Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

So, we're still going to have to use Discord to trade Harvest crafts?
Well, I'm skipping PoE for the foreseeable future.
Diablo IV here we come!
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jer1993 wrote:
This is a massive mistake.

This fixes nothing for the top 1% of players, they will still get perfect items because they have the time and currency to do so regardless. This changes nothing for the bottom 1% of players either who doesn't make it far enough to even reach the point where you need to use this. What this does change is the funcap we as 98% of the players have to adhere by.

Let's face it, your crafting systems sucks tremendously. If you want a good item you have to suffer through weeks of wristpain due to altspamming. Nobody in the 98% is going to actually slam an exalt either once they finally got this item so using harvest as a 2nd roll on a bad mod, not gonna happen. This just turns crafting back into a stale diceroll rather than the actually quite enjoyable puzzle harvest made of it.

That isn't even accounting for the fact maybe, just maybe, your player retention this league wasn't because of your abysmal performance not being so abysmal at all, because it truly was. Now I can't speak for others but I can tell you that I only kept playing because I really enjoyed the harvest part of this game more than I got frustrated by the countless DC's and death by lagspikes and sirusbugs (yes there are still so many we have to discuss cmon GGG that guy's been in here for over 3 leagues now you got bigger fish to catch here than people having a bit too much fun).


I could agree that harvest right now is extremely powerful and it should probably be far more rare than it is at this time. The problem with harvest isn't in its power, that's the very thing that makes harvest so enjoyable. The problem with harvest is that it's easily farmable so we can spamm a million crafts in a matter of weeks and create perfect items through sheer will. Make harvest a rare delve node for example, much like a lich tomb. We get maybe 20 harvest crafts per league or we're forced to buy them off others for like 5-6 ex a pop? Definitely still a very enjoyable mechanic but now it's not overpowered. Nerfing harvest crafts into the ground makes it effectively useless to those that needed it the most ruining every strong point it had going for it. Just nerf the availability and you'll find people playing longer and harder just to get those crafts, striving for that juicy powerful deterministic slam so they can elevate their item, but not too often because it'll be expensive af now.

I don't understand why you'd want your game to be 100% about 1/12000 odds crafts letting us suffer through every single click of it. Last time I tried to craft an explody mod without harvest I had to ice down my wrist for 2 weeks, never again. I'll rather suffer through the shitshow that is trading in this game and buy it off the people that got their synthetic wrists already from playing this game too long.


The performance issues were extreme, to say the least. I was into the triple digit disconnects/crashes before I realized I had an even more game breaking bug that ended my league the moment I discovered it. I was going to overlook that, even, but they posted this an hr later...

I want to enjoy a videogame, not agitate my existing carpal tunnel. I tried spamming alts/etc once. I could not play for days after. My wrists were in agony after thousands of gambles.
Thank god for GGG removing the item editor, it really had no place in POE.
So all you really end up having is playing the economy, and plowing maps. And if you want to get anywhere on your character, you are better off mowing monsters down like weeds and just collecting pennies of the ground as fast as possible than any meaningful item hunting.
It's my 2nd attempt to play the game.

First time, I enjoyed game itself, but I simply hated so-called "craft" which is pure lottery/gambling. So I dropped after story line and few atlas map runs.

This time, I spent almost two month with few hours daily (I have job and family) and first of all due harvest possibilities. Harvest is something that you can call "crafting".

After reading today's manifesto - I won't even run the game and all excitement about upcoming league went to zero.
Bad move, it will cause me to stop playing the game. Simple as that.

Harvest still requires a lot of grinding to find the necessary crafts. With it's current state and how it took off you should be looking to give people more capacity in the HCS and not nerf it.

Your argument that some people feel overwhelmed by the amount of crafts etc is completely unreasonable. If that's how anyone feels they can just not enter the Sacred Grove...

Harvest allows people to have realistic goals for their builds and work towards it which in my case motivated me to play for hundreds of hours this league. If you take it away I will not have the energy to play POE anymore because repeating the same boring stuff (levelling up, completing the atlas, unlocking/unveiling all the mods) every single league is just not worth it if in the end I can't make myself a build that I want.
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FlamingVoodoo wrote:
The majority of players (me too) want harvest merchanic to stay as it is right now.

But i understand that there are a few major problemns:
1. the tft discord harvest trade thing is annoying.
2. the market is flooded with "too powerful" items
3. top tier items are too easy achivable

From my perspective there are better ways to solve the problems than to nerf the whole harvest crafting. We can keep targetable remove/adds and go around all of the above problems with:

- harvest touched items are from there on account-bound and not tradeable any more (targets problem 1 and 2)
- let harvest crafts can be itemised like beast-crafting and tradeable (targets problem 1 with tft). If there are concerns that this would lead again to overpowered items that are too easy to get, then leave this out. From my part it would be fine to have no harvest trade at all. Grind the crafts yourself, use it yourself to improve - that is a goal i can follow
- and let us save more crafts on the hortistation.
i feel forced to sell rare crafts if hortistation is full and if i cant use them on my currenct gear. deleting the stuff feels bad


Totally agree with this. I think making both the crafts and the harvest-touched items themselves non-tradeable would be perfect.

I'd much rather have MY crafts that are well less than perfect, but have a history, and fit my gear & build, than feel like I need to buy and sell my harvest crafts on discord because it's 'the best way to get better items & currency'. I'm only commenting because they were finally on to something with a game I love, and rather than build on what's good, and fix what's broken, they've opted to not solve the problem, and kill the fun part.

It's baffling to see this solution which acknowledges the problem, but just throws the baby out with the bathwater while not actually solving the Discord problem, and at the same time giving me the middle finger by telling me to go close my eyes and enjoy bricking my items with an exalt instead. That above all was the concerning part and made me worry that they don't understand what actually makes the game fun.
Last edited by city_ofthemoon#4336 on Mar 11, 2021, 10:59:44 AM
Game is popular and player base is still high even at this point in the league. It would be nearly impossible to ruin this!

GGG: Hold my beer
1. Add influenced mods to crafting bench. (recipe obtainable from boss fight, 5-10EX craft?)
2. Make 90% of current Jun crafts baseline available
3. Add rare modifiers to Jun discovery (+2 socketed gems, etc..)
4. remove multicraft mod
5. allow for 1 crafted prefix and 1 crafted suffix on items
6. remove harvest from the game
7. remove fractured delirium map cloning from the game
8. make HH cap at 20 stacks

well that Nerf to Influence rolling is a Massive nerf ...
I am your Devine one Bow before me
I'm not even a casual player, I probably played upwards of 200h this league.

That being said, I had like a handful of good crafts via Harvest in that time. I heavily disagree with GGG's stance, that this circumstance is breaking the game (or even negatively influence player experience).

I had fun, it felt like that I myself could influence my own gear instead of buying it. Even just the prospect of it was nice. I'm not a top tier crafter or player. I often don't have the currency to just buy the stuff I want. What am I to do in the future, GGG?

Well, fun gone. Probably me as well, atleast for the next league.

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