Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

I totally disagree with the proposed intentions of change, I think it is not the way and I just hope that all the solutions and intentions are rethought so as not to ruin the gaming experience.

People are only crafting mirror tier items so "easily" because they're buying harvest crafts from other players. No one is making mirror tier items on solo self-found.
You don't have to nerf Harvest. Just make it untradable. Two birds one stone, you'd even solve the Discord issue.
Someone suggested making items you harvest craft on account bound. I'm sure you guys can think of something.

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

Most players use that for trading.
Only high end (no life) players use them for crafting.

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luluch wrote:

People are only crafting mirror tier items so "easily" because they're buying harvest crafts from other players. No one is making mirror tier items on solo self-found.
You don't have to nerf Harvest. Just make it untradable. Two birds one stone, you'd even solve the Discord issue.
Someone suggested making items you harvest craft on account bound. I'm sure you guys can think of something.

This is a far better option, than destroying the mechanic.
Most league mechanics are not even worth looking at it. And here's another one on the way.

To GGG i will remind some things about harvest :

Making an item requires you to go through 5 layers of RNG !!

Trading crafts is what makes it fast to achieve god tier items !!

Make a good decision for once because this will decide if players a gonna continue to support you in the future !!

I still don't see the problem with trading crafts under the same user interface that currently allows players to trade things in relative safety. If you craft your gear yourself, you don't have to trust strangers with it.

Allow players to make their horticrafting stations public, and give them the ability to trade their crafts directly from one bench to another.

As expensive as harvest crafts are on discord right now, buying them is for the elite 1% anyway. You just about HAVE to find them yourself, if you want to use them.

If you make crafted items untrade-able, people will build up a stockpile of crafts they can't use, while the one craft they're looking for remains elusive. Meanwhile people are desperate for the ones you're now wasting or deleting just to make space, but you can't sell (or even give them) to them. NOBODY is happy.

IMO the solution is to make harvest crafts more safely traded, not make them impossible to trade. You can either buy 200 fossils/essences from me for 2ex, or you can buy one craft with better odds.

...Still not seeing the problem.

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Azarhiel wrote:

To GGG i will remind some things about harvest :

Making an item requires you to go through 5 layers of RNG !!

Trading crafts is what makes it fast to achieve god tier items !!

Make a good decision for once because this will decide if players a gonna continue to support you in the future !!

Why do you talk for all players i wonder?

I stopped supporting with all the character power they introduced, and now i gonna start support again, cause i welcome changes which make gearing slower.

The worst practice is to talk for "all" or talk for "majority". Talk for urself.

The entire community is in turmoil. Whether it's the players or the content creators. I think it's significant that GGG hasn't even spoken up in the last six days after this post. There hasn't been such unrest in a long time and I would really be interested to see how they react to it. Do they ignore the condition of their players, or do they respond to it?! Who knows. All in all, a very weak performance in terms of implementation and communication.

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Eisbehr wrote:

The entire community is in turmoil. Whether it's the players or the content creators. I think it's significant that GGG hasn't even spoken up in the last six days after this post. There hasn't been such unrest in a long time and I would really be interested to see how they react to it. Do they ignore the condition of their players, or do they respond to it?! Who knows. All in all, a very weak performance in terms of implementation and communication.

They will never respond, because they don't need to. And they never do. It was an announcement, not a discussion opener. They made up their mind and told us how things will be. We can't do s**t about it. Which is really sad to see. They know people will buy MTX anyway and enough people will play next league regardless of what they do, tbh even if they added shop XP boosts, purchasable non-cosmetics and currency, it would still change nothing, people would complain, it would cause an uproar, but in the end enough people will still play so they would not care.

Dear GGG,

first I want to thank you for this League. It was the best time ever to play PoE in years. I'm not calling this league “Ritual League” intentionally. Let's face it, ritual in itself is fun mechanic, which adds more monsters to kill, but otherwise quite underwhelming. The new Maven stuff is awesome, I love it, but it's also not the reason for such pleasant time in game. Harvest going core is why people STILL play and enjoy this league. I cannot remember the last time trade/community being that active 2 months in.

You've released a lot of dev-manifestos and dev-blogs which were very unpopular in our community. I felt sad and angry reading them, but never wrote anything here. Exchanging opinions with friend and other memebers of PoE community was enough to quell the anger, because deep down I knew you want the best game for us. That why I never criticized anything here in forum. But now I feel obliged to do so.

This manifesto is full of fallacies, unreasonable conclusions and blank out-of-touch statements.

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

Chaos orb spam is neither risky, powerful or exciting in any shape or form. You don't use exalted orbs slams, without determenistic outcome like + 1 to gems on a bow, period. It's common knowledge for anyone who played the game for hundreds of hours. Fossils and essences as “powerful and risky ways to craft” is a much better argument.

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Players easily filled gaps in their builds while levelling, and made many, many mirror-worthy items.

During leveling I fill my gaps in the builds using crafting bench, should we remove it as well? I played many hours, encountered hundreds of sacred groves, but I've yet to craft anything near 20ex, not to mention “many mirror-worthy items”. Mainly because I purposefully don't interact with trading-discord and do all my crafts in SSF-style. And thats the average Joe out there, who you, GGG, are targeting.

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Even the crafts we made quite rare felt pretty common when the entire community was pooling them together and using them on the right items.

What a surprise, when lots of people combine effort – great things can be accomplished. Same thing has been done before introduction of harvest. Your proposed changes are not going to affect it.

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Why would I use a regular Exalted/Divine/Annul Orb when I can get one through Harvest that has a deterministic result?

Players are still using divine orbs (lots of item-mods don't have tags) and annuls and exalted orbs (bench-crafting) even with harvest being in the game.

I could go on and on, but it would get mean. At least we've got “Close-your-eyes-and-slam-ex”-meme out of it, thanks.

With the introduction of maven orbs and it's expected interaction via awakener orbs you already broke the ceiling for “mirror-worthy” items, which is fantastic. We've got a way to improve our gear in a very risky but also very powerful way, which in itself is exciting. This is the way to introduce RNG, time investment, long-term planning and anticipation. The proposed change “Aug. Type to only not influenced item” is absolutely destroying this for average/above-average 3 hours a day player. The 12 hours/day player is still going to acquire those ridiculous items, he's got enough currency to waste. This change is not in favor of players. You think, people are going to waste 20 maven orbs, without any probable outcome in sight? No, they just won't engange in the first place. This change is going to hurt longterm. You don't want mirror items for players, introduce kthulhu orbs for the next level upgrade, raising the ceiling once again.

The same goes for targeted annul. Right now I can take a decent influenced item (which is still hard to find in the current, garbage filled loot explosion) and using my acquired experience and knowledge transform it into a good item through removing useless mods. It's not easy, it takes time, lots of things can go south. But eventually I get something I like, something I made by myself. The elimination of targeted annul will just push everyone to the trade again. And only those with a lot of currency will get the opportunity to create items to place it overpriced on the market. So... is it really “in Path of Exile's best interests going forward”? Clearly not.

Heart of the grove changes are good, but without improving Oshabis loot – meaningless.
More RNG on seeds outcome, I'm okay with.

All in all, the current loot system (only maybe 1 in 10000 rare items is somehow useable), the raised difficulty (Maven and her invitations) and extremely painful gearing process of non-meta builds requires deterministic crafting in exactly the shape of current harvest. Player retention and engagement numbers, 420+ pages of comments in this thread, hundreds of pages in other languages, 10k comments on reddit is the definitive proof. For even more thorough deep dive into this manifesto I recommend everyone to watch the 30 minutes long video of “Path of Matth”, which uncovers the obvious and not so obvious implications of upcoming nerfs.

Path of Exile as a game in it's current form, even with somewhat deterministic harvest is still filled with layers and layers of RNG we are never running out of exploring. The proposed changes are not going to improve the enjoyment of the game, they'll result in more valuable hours of our lives wasted. Players wont go with it and quit early or wont even play the new league in the first place.

Please GGG, take the time to look at this from a perspective of a player, not a developer. Otherwise you go the same tone deaf, out-of-touch path Activision-Blizzard has gone.