Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

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Tenzarin_MyNameWasTaken wrote:

I woke up this morning. It seemed like it was a normal day. I made my cup of coffee and then I saw the news. "GGG removes the item editor because it was ruining POE".

I smiled.

And then there you are, with 25 achievements (something that only a percent of players achieve), a level 98 Gladiator with quite good gear, and a HH complaining about "item editor". Oh, yeah, sure it was ruining your experience, I can see it.

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MonkeyXAce wrote:

As casual player that struggled to kill Sirus, harvest crafting was great and my only hope to make a decent weapons to take on end game content.

Exalt craft and gambling was never a thing for us casual players, we don't have enough currency to gamble.

It's fine if GGG needs to rebalance or nerf harvest, but at least give us something back so casual players can enjoy the game.

If harvest is nerf and there is nothing in return to empower casual players, then 3.13 would be the last season for many of us.

This.

Despite its deterministic nature, I wasn't lucky enough to find the crafts I need and I wasn't rich enough to buy them. (In fact, I really cannot be bothered with Discord trading.)

As a casual player, I was quite happy with the frequency of appearance of the grove and the amount of crafts I got. I liked spending some time there to look for items which I could use my crafting options.

EDIT: I get the idea from your post that you did not like how a vast minority of your playerbase created OP items and you want everything to be extremely RNG. Then remove it altogether, do not ruin it for the majority who is having fun with it.

Item editor is such a ridiculous myth, I'd really love to see the statistics behind just how many hours, without trading crafts, it takes to make one piece of 'mirror tier' gear.

I feel like you made one step forward in this league, and now you want take 2 steps backward with this nerf

HAR HAR @ crafters

just leave it only where it makes sense: SSF.

RIP Harvest

maybe it is time for another game or back to 2-4 week season like heist and delirium for me

we will see, but sad announcement

this season and harvest season were the longest and funniest season for me...

"Spent more time, enjoy less" right in your face

Of course these changes don't affect top 1% of the players.

GG

So harvest is essentially just aug influence and targeted chaos orbs... No one uses non influence items so your regular augs are actually worthless (except for jewels). Non x to x is quite hard to use well but it get's a bit better now. So as far as crafting, harvest is aug influence and a worse fossil (and you're making the targeted chaos reforges show up less also?).

You cannot nerf the game enough so that people with multiple mirrors don't get BIS gear. All you have done is make harvest obsolete for 99.9% of players.

As someone that made probably ~400 exalts this league (in raw currency; gear not inc) (I assume that's somewhere in the top 3% of players) I still don't have close to mirror tier gear.

But you know who had mirror tier gear before harvest league? The super rich, you know who will have mirror tier gear after 3.14? The super rich. Not very well thought out. It's almost as if no one at GGG actually plays POE. I'd like an employee to start at league start next league and make their way to t16 100% deli maps then tell us it was too easy :)

Harvest was the best POE league ever; Ritual the 2nd best. I wonder why?

Never felt strongly enough the need to post in this forum over the years until reading this today.

Please reconsider your approach.

Unless I'm missing something (entirely possible!), doesn't making harvest crafts either untradeable or at least trade-limited somehow solve all the problems you outlined?

Let's see..

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Even the crafts we made quite rare felt pretty common when the entire community was pooling them together and using them on the right items.

Your solution doesn't solve this for the crafts that remain, untradeable crafts would.

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Players also expressed frustration that the most effective way to get the best items in Path of Exile was to join a discord channel and try to trade for these incredibly crucial crafts.

Your solution doesn't solve this, untradeable crafts would.

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The second issue was that players felt overwhelmed to get so many crafting options.

Fair enough, I'm totally fine with reducing the quantity of crafts per grove!

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The first part of this that concerned us was that Harvest was critical in making the best items (and hence made many other game systems obsolete).

Isn't that again solved by untradeable crafts? You get to actually play the actual game (a LOT!) in order to access the crafts you need to make the best items (rather than using discord), so you get to engage with the other game systems PLUS it's fun! What's the problem?

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Our problem with all of this can be summarised with the following thought: "Why would I use a regular Exalted/Divine/Annul Orb when I can get one through Harvest that has a deterministic result?"

My problem with all of this can be summarised "Why would I engage with crafting as a system at all unless it is actually fun and/or economically worth doing?". It's neither. It's the first time I've had a blast with actually gradually improving my own items rather than 'saving up' and camping live search on trade and buying them begrudgingly.

The reason I feel so strongly about this is I have never had so much fun in this game and you are really onto something, but are about to screw it up. You're taking away the very thing I find fun, but not fixing the things I hate! I want to play this game, and it's the first time I've felt the need to dump money into an elite supporter pack since 2017 - don't kill the momentum guys, learn from what makes your game fun, and build on it, it's not enough to rely on what's 'worked' in the past.

I want to see you guys try new stuff and take the best of what works, and fix what doesn't - don't kill the stuff that works, without fixing the stuff that doesn't!