.

I hope that at least some people share my sentiment.