What's wrong with deterministic crafting?

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adghar wrote:

How would you purpose this happen? Any item that has a Harvest craft used on it becomes Bind on Account?

GGG and a large number of top-level end game players LOATHE the idea of Bind on Account.

Personally, I wouldn't mind BoA, but I know it's LOATHED - so lets stay away from that idea.

Anyhow, the way I would propose (and other have propsed too), is to tag an item after the first Harvest craft is applied, making it impossible for any other person to craft on it than the person apllying the craft. You could still sell/buy the items (more or less just "finished products"), but you could not buy/sell Harvest crafts themselves.

Far from a perfect system, but arguably much better than TFT trading.

hmmmm

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Vennto wrote:

What I meant with unhealthy was not the implications from harvest itself, rather than that harvest was too good to pass on, making other things like fossils, chaos-spamming, essences... pretty much anything else redundant or obsolete. Right now, I might be wrong here, but I feel there is a decent balance between all crafting-options and to produce really good items you would combine those. When Harvest was at it´s maximum strength, there was nothing else, it was game-consuming, at least from the crafting-part. And that´s what I would call unhealthy.

True, for a player like you.

However there are many players for whom it just makes very little sense to craft at all using those other methods. It is much more effective to simply trade than gamble using those 'crafting' avenues. If you are a new player asking for advice on the forums on high end crafting you will hear that over and over "You can do it, but honestly its so complex you'd be better off 99% of the time trading for it."

Harvest broke that rather unpleasant model for a lot of players, essentially giving them real crafting options for the first time that weren't an order of magnitude worse than trading.

To those players, there is currently no crafting aside from adding mods to their leveling gear essentially. The rest is trade.

So when you say it made the game worse, you are only speaking for players like you or other reasonably high end crafters.

When others say taking out Harvest ruined crafting, its because they are left with trading.

Neither side is wrong, they just represent different ways of playing the game. It is unfortunate Chris ending up siding with the power-gamers when I suspect you make up a tiny percent of players. But then we saw him give the company a black eye to help literally two dozen streamers, so his judgement just doesnt seem that great.

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However there are many players for whom it just makes very little sense to craft at all using those other methods. It is much more effective to simply trade than gamble using those 'crafting' avenues. If you are a new player asking for advice on the forums on high end crafting you will hear that over and over "You can do it, but honestly its so complex you'd be better off 99% of the time trading for it."

When others say taking out Harvest ruined crafting, its because they are left with trading.

I feel we compare apples and oranges now. Lets put people in 2 categories:

1. The more "casual" players that feel crafting is too complex so they liked harvest because they were able to craft their own gear for the first time. Yeah, I get that. But those people are not looking for, as you put it, "high end crafting".
And what´s more: The same people could actually get into other crafting because they already learned via harvest what prefixes and suffixes are and what tags their desired mods have. From there it´s not really that far to get at least SOME basic crafting via fossils done. And no matter what project you look at, as long as you are not shooting for 5-6 perfect mods selfcrafting is ALWAYS cheaper than trading for items. Else no one would craft for profit anymore... the basic idea of crafting for profit is to sell stuff and you get paid for your time- and knowledge-investment and as I´ve just explained, for casual items the required knowledge is not that high and if you don´t want to spend your time doing it that´s a choice, but not mandatory. Nothing that harvest did changed this basic principle, other than having it all in one big trove rather than 2 or 3 mechanical options. I understand that many people view harvest as something that helped their crafting-experience. I just don´t understand WHY.

2. The real "high end crafting" on the other hand is basically always not worth the currency. People start specific projects with "outs" that do not help their build but can be used in other builds and get their money back for selling, so high-end-crafting is really not worth doing it on your own in most of the cases. And this was ALSO true in pre-, during and after harvest.

Those 2 reasons are why I don´t get all the fuss about harvest nerfed. Nothing really changes the basic principles, other than people were able to sell single crafts for 1-2ex on TFT and buying way better gear with their money.

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So when you say it made the game worse, you are only speaking for players like you or other reasonably high end crafters.

While I understand why u might think that, I still have to disagree. As I said earlier, my point of view is from a BALANCING PERSPECTIVE. If harvest (or any other option for that matter) is BiS at everything, everything else becomes obsolete and I would very much appreciate if you try to understand this aspect rather than saying it´s just my view due to me knowing how to craft. I said earlier that I am a firm believer in balancing from top to bottom and just because no one ever used fossils, beasts or essences before they got into harvest-crafting does not and surely should not mean that it´s healthy for the game when one mechanic is superior to everything else.

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Vennto wrote:

And no matter what project you look at, as long as you are not shooting for 5-6 perfect mods selfcrafting is ALWAYS cheaper than trading for items. Else no one would craft for profit anymore... the basic idea of crafting for profit is to sell stuff and you get paid for your time- and knowledge-investment and as I´ve just explained, for casual items the required knowledge is not that high and if you don´t want to spend your time doing it that´s a choice, but not mandatory. Nothing that harvest did changed this basic principle, other than having it all in one big trove rather than 2 or 3 mechanical options.

Thanks for explaining your viewpoint/experience, its very different than mine.

My experience with crafting is that you can often waste the first few ex on bricking items, bad rolls, etc. If you invest 50ex, you might get nothing back for the first 10ex, then your RNG will start evening out. You will get a few 5 ex items, a few 10ex items, and maybe one 25 ex item. But you have to able to eat a good bit of losses to RNG. Just like, say, map sustain. Sometimes your map base goes down, it doesnt ALWAYS go up.

Most casual players are not going to sustain multiple Ex losses before starting to succeed.

Harvest changed this completely because although some sold the high crafts, there was no reason NOT to craft with the remaining harvest crafts you had. There was no downside except using your base items.

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Vennto wrote:

I understand that many people view harvest as something that helped their crafting-experience. I just don´t understand WHY.

See above, this was the first time crafting did not mean you were wasting currency that would be more effective trading (which is not fun, even according to Chris).

I am not so much trying to convince you, as explain what it feels like to at least some players.

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Vennto wrote:

While I understand why u might think that, I still have to disagree. As I said earlier, my point of view is from a BALANCING PERSPECTIVE. If harvest (or any other option for that matter) is BiS at everything, everything else becomes obsolete and I would very much appreciate if you try to understand this aspect rather than saying it´s just my view due to me knowing how to craft. I said earlier that I am a firm believer in balancing from top to bottom and just because no one ever used fossils, beasts or essences before they got into harvest-crafting does not and surely should not mean that it´s healthy for the game when one mechanic is superior to everything else.

But from my perspective (and many casual players) they already dont engage seriously with crafting, so it is ALREADY obsolete.

I totally do understand and respect that YOUR gameplay experience is more balanced this way, and I appreciate you explaining it.

On your side, do you disagree many players don't use crafting due to complexity/sustain/cost/trading/hating-RNG or other reasons, hence the non-Harvest crafting is already obsolete to them?

Saying they 'could learn to craft' is like me saying you could learn to ignore pre-nerf Harvest and use the other mechanics so you felt crafting was more spread out. Both are technically true, but not real useful commentary.

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trixxar wrote:

But from my perspective (and many casual players) they already dont engage seriously with crafting, so it is ALREADY obsolete.

Couldn't this argument be made for every single mechanic in the game, though? Especially trading? If a player chooses not to engage in crafting, trading, delving, deilirium maps and so on, they can't really expect/demand that they develop the game in that direction?

Aaaaanyhow, no matter what they do to trading and crafting, the quality of dropped gear needs to be up'd - significantly.

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Vennto wrote:

I understand that many people view harvest as something that helped their crafting-experience. I just don´t understand WHY.

For me, it didn't improve my crafting-experince as much as it improved my gaming-experience:

For one, the crafting system in place is frustration inducing: You can easily end up with an item worse than the one you started with, and poorer. To me, that translates into the game wasting my time and effort. I want to work for a goal, no matter how difficult, and know that at the end of the road, I'll get what I worked so hard for.

For another, the trading experience in this game is awful. I've been scammed, I had to deal with bots, afkers, etc. Spending a lot of time in my HO trying to buy something that I would much rather spend playing the actual game.

And for another, the disparity between anything you can possibly obtain, through drops or crafting, and trading. Trading makes the other two irrelevant. That's why when Chis mentioned how exiting it is to use an exalted orb to craft, everyone laughed at the idea. It is much better used for trading.

Harvest, with all its limitations and bad implementations, helped alleviate all of these issues. And I would much rather have it as it was, than not have it at all.

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Phrazz wrote:

Couldn't this argument be made for every single mechanic in the game, though? Especially trading? If a player chooses not to engage in crafting, trading, delving, deilirium maps and so on, they can't really expect/demand that they develop the game in that direction?

Aaaaanyhow, no matter what they do to trading and crafting, the quality of dropped gear needs to be up'd - significantly.

Hmm, no one demanded Harvest to my knowledge. GGG added it, and showed people who didn't like the current-RNG crafting how fun actual crafting could be (for casuals, I get that Vento and similar didnt like it).

Then, they took it away, and Vento's argument is that in part that was to balance the other options which were obsolete to uber-crafters.

I would say its less demanding that the game move entirely to deterministic crafting rather than not back-stepping from progress towards fun crafting (for the many who found it fun).

They basically opened up a large aspect of the game to players, then removed it and didn't replace it with anything. If the players were already crafting (like Vento) then they seem ok going back to it. The complaints are, somewhat self-evident here, people who didnt craft before, probably wont craft now, so you can't really say they have more balanced crafting options. They are just trading now (I suspect). Which doesnt feel as good as Harvest.


Agreed on drops, it doesnt even feel like part of the game. The last league there were actual drops that you'd remotely consider using endgame would be Incursion for me, from boosted Architect drops.

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On your side, do you disagree many players don't use crafting due to complexity/sustain/cost/trading/hating-RNG or other reasons, hence the non-Harvest crafting is already obsolete to them?

I mean... let´s break this down:

1) complexity
Totally agree on this one. This game is by far the most complex I ever played, and especially crafting has a very steep learning curve and takes a lot of effort to get into it. I can fully understand why people don´t want to deal with that.

2) trading
Also a point that I cannot argue. If you hate trading you cannot, or are at least less likely to get enough recourses together to step into a crafting-process. I dislike delve and when I buy stacks of 200 or 300 fossils at once I can´t image farming them myself, so yeah, that´s totally a point I can agree to.

3) sustain/cost/hating RNG
That´s a bit more complicated and the point where I have to disagree. Of course I totally understand that people want a result from farming a few hours. There are several tools to determine how likely it is to have a successful result on crafting and you should always have your investment and the likelihood of results in mind. Crafting is actually not at all gambling but down to probabilistic measurements. So to answer the question: Maybe people don´t use crafting due to costs, but they are wrong in doing so. I would like to show that on an example to further picture my point.

Let´s say you start a new league and want to play a character with low life or full-es/CI. The item you want to craft, just as an example, is a shield.

First shield
For the first shield all we care about is enough Energy Shield to get by and maybe some resistances to get into higher tier maps. We don´t need any crazy mods.
With just a few dense-fossils (like 10-15) you can get a shield with 200ES+, maybe some other nice stats and open affixes for a craft. That will get you to red maps. To hit 200es+ has a likelihood at roughly 65% for an investment of 42c. So you get in very likely areas if you spend 50-60c for it.

Second Shield
Now we want to get our endgame gear, meaning a shield with also ES on block. There are different crafting-methods now to do that. You can eigher just use harvest crafts "reforge an item with a defense modifier. Defense modifiers are more common" with a likelihood of hitting the recovery-mod as well as another good mod. If we just hit this one + a high-tier ES mod we can craft the second, finish the item with an aisling slam and have a very powerful endgame shield. Other ways, in terms of "less RNG" would be sticking to fossils again: Lucent + Dense have a 65% chance after 90 trys to get us the block mode and t2+ percentage ES. Last option: 150 pure dense fossils for VERY high flat + percentage ES, then prefixes cannot be changed and reforge with harvest to force the def-mod. All of the above methods result with a very measureable way to the same result. Of course, you can be unlucky, but if you just take those numbers every method is between 3-7 exalts, so if you average this out at 5.5ex and put down another 3 for being unlucky you have a perfectly fine end-game shield for 8.5ex with nearly impossible chance of NOT getting it.

Third Shield
Now the tricky part starts actually. And I totally agree, that further upgrades now start to depend more on deep pockets and maybe luck but that is my point: The second level of shield is MORE THAN ENOUGH for everyone to finish the game and there has to be something that seperates the top tier players from others. If you keep going though u can produce something like this eventually:

That is my fully self-crafted shield from the current league, market value roughly at 50ex. It cost me 35ex in production.
To sum that up: Substain and cost is something that can be planned, as well as the risk-rewards in terms of RNG. So when people say crafting as it is right now is just pure RNG they are missing the knowledge about it or have too high expectations what items they think they are supposed to craft somewhat deterministically.

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For one, the crafting system in place is frustration inducing: You can easily end up with an item worse than the one you started with, and poorer. To me, that translates into the game wasting my time and effort. I want to work for a goal, no matter how difficult, and know that at the end of the road, I'll get what I worked so hard for.

Yeah, and I can relate to the fact that you want to have a result at the end of your jurney. I really can, in fact I dropped a season when REAL RNG hit me: I was trying to six-link a chest on day 2 of the league and threw 2400 fusings on it, it did not 6-link, and I dropped out of the league. 6-linking is REAL RNG because due to a low probability of linking it the variance is too high, therefore a theoretical confidence interval is too big. It was very frustrating but if you are clever about crafting this will never happen or only in the very endgame stages when you want insane items.

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Harvest, with all its limitations and bad implementations, helped alleviate all of these issues. And I would much rather have it as it was, than not have it at all.

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The complaints are, somewhat self-evident here, people who didnt craft before, probably wont craft now, so you can't really say they have more balanced crafting options. They are just trading now (I suspect). Which doesnt feel as good as Harvest.

But yeah, I get those points and would like to say thanks for the explanations. I hope you guys can take something away from my view point as well and why I don´t consider crafting to be pure rng. :)

I can tell you the #1 thing that makes me stop playing every league.

RNG Crafting. It's just not fun.

It's also way to complicated at this point. Too many mechanics on top of mechanics.

Nerfing Harvest was not the answer. They should have retired older mechanics. Fossil, Essence, Beastcrafting, BLOAT.

If anything they should have expanded Harvest. Embrace the garden aspect that it takes time to grow something. Turning it into just another RNG fest was absolutely the wrong answer.

If Ritual, Ultimatum has show us anything is that playing until your wrist huts to progress is insane. Harvest was great, it was a built in mechanics that gave a reason to slow down a bit.

PoE should not be "Carpal Tunnel, The Game"


Add: You can still have the old mechanics, just make them drop items that feed into harvest. You want a chaos plant? ok, feed it essences, fossils.