Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

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Pheu wrote:

If only this game had 1/10 of this thread pages as FPS (40) during even semi-juiced maps it would be a playable game.

I can agree 100% with you my boy, even when im running just 40% because 100% my game just a powerpoint presentation and my eyes burning.

I can't wait for next league. Its going to be fun!

So harvest receives the Soap-in-sock treatment. I'm not even a crafter, mostly because of the high price of entry in terms of currency and the fact that it's too random. I was planning on learning how to do it with harvest going core, because *some* of the randomness was taken out. But now that you've beaten my will to learn into the ground, I guess I'll go back to being excited when a rare I can sell for a chaos orb drops. Just like everything else in my life, I wasn't meant to be rich here. The game as a whole has taken a severe beating in my eyes. Let me recap the past few things that have really gotten on my nerves:

Heist: The launch left such a sour taste in my mouth that I was never really able to enjoy this league. I liked the concept of it though, and was seriously hoping that it would go core so that I could enjoy it later on. Now that it's core, I don't do it. Why would I? You've nerfed the rewards into the ground, everything in heist hits like a truck, and there is literally nothing to appeal to me over doing maps.

Heist has: very tanky mobs that hit like a truck. Subpar loot that you lose if you die to those truck hitters. very little to no XP gain for defeating mobs. Full xp penalty if you die. Good god the lag! NPCs that NEVER SHUT UP. A town hub that lags because it's very small in comparison to any other hub in the game and full of MTX lag. In order to get the few things worth getting, you have to have blueprint reveals and rogue markers. After stockpiling 30k markers, I used all my reveals to not even fully reveal a blue tier blueprint. Gee, that was fun!

Maps have: good xp gain, EVERY OTHER LEAGUE MECHANIC, monsters that don't one-shot you as often, boss fights, decent loot.

To put it into perspective, my level 85 guy killed Atziri in the apex of sacrifice without dying. Without even getting particularly close to death. I got one-shot by a rare mob in heist on a level 70 contract. Difference? If I'd have died to Atziri, I had more portals and also all the loot in my inventory I'd gotten so far. By dying in that heist, all I had was 15 minutes of wasted time and the mindset of "why would anybody do these when maps are so much better?"

In order to make Heist even palpable for the average guy (like myself) to do, you'd have to do some combination of buffing the loot, nerfing the monsters, or adding in the same chances for other league mechanics to show up. Why heist when I can map and get harvest, or syndicate to unlock more crafting options?

Your servers are crap now. Sorry to be the one to bear bad tidings, but they are absolute crap. Ever since 3.13 hit, the lag and crashes are frequent flyers on my airplane of life. I was just fine prior to 3.13, but then you had to go and fiddle with stuff and break a bunch of things. People usually just fall back on "get series X hurr hurr hurr." But they just aren't for sale right now. At least not from reputable sources. And unless I missed the memo, you didn't state when you released 3.13 that it was specifically going to break every system besides the series X.

Harvest: This needs to come back to the core experience far sooner than maps. If you are going to nerf everything into the ground, we need some way to obtain decent leveling gear. Harvest from A4 onward would help a lot. Let me craft my way upwards. Harvest is fun, spending Chaos orbs randomly rolling crap gear into potentially crappier gear is not. By announcing that Harvest was not going core after the harvest league ended, you gave yourselves the luxury of time. You had ENDLESS time to playtest the daylights out of harvest. You could have run a private in-house POE league for playtesting purposes and tweaked harvest until it was in exactly the right place for both yourself and the rest of us. Instead, you half assed it like you half ass everything else. For goodness sakes, start playtesting this stuff. Invite a few folks to play on a closed server to playtest new ideas and mechanics, etc. have them sign a non-disclosure. But for pete's sake, start playtesting your game. There is absolutely no excuse for the pitiful state that Heist launched in, or the pitiful state that Harvest went core in.

Finally, please send ritual core. I enjoy ritual, and it was a much needed boost while I was doing the campaign. being able to buy better rares that were pre-identified was awesome. As I leveled up, the rewards got better too. Maybe i'm in the minority, but I enjoy ritual. It really helped the casual player enjoy the process of getting to mapping. Plus I enjoyed being able to randomly get delve fossils, scarabs, etc without necessarily having to do content that I might not enjoy as much. Ritual was a step in the right direction.

Final thought: I would like to throw my vote in with the "make harvest crafts able to be made into an orb so we can trade them on the TB." crowd. Make those orbs cost a chaos orb (or more) for the lower tier crafts, and the really good ones make them cost exalted or annul orbs. if they do an exalted orb thing, make it cost exalteds to orb it. if the craft does an annulment thing, make it cost annulment orbs to orb it. etc. you can do this, just knuckle down and get it done. Bottom line is, you are a multi-million dollar company and as such I expect a multi-million dollar product. I have supported your cause. I have no problem continuing support so long as you stop trying to wreck the game experience for me.

I think a lot of people would like to see a constructive reaction from Jonathan and Chris to the Path of Matth video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdpA_xHXhEA) isn't he right?

I must say I'm sad, which is surprising to me. Guess, I enjoyed harvest more than I thought. ^^

Of course, an essay about what players enjoy cannot resonate with everybody and in my case it does not resonate very much to put it nicely. I really enjoy crafting, but not for the gamble. I want to make an item for myself, for (at least kind of) know cost. That is what keeping me playing this season. When I have enough currency I got on discord (what a huge waste of time), go an a r/a spree and most likely upgrade one of my items. My stuff is obviously pretty good be now, but there is still the mirror tier out there, which I would need years to reach on all slots. Therefore, I'm still playing this season, even with the slowly drying out of active players that late into it.
Everybody has a point at which they are done with the season. For me that is the case, when I cannot achieve a significant item upgrade in a reasonable time. I'm hoping that will come late/never next season too. :(

Obviously, the discord is extremely annoying and we can all think of many options to make it unnecessary or (if you dislike harvest trading) impossible to use. Funny enough, its seems that GGG disagrees and it will be "to good to pass up" again. At the very least as a seller.

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zifcozif wrote:

I think a lot of people would like to see a constructive reaction from Jonathan and Chris to the Path of Matth video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdpA_xHXhEA) isn't he right?

I would also like a constructive reaction from community reacting this nuke of harvest.

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arapera wrote:

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zifcozif wrote:

I think a lot of people would like to see a constructive reaction from Jonathan and Chris to the Path of Matth video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdpA_xHXhEA) isn't he right?

I would also like a constructive reaction from community reacting this nuke of harvest.

I disagree. I think there have been plenty of alternatives that would've been sufficient to solve the issues named in this thread alone.

News flash: Pain is not enjoyable, nor is it fun.

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arapera wrote:

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zifcozif wrote:

I think a lot of people would like to see a constructive reaction from Jonathan and Chris to the Path of Matth video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdpA_xHXhEA) isn't he right?

I would also like a constructive reaction from community reacting this nuke of harvest.

I believe that community should stop watching Twich streams for one month. Ideas of making a game content accessible for pro-players only come to Chris mostly from top streamers. They can afford the most expensive items because for them the game is not an entertainment - it is their everyday, full-time job. Chris is convinced that placing more and more content and RNG people will play more. He thinks that only 8-hours daily grind should be rewarded. Well... Why people should do that? This is then not a fun - this is a job. Somebody who spends 8 hours daily at work (school, university etc.) does not want to come home and to start another work.

See if you can hire this guy.

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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.