Harvest could be worst league ever?

funny thing, 50% of the playerbase have already quit, but they still dont understand that it doesnt matter are recipes generous or not. that league gameplay is not fun, thats the main reason. like mathil said: "it maybe a blow**b at the end of it, it would not matter".

WE MESSED UP

haha, for reals. They not only were prepared to release a subpar league they messed up even that. Can you imagine, releasing subpar content yet still making mistakes. Work from home is to blame, right?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of this league but it's important to consider a couple of points here:

1. While retention has been relatively poor, there are still a large number of players still engaging with the league and there are people who are enjoying it.

2. GGG uses leagues to experiment and try things out. If you're not willing to risk failure, you're never going to be innovative enough to achieve break-through successes. As a learning opportunity GGG will no doubt use this league to recognise that it appeals to a portion of their player base, but that it's also incredibly polarising and very disengaging for another large portion of their player base.

3. There's little point in flogging this dead horse any longer. GGG are not idiots, they can analyse the stats themselves and learn the lessons. The concept of reinvigorating crafting is a sound one and something the game needs but linking it to a mechanic that is more polarising that the Labyrinth is definitely not the winning combination they had hoped for.

4. Stop asking for a Flashback league, GGG have explained why it's not a simple flick of the switch to enact it and considering the compressed timeline to the next league and the more challenging work environment they are experiencing it's just not practical. Find something else to do, leave the current league to the people that are enjoying it and come back refreshed in a couple of months for the mea culpa league (calling it now, that's gonna be the new theme! No, I don't mean that, I'm joking!).

I mean off the top of my head it's a better league than, torment, warband, tempest, essence, synthesis, abyss, legion, delirium, beastiray, and probably more. It's an average league, it's the first attempt and giving PoE real crafting options.

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1. While retention has been relatively poor, there are still a large number of players still engaging with the league and there are people who are enjoying it.

Nothing suggests that. If the retention is poor that means more people don't want anything to do with the league than usual. Plus there is a big part of the remainers who don't actually bother to engage with league content.

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2. GGG uses leagues to experiment and try things out. If you're not willing to risk failure, you're never going to be innovative enough to achieve break-through successes. As a learning opportunity GGG will no doubt use this league to recognise that it appeals to a portion of their player base, but that it's also incredibly polarising and very disengaging for another large portion of their player base.

Synthesis exists. That was their experiment. Repeating the same mistakes is not a positive. Fool me once and all that

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3. There's little point in flogging this dead horse any longer. GGG are not idiots, they can analyse the stats themselves and learn the lessons. The concept of reinvigorating crafting is a sound one and something the game needs but linking it to a mechanic that is more polarising that the Labyrinth is definitely not the winning combination they had hoped for.

First off, there are dedicated crafting games and Path of Exile was never advertised as one of them. Second, this league clearly had a purpose. I especially agree with one poster's opinion that they decided to bunch up all of their controversial ideas in a single league and accept their losses.

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4. Stop asking for a Flashback league, GGG have explained why it's not a simple flick of the switch to enact it and considering the compressed timeline to the next league and the more challenging work environment they are experiencing it's just not practical. Find something else to do, leave the current league to the people that are enjoying it and come back refreshed in a couple of months for the mea culpa league (calling it now, that's gonna be the new theme! No, I don't mean that, I'm joking!).

A flashback league is the only thing that can save the game right now. Sure, we can all go do something else, but this won't be the best solution for GGG either.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

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2. GGG uses leagues to experiment and try things out. If you're not willing to risk failure, you're never going to be innovative enough to achieve break-through successes. As a learning opportunity GGG will no doubt use this league to recognise that it appeals to a portion of their player base, but that it's also incredibly polarising and very disengaging for another large portion of their player base.

Synthesis exists. That was their experiment. Repeating the same mistakes is not a positive. Fool me once and all that

Do you think they were trying the same thing with synthesis and harvest?

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Do you think they were trying the same thing with synthesis and harvest?

Not really. The only thing you can say that were similar about Synthesis and Harvest was that both involved crafting and building things. Synthesis crafting was considered inaccessible and prohibitively expensive (despite fractured bases being an alternative for easier lower end crafting) with incredibly high rates of failure when synthesizing items, so Harvest is definitely an attempt to not repeat that and have something that has much more immediate and allows for more precise, controlled results and doesn't require currency to make use of (compared to Synthesis which required you to craft very specific items with currency in the hopes of getting something good).

Synthesis was on top of that an attempt to recreate the success of Delve far too early after Delve was released. Synthesis as a concept only made sense a year after delve, not a few months after. During Synthesis league one of the most common complaints was that people weren't able to Delve more, in a league that gives you another "endless dungeon" mechanic. A repeat of a mistake in this instance would be attempting to make another league that affects the entire map and forces you to go fast and is intended to completely add to entire maps while Delirium is still fresh on our minds and it is still an exciting league mechanic.

Finally, Synthesis was hugely criticized for being a league that required you to go fast, something Harvest does not do.

I mean the big win of delve was the endless dungeon and deterministic progress. It turns out a system that lets you do the next content after you finish the previous one is good and random content progression kinda sucks. If synthesis was meant to be like delve then they missed all the good parts of delve. Heck my biggest ongoing complaint is that I can't delve more still.

Synthesis' problems were many varied and basically all of it. Too tied to mapping, go fast, weird mechanics, crappy balance, and yet another trade based crafting league. Like delirium it was kind of an example of a whole host of things that were bad before and they should have learned from instead they doubled down.

1. minus 50%, minus botters = very few people who enjoy this league. i wouldnt use the word "many".

2. experimenting is a key to success, we could agree on that. but you do know that game companies can experiment internally? playtesting different concepts among different kinds of mechanics, and after a positive feedback they can give the content to wide masses of players. problem is that i cant see how the current content can be givend a green light. this is a small content, its not dynamic, its not intuitive/simple/comfortable enough for an arpg genre, its not engaging, it breaks the usual hacknslash gameplay loop. its wild experiment that should have been playtested internally and they should keep it for further adjustments and implement later as a supplement to some real content.

3. im not seeing the fact that they learn their lessons. i see another rushed content, lacking qol changes, bugged league endgame boss and so on. time and time again. the concept of invigorating crafting is ok, the realisation is a total disaster, they could add all crucial recipes to bestiary, even this would be bearable.

4. first of all, we wont stop asking for a flashback/mayhem/turmoil events because some one guy nicknamed "Aldora the Summoner" on the forum told us to do so. i dont want to hear any ggg explanations, it was their choice to lock themselves in 3 months development cycles and noone ever demanded that exact cycle. im telling you right now, if they would implement legacy 2.0 league instead of the harvest garbage, players engagement would be much, much higher and the league would never lost 50% of playerbase within the first 10 days.

actually i cant believe that ggg are screwing up big time on the SIMPLE task to entartain players. you dont need to fucking invent a bicycle, its obvious what players want. you can do crafting as a supplement, but arpg players want to KILL MOBS and yet we get a league with empty standard-style maps. unbelievable.

Delve was also tied closely to mapping, which was my point. The community wasn't ready for another endless dungeon league mechanic that competed with their mapping time when they just wanted to Delve more.

And yes, I'm pretty sure it was meant to be something like Delve. Both leagues you did maps to be able to access more of it, and you can eventually lead yourself to special reward zones and bosses, and it introduced new methods of crafting. Synthesis also used the decay to replicate the urgency that the minecart and the darkness provided. One could argue that was an inferior take (I like Synthesis a lot better personally, having to stop to do every forced encounter that lasts for a minute or two really killed any love I had for Delve), but it was definitely an attempt at a Delve 2.0 that was rejected by the community.

I think if Synthesis or another Delve clone came out today, it would be much better received now that Delve is a fairly old mechanic.