Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

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.

What will most likely happened in April.

1. GGG continued with their changes.

2. They also upgraded the loot ( items and currencies ). About time they do that anyway. Make the item loot drop more useful and have more rare mods.

3. Half of the Uniques will be revamped. Unique supposed to be "unique" but now we can get a lot of the Uniques mods ourselves via crafting. It should not be the case. Unique is suppose to have unique mods that is a strength and unique mods that is a weakness to compensate such that whoever uses them need to balance between the mods. Currently we see people crafting similar strength mods and do not have to worry about the negative mods in Uniques. Unique mods is also made specific to certain skill or classes and only benefit that classes greatly.

The group who supports the Harvest nerf will be happy that GGG stick to their guns and get a bonus in upgraded loot and revamp Uniques ( which everyone calling for it for a long time ).

The group who wants Harvest to stays the same will claim victory ( although they didn't get what they championed ) in that they will say GGG listened to them and gave them something to compensate for the Harvest nerf.

GGG can relax in peace having 2 satisfied groups plus they needed to do the changes 2 and 3 anyway. Now is a good time to do it. Everyone live happily ever after!

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Overmind29 wrote:

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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.

Well, true. But tbh, the most changes haven't received so much comments and controversy than this manifesto. This is a clear exception in changes. I mean, this has a high impact for players, the game and the future. And not so predictable like they nerf skills after they add new mtx to them. Thats another kind ...

GGG at the launch of Harvest league:

"

We can't wait to see what the community creates with harvest crafting!

GGG now:

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

1) LOL!

2) TRANSLATION: "Players who found or earned a mirror were suddenly blessed with a wider variety of mirror-worthy items to dupe, without having to sacrifice build diversity as much in order to use top-end gear."

Where is the problem? We're not talking about many, many identical mirror-tier items with the same three synthesized implicits, we're talking about a wider variety of top-grade items.

Is the problem that the 1% might have to sully themselves by actually competing in a market rather than monopolizing it, forcing them to be even more elite than they were previously?

3) LOL!! Get gud, scrub!

The lack of response from GGG I'm concerned by.
Regardless of where people's stance on the matter lies(although it's clear the overwhelming majority think all this will do is hurt build diversity and make the end game near impossible to reach for casual players(all true)) the lack of response to this much outrage/response from the community is unusual for a developer.

Even if they are going to hold their stance, some sort of statement should still be made. Giving absolutely no reply when such a large community response is present is a giant 'F U' and would only demonstrate that they don't care about nor listen to their community in any way.

Please respond at least acknowledging your communities disappointment if nothing else.

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We can't afford to gamble with what little currency we have.
If you're so dead set on making nice gear hard to acquire, then please add an in-game auction house that would allow sales of items while offline. This is why casual players have little to no money. They can't stay online long enough to wait for sales. With little to no money they can't afford to craft gear, nor can they afford to buy nice gear.

Adding an in game auction house would be exactly in line with tennants outlined in this post. It would lower the use of third party tools, and it would combat scamming(Price fixing, price changing on PMs, etc). It would also save player's time(all the waiting around to see if you'll get a reply, and not getting one, sometimes over 5 times in a row) and allow casual players to make more money, allowing them to actually afford this 'crafting' or buying gear they need.

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If you consistently refuse to make any changes that benefit the casual player and only make changes that continue to keep the top on top and make the rich richer, then I will lose any respect I have for you as a company and your product.
I may still play your game since I was fortunate enough to be able to make myself a set of gear this league that let me break out of that pit(Fought elder/shaper for the first time in the 7 years I've played this game. Heck I hadn't even been able to beat shaper guardians before this league, since I played off-meta abilities without the gear nor currency to fund them), but I will not be spending a penny more than I already have(and I was really close to buying the Imperial Eagle pack before this manifesto).

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anntari wrote:

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We can't afford to gamble with what little currency we have.
If you're so dead set on making nice gear hard to acquire, then please add an in-game auction house that would allow sales of items while offline. This is why casual players have little to no money. They can't stay online long enough to wait for sales. With little to no money they can't afford to craft gear, nor can they afford to buy nice gear.

Adding an in game auction house would be exactly in line with tennants outlined in this post. It would lower the use of third party tools, and it would combat scamming(Price fixing, price changing on PMs, etc). It would also save player's time(all the waiting around to see if you'll get a reply, and not getting one, sometimes over 5 times in a row) and allow casual players to make more money, allowing them to actually afford this 'crafting' or buying gear they need.

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THIS!!! i really dont understand why its so hard for dirtbag elitists to understand this?