Unprecedented: GGG should not delete player items.

It is unprecedented to remove league-generated items from the player stash. For instance: Metamorph organs persisted in the stash, post-league, but weren't usable until Tane was added back into the game (totally reasonable!). In another case the "Deep Cuts" cluster jewel notable was available at the league start on Megalomaniac jewels. GGG didn't remove the ones that had already dropped, after making them no longer possible to drop. The expectation has -always- been that even if the mechanics of a league aren't immediately or even ever re-implemented, the stash-storable items would remain; at least as souvenirs of the work it took to attain them even if they serve no tangible purpose. By removing player generated items you're giving fans the middle finger and implicitly saying that any time spent generating such items may be a complete waste going forward.

Why -are- Horticrafting stations (and seeds) getting removed from stashes, rather than just remaining but without a way to use them?

This leads one to conclude Harvest's death is less about being "overpowered" and more likely that the backend data-growth costs are more than GGG wants to pay for and/or the underlying architecture is in such a bad state that this is the cheapest solution GGG could come up with. For the first time ever during a league, the current patch content was disabled in standard, mid-league. It should have been obvious and more transparent then, what the expectations would be.. rather than surprising players so late in the league that their outputs would be null and void. Additionally mid-league you were about to deploy a patch which would have made the ability to store horticrafts in the stash impossible, and then removed that item just before the patch went live -- without *any* explanation or communication as the reasons why..

I don't mind so much the core gameplay parts of Harvest not becoming part of the game, but it has ultimately removed any trust I have of GGG for misleading players about the real reasons for not bringing some or all of the Harvest league pieces into the core game. It's obvious GGG can deploy minimal changes to tweak outcomes and rarities. Case and point: speed or crit modifier crafting seeds were /very/ rare compared to other seed types. Another example: in the tens of thousands of seeds I harvested, I did not get a single 6-link socket craft all season. Also the "accidental" (experiment) early in the league with making some crafts very rare was either intentional or incompetence. If it's the latter, then I have no confidence other than the game will continue to always disrespect player time investment with similar major flaws. Playing the "its just too overpowered" statement as the major factor here is misleading and frankly, insulting to loyal players.

As such, I'd like an official reason (not a misdirect) as to why Horticrafting stations and seeds are getting deleted from player stashes. This makes sense for removing these things from the harvest/grove area as that area just won't exist. It has been difficult to find any public reference to these details. The only references have been buried in one or two replies from Bex on Reddit.. which are vague and without detail, at best.

As one who has tried to support GGG since 2013, I'm finding it hard to continue to do so if you're going to mislead your player base... so I'm asking for you to please be more transparent here and explain..

thanks.

I agree. I think they could be purposefully not disclosing the full information or reasons as to why Harvest is not going core and using the "items are too easy to obtain" reason as a scapegoat and then also using "negative feedback" from Reddit as leverage for having more reason to remove Harvest. Same with how last year in 2019 Chris in his post said "it doesn't take much looking at the Reddit or official forums to tell Synthesis is not liked" Is this really the case? Or are you using the negative feedback as a self-serving justification to not have to implement the league mechanic? This just seems dishonest to me if I'm being frank and something doesn't add up unless most of the players just take everything the devs say at face value.

Bear in mind, it took them 1 full year to "bring back" Synthesis and it was not even brought back, but rather put into some low drop chance maps that you never get and people only run for the customized synthesized unique rings and The Bottled Faith Flask. What happened to the Synthesis area with Cavas and all the lore that came with it? The Synthesis Board with the tile making of your own areas with the puzzle game. The Synthesizer implicit crafting. These were all things players complained about at first but learned to love in the end and pleaded for it to come back after it was gone. The devs then used this negative feedback as leverage to not have to spend the time to put Synthesis as a main side activity in the game like they did with Delve. On top of Synthesis probably being too much work for them to work into the game and perhaps a resource hog, but it's shameful in my opinion for the devs to just give up on it and not bring it back in its full form.

I also only found out the information on the horticrafting stations being deleted completely from Chris only by emailing him. Why is this information not public instead? To not anger the usual player and have them find out last minute? I just don't understand. I usually stick up for GGG, but they are not even a small indie company anymore, but rather majorly financially backed by Tencent. I would expect at least slightly more than this.

Then again maybe the Covid restrictions really hindered their efforts, if this is not the reason as to why all of this is happening, then this is just shameful in my opinion. I'm not claiming that it's easy to run a big operation like this, but at least more transparency to the playerbase would be appreciated.

I'm fine with them deleting any league items that are rendered unusable and will never be usable again. Leaguestones, nets, Harvest stuff, whatever. I have a couple Leaguestones as keepsakes, but I couldn't really care less if they disappeared.

For Harvest in particular it seems a very reasonable thing for them to do since no aspect of it is being merged into the core game. The sheer number of components people have is surely causing some massive database bloat on their end. What would be the point in leaving millions of unusable items to just sit there causing or potentially causing issues on their end? There's more to it than simply the data storage, after all.

Even if the amount of data involved wasn't itself an issue, it was obvious from pretty early on that Harvest had no chance in hell of going core. Rather than some kind of conspiracy, deleting the items is a very clear statement that Harvest is never coming back in its current form.

while i do not care about the disappearance or not of these items, one note:

'storage costs' are so miniscule that you no longer factor them in business costs. how much data you think these items take? it is few lines of text, that compresses well, storage is CHEAP (yes, including backups, persistency, geo etc etc)

in fact deleting it is far more expensive than keeping it there

the reason lies somewhere else

Sad, I want to keep some canisters of colourful juice as joke items.

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TwentyFiveEX wrote:

By removing player generated items you're giving fans the middle finger and implicitly saying that any time spent generating such items may be a complete waste going forward.

Surely you enjoy playing the game? How then is the time wasted?

I feel like "this might not last forever" is pretty clearly implied by the notion of temporary leagues itself.

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

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TwentyFiveEX wrote:

By removing player generated items you're giving fans the middle finger and implicitly saying that any time spent generating such items may be a complete waste going forward.

Surely you enjoy playing the game? How then is the time wasted?

I feel like "this might not last forever" is pretty clearly implied by the notion of temporary leagues itself.

He explains exactly how time is wasted, you're just not willing to see it. Temporary leagues in PoE used to mean an economy reset, not a content reset. I can only justify doing this type of stuff a couple of times before it becomes enough. It shows they have not learned from their mistakes in the past because whenever content becomes too difficult to implement into the core game, they just put it on a back burner and focus on a new league instead. Cut Throat, Legacy league, Synthesis, Harvest. All either never brought back or brought back way too late in some low-effort, non-creative ways from what it was originally.

And to elaborate on how time is wasted, imagine that you invest time into new content that you think is the best content this game has ever come out with. You spend more time than ever on this new content and more time invested than any league before and are then told at the end of the league that it's not going core or re-introduced into something completely different from what you liked it for. You don't see even slightly how something like this can cause even veteran players to leave the game? Or better yet, scare away a new player, coming into the game to learn a new league only later to be told it won't be in the game anymore. I mean, at best you are used as a beta tester for what content goes into Standard. It just seems very unstable from my standpoint. I don't think I've witnessed in all my years of gaming this much content being cut out of a game. Either don't put content out that you think might not work in the first place or make a sound decision on a league in the first place, seems logical to me. I don't know, maybe I have it wrong here, but that's just how I see it.

1st they tell us that it will not be going core, and that they plan to bring it back in some form or fashion, so why now all the sudden our horticrafting stations will be removed if indeed you will be bringing it back? If it is the remaining crafts in them that YOU think are going to be too OP to have then just adjust the crafts within them across the board, so when you do bring Harvest back, at least they'd be in-line with reasonable expectations.

Deleting them entirely is a waste in this scenario. We worked to craft those Harvest tools. Let us keep them for Christs' sake!

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TwentyFiveEX wrote:

This leads one to conclude Harvest's death is less about being "overpowered" and more likely that the backend data-growth costs are more than GGG wants to pay for and/or the underlying architecture is in such a bad state that this is the cheapest solution GGG could come up with.

This is very unlikely... Data that is not graphics is SO cheap these days...
It will also already have been factored in... GGG sold you a stash tab, and they'd know that stash tab would be used... If not for seeds, then for something else.

As long as we're all conspiracy theory: Maybe they're being deleted to eliminate potential scams in Standard.