The reason why harvest is not as bad as you think

Harvest itself and the implementation into the core is one of the most controversial topics in the last 6 months of Path of Exile. While some points are good, some other arguments are just really dumb and in this thread I want to do my best to deduct which are which while explaining why. To spoiler a bit: Due to really ridiculous claims I can foreshadow the result: Harvest is not as bad as you might think.

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"Harvest is only good for the top tier players and Streamers/"
"GGG wants to cater to the no-life-players
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One of the most brought up arguments is that GGG is only interested in the opinion of the "big whales", the streamers and those that show their public face as part of the PoE-Gaming-Community. That argument couldn´t be further from the truth, for a total of 3 reasons:

1) GGG itself stated, and it is also quite logical, that their biggest ressource of income are not the 0.1% that spend more than the average player, but the casual player who invests somewhere around the 15-30$ range. From an economical standpoint there is no reason to cater to the 0.1%-Playerbase if they don´t make their money from them.

2) No matter what you do in this game, the 0.1% playerbase will always be better. People complain a lot about needing discord to trade harvest crafts (which I understand, I get to that point later!) - but forget harvest for a second: Long before people complained about harvest, they complained about how random exalt-slams are and that they rather save them to buy an item they would never be able to craft by themselves. Guess who crafts those items: The 0.1% playerbase. It can be discussed that harvest contributes to a different CEILING since it is easier to craft high-end items and I would not say I have all the answers in what direction this goes (for example more people in the 0.1%? Less? More money in their pockets? Better contribution overall? No idea, but also never the point of any discussion). But as far as it goes in terms of GGG "caters to the top players" - whatever you introduce into the game, the best players will always get the maximum out of it, and therefore always be richer, better equipped or whatever. That is not catering to a group, that is just a higher knowledge and more time-investment in the top 0.1%, and making knowledge and effort obsolete would REALLY damage the game.

3) Stacking onto Point 2 and acknowleding that top-tier players will make more use out of harvest - even the most casual player can use it. Yes, Remove-Add, Augments, all the good stuff is rare: But even if it is, imagine some casual father of 3, strolling through the game in SSF, normally never able to improve on his gear suddently gets a simple and easy-to-understand mechanic to reroll one of his shitty resistances. In what way caters Harvest here to the top 0.1% that were able to throw 6000 Fossils on items the league before and craft the stuff anyway? Yes, it got easier/cheaper. But that random casual was never able to afford Gear like that and now he can work more deterministic on his own stuff, just by running through the maps.


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"Harvest destroys the economy/
Nothing holds any value besides Harvest crafts"

Also an argument with no support from data. Let´s adress the first part, the "destruction of economy":
For that I would just like to point back to heist league.
https://ibb.co/y5XJDyS
In the following graph you see the economic progress throughout past leagues, pulled from poe-antiquary. As you see there is a typical growth in price for exalted orbs, reaching a maximum level and from there dropping back to their final value they hold for the rest of the league. All past leagues followed that principle, roughtly diviating in the final value in terms of chaos:ex-ratio. Not heist: In Heist league Exalted orbs dropped to a all-time low of 30 Chaos in a one-week cycle with a lowest point of 1ex = 19chaos, making chaos-recipe an actual endgame-farming option. Of course, we don´t have the final results for the ongoing league, but facing the fact that the exalt-price has never ever been that stable, I really wonder how you would explain to me that Harvest destroys the economy!

The the second point of the argument: We are back to the point of "ceiling". Yes, I don´t deny that some rares lost their residual value they had left. But honestly, you cannot tell me that rare items in general - if they arent really good to perfect - held a high amount of value in the past. 3-4 weeks in everyone is playing on uber strict filters and even before harvest you did not pick up stuff aside from very high item-level t1 bases, you always went crafting. You can argue that it is harder to craft top-endgame gear with fossils than it is with harvest. I agree. But the argument that all items were so much more value before harvest is just not substantiated by any sort of data or experience from players.


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"Harvest is the only viable strategy to farm money now"

To be fair, I have to give this a 50% correct. Why 50%? Because if we DIDN´T have the new atlas-expansion, I have no doubt that finding Harvests would be target number 1. That being said: We do have Echoes of the Atlas. I normally don´t like to share internet-crybabies any useful tips and tricks, but for the sake of the argument I have to. Here are the currently used, top tier farming strategies:

1. Speedrunning Haewark / Proxima for Harvest
2. Beastfarming Lira Arthain with Multiple Accounts
3. Legion-Farming in New Vastir
4. Heisting
5. Boss-rotations for the feared, the hidden, etc.
6. Harbinger-Farming in Valdo´s Rest
7. Deep-Delving for Fractured Fossils
8. Lab-Running Gift of the Goddess
9. Fractured 100% Deli-Maps
10. Simulacrum-Runs
11. Fractured T2 Tower Mf-Farming

All of the above farming-strategies are executed by a multitude of players. A lot of those were made possible with the Echoes of the Atlas Expansion. Telling me at that point that harvest is your only source to make money? Sorry, that has to be a joke. On top of that, those are - for the sake of this forums in-depth-knowledge - only the strategies with really engaging the game-content. Not included are all other methods like Flipping items, Flipping currency, Exp-Farming for money, Crafting, Services and many others.

Let´s come to the final argument I would like to adress:

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"I don´t think discord should be the endgame".

This, ladies and gentleman, is the only valid point which I don´t find any arguments against. The counter-arguments to this point are as bad as the former claims, something like "then don´t use it". The basic concept of the Echoes of the Atlas Expansion was to give players more agency what content to interact with. Being mostly successful with that endeavour, it FORCES people into using discord to make THE MOST out of harvest. And that is not healthy for the game. Yes, Discord- and other community-platforms will always be helpful, especially in such a complex game. It was possible to sell for example alva-temples, gem- and item-corruptions, achievement-completions through that platform. But if a player does not want to use it he was still able to prepare his own inventory / items / gems in a way that he can make use of that. Demanding people to have 25-30 different bases with different influences to make the most out of harvest due to the very limited storage-capacity of only 10 crafts is something I would not consider fair in terms of management vs outcome. I don´t have a simple solution for that. The most ridiculous claims I saw are "make the crafts account-bound", while not even realizing that it would change nothing since items are already traded to provide the crafting-service for another party. Giving more stacks for the horticrafting-station might be an option - I don´t know. I am pretty confident to admit that I am not sure how to adress this problem.

But ANY other of the aforementioned typical "Harvest is so bad"-arguments can be ignored due to the outlined arguments against it. I would hope this post helps with calming players down and not taking harvest as the devil itself, rather making a small contribution to a more productive discussion about the leftover problem, which needs to be adressed. Thanks for reading.
Last edited by Vennto on Feb 27, 2021, 2:35:45 PM
Last bumped on Mar 7, 2021, 4:00:42 PM
It's like every similar discussion since closed beta - a bunch of people complaining because they can't do xyz/can't be bothered to do xyz/don't have time to do xyz/are too stupid to do xyz but are envious of the people who do it and think they shouldn't have it if they can't have it.
"You want it to be one way, but it's the other way"
Last edited by MarloStanfield on Feb 27, 2021, 3:32:17 PM
The only problem I have with harvest is that it is too rare for mid-level crafting. The great thing with harvest league was that it made drops much more interesting, since there was a reasonable cahnce of turnign them into something useful. Now the good crafts are so rare that you can't really waste them on side projects.

Maybe they could have restricted aug and aug-remove crafts that cannot roll influence or high tier mods?

In terms of the economic impact of harvest, you also have to take into consideration all other changes and the league itself this patch. I don't think harvest destroys the economy though. It is not even that clear what "destroying the ecnonomy" amounts to apart from everyone getting the best possible items very quickly or some monopolistic problems (fractured fossils on consumables?).

The 10 max crafts is also not really optimal. I get the intention, but the practical implementation is problematic.

And, yeah, Oshabi inheriting map modifiers is a balance problem.
There are 2 real problems with harvest in it's current form. The first and biggest offender is the existence of TFT. GGG didn't intend to make harvest craftable and yet as a matter of fact it is. Doing so is extremely risky as there is a good chance you will get scammed, especially on the higher end but if don't use TFT there will always be the FOMO problem for a lot of people. Because of that i personally think harvest crafting should make items account bound. I am aware it's most likely not going to happen but still, the current situation just plain sucks. All the people whining about harvest being designed for the top 1% are exactly those who suffer from FOMO. You can do incredible stuff with harvest even if you don't trade but because some people can do even more than that by trading, the ones who don't want/cant do it are upset about it.

The second, minor problem is the number of crafts you can store, probably related to problem 1). 10 crafts is a really low number even if you run several crafting projects at the same time. 20-30 would be more reasonable.
Last edited by Baharoth15 on Feb 28, 2021, 7:54:32 AM
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It's like every similar discussion since closed beta - a bunch of people complaining because they can't do xyz/can't be bothered to do xyz/don't have time to do xyz/are too stupid to do xyz but are envious of the people who do it and think they shouldn't have it if they can't have it.


+1 summary.
~ Adapt, Improvise and Overcome
This is all bullshit. There's no reason Harvest shouldn't be like Bestiary.
In game people love harvest, I've only seen any naysayers here on the forum. I feel it's only a vocal minority complaining about it.
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Baharoth15 wrote:
There are 2 real problems with harvest in it's current form. The first and biggest offender is the existence of TFT. GGG didn't intend to make harvest craftable and yet as a matter of fact it is. Doing so is extremely risky as there is a good chance you will get scammed, especially on the higher end but if don't use TFT there will always be the FOMO problem for a lot of people. Because of that i personally think harvest crafting should make items account bound. I am aware it's most likely not going to happen but still, the current situation just plain sucks. All the people whining about harvest being designed for the top 1% are exactly those who suffer from FOMO. You can do incredible stuff with harvest even if you don't trade but because some people can do even more than that by trading, the ones who don't want/cant do it are upset about it.

The second, minor problem is the number of crafts you can store, probably related to problem 1). 10 crafts is a really low number even if you run several crafting projects at the same time. 20-30 would be more reasonable.

I totally agree on that, apart from the risk-asumption: I can´t remember how many crafts I did already via Harvest, I have never lost a single item to scam and only lost one item due to miss-crafting which was instantly restored in form of currency. I don´t deny that scams can happen - a few days ago there was a very prominent case where an already ascended player (awakened+) scammed for hundreds of exalts in items, but those are REALLY rare cases. If you are smart about it, check the vouches of people, demand collateral if they are new to the servers and only trade with high-level chars you are quite safe for the simple reason that the work to be able to scam outweighs the profit. That being said: As in my original post I agree that TFT shouldn´t be the final option to trade harvest crafts and there should be a different solution.
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teknik1200 wrote:
In game people love harvest, I've only seen any naysayers here on the forum. I feel it's only a vocal minority complaining about it.


I won't complain about Harvest as a concept, at all. It is a great concept, Harvest was - by a long shot - my favourite league.

However, I will complain about the current implementation, which is really lackluster. Especially, can anyone give me a logical explanation about why the Horticrafting storage limit is 10? And no, it can't be that it would otherwise be too powerful, because you can 100% bypass that limitation by using TFT trade. It mostly affects you when you don't trade your Harvest crafts.
Remove Horticrafting station storage limit.
You make some good points, but then again, you can't ignore the fact that harvest overshadows most things in the game, some uniques from endgame bosses that were BiS or at least very relevant are now almost forgotten because you can make a better one MUCH easier than before.

The power creep is way too much and I don't think this is fine, sure it may be fun for now, but in the long run, it's pretty damn bad for the game

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