Harvest is too good for the game

Flat out, Harvest is far too powerful of a crafting tool. It's for all intents and purposes an item editor. Yes it has some limitations, but not really major ones and most things can be worked around to remove or add on. Hell you can take an item with one modifier and start Harvest crafting on it to be a very strong item. Harvest devalues basically every other system of crafting, and even if you use like essences or fossils, you ultimately end up using Harvest to "finish" the item. People are complaining about a "third party Discord server" being the new "endgame" and they're completely skipping over why it has become the go too. Everyone is farming Harvest because it's the most valuable and powerful system in the game to create good items, it's too good at creating powerful items. So Harvests selling and buying have predictably become the best way to play the game. The problem isn't the server, the problem is Harvest.

So instead of fixing the symptom of the issue, we need to actually fix the root problem, Harvest being too all powerful for the game. Well the first and nuclear and clearly unpopular option, remove Harvest from the game. It's too good, the game functioned just fine without it, the League added so much good to the game, player agency is at an all time high, you can do the content you want a lot more easily and all of this is overshadowed by Harvest being stupid powerful

Well removing Harvest is the extreme option, and a lot of people would be mad, after all it's significantly harder to take something away from people if they have it already. So what's a less extreme but still pretty good method of toning down Harvest? Remove all the targeted Annul and Exalt crafts, these are the largest problems with Harvest. They make it far to easy to target and reliably craft super powerful items. I think the Remove non-/add crafts are less problematic as there is a certain level of risk to them sometimes. And there are still plenty of powerful Harvest crafts left even without them, fracturing, synthesising, chaos spamming, div/fossil/essence exchange, socket and links, resist swapping, there are still a TON of very good and useful crafts that would stay. So getting rid of the problematic targeted annul and exalts would push the system in to a far HEALTHIER state for the game. But okay that probably still isn't super popular with everyone. Although I think this is my personal favorite route.

And the last route I thought of, make it so when an item is Harvest crafted it becomes Account Bound. Now obviously this would require some work from GGG but this would make it so Harvest can stay in its current state and be very powerful, but it becomes a personal tool for self crafting items. Powerful items that are tradable rise significantly in value, because an item only really has value if you can trade it. Harvest still stays the best way to craft items, but now those items are limited to personal use and aren't flooding the market causing the general value of all items to go down. However this way doesn't really solve the problem that Harvest hunting is still probably the best way to play the game, but at least you're hunting it because you want to use the crafts and not because its also one of, or the most valuable ways to play the game. Another cool thing with this route is I think you could sort of "brand" the item with your character name who created the item. So instead of "Big Strong Sword of Slaying" You can have "So and So's Big Strong Sword of Slaying" or a simple "Crafted by X" tag can be on the item so it really makes it your item.

But yeah, ultimately I think Harvest is too good, it raises the bar on rare items to a stupid point with how easy it is to target and reliably craft very powerful items. It inevitably will always warp the game around it in its current iteration, everyone is hunting Harvests, Streamers are always looking for Harvests. The problem isn't a discord server, the discord server is a symptom of the problem (and no the problem isn't that there isn't a magic orb that makes Harvests tradable, Harvest is already over powered enough as it is, stop trying to add more power to a system that is already warping the game around it,) the problem is Harvest whether or not people choose to accept that.