Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

What if they were keep harvest the way it is but it doesnt give you crafts, instead it allows you to infuses your own currency with crafts that you can then trade via poe trade.

No reason to play any further after hitting 24 achievements without current Harvest mechanics. No more fun for average players, R.I.P PoE.

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This sentiment was summed up by a member of our design team who recently said "We don't want to take away the feeling of closing your eyes and Exalting an item, scared to see whether you ruined it or not."

This right here is what drives me away, not what makes me want to keep playing.

Hi GGG!

I understand where this is coming from, but I'd still like to give my 2 cents.

Like so many others in this thread, harvest gave me a reason to keep playing the whole league. I am in SSF HC, so the trading aspect doesn't really affect me, but I'd still like to give my take on it.

You stated that it's a problem with people using discord to trade sell and buy crafts - I understand this issue, but instead of focusing on the issue at it's core, you decide to go on a different route - that being: nerf the whole thing. To me the simple answer would be to make items tradeable. That would solve the whole issue.

That leads me to believe that the issue stated has nothing to do with the change itself, but the philosophy that you just described. And that's fine. But I'm starting to feel like you're losing touch with your playerbase a little bit here.

Harvest has, for me at least, given me a reason to keep playing the league instead of getting burned out after 1-2 weeks and return the next one. The feeling of (especially for me as a HC player) spend time to craft some amazing gear and hopefully not lose it, is a thrill itself. And I can't be the only one to think this. I'd be really suprised if the numbers didn't show this league to be the most played league so far, for the longest period of time after being introduced to this type of crafting.

As an SSF HC player (ssf hc btw) I felt much more compelled to try out different gems, ascendancies, because let's face it; With the monster and boss buffs that's been going on for the last couple of leagues, harvest crafts gives you the option to take those wonky funky gems and ascendancies to the end game - the thing you've done with harvest crafting is to allow the playerbase to play skill they want, and make it work. For the more experienced players like myself, it's more ground to cover, more stuff to open doors to- and have fun with. Things that previously wasn't accessable, reasonable or viable. A clever unique usage that by itself didn't have the support of the rest of the gear that harvest crafting can actually fill. The top players will always find ways to zoom through a map with ease, and no matter what the meta is, or what skill they use for that specific league - the speed will certainly remain the same - with harvest crafting or not.

I'm not here to threaten to quit the game and stop buying supporter packs - I'm to old for that stuff. But I'd just like to say this:

The way I see it is that you made two big mistakes. The first being to introduce the harvest system at it's current state at all if it goes against your philosophy of the game, and 2: remove it right after you've introduced it.

I love the direction you've taking on the game, and I've played about 8000 hours. Personally I feel that this change isn't good for the game moving forward, and I hope that instead of thinking "this is the change we've done and we're going to stick with it", I hope you can have an open mind about this decision and listen to the community feedback regarding this thread. If the majority of the people want to see harvest change into this state, then I'm absolutely fine with it.

RymdLeffe out!

I - for one - am grateful for these changes. I absolutely agree with everything you said in your post. Insane items should be rare. I just shruged and thought to myself "Wow, that's absolutely not impressive" when i saw an insanely rolled item in 3.13. It's just too much.

I would have welcomed the following change which would make it acceptable: Make storage unlimited, keep the power level of Harvest, but make items "account-bound" as soon as you touch it with harvest (only affects rare items). This way people will craft their own gear step by step if they farm a lot - which i think is totally fine, still keeps you on your toes, doesnt break the economy and gets rid of the discord-channel necessity which was an absolutely terrible expierence.

This btw. would still satisfy SSF players as well as League players.

But well, if i'd have the choice between keeping Harvest as it is and removing it entirely, i'd remove it.

congratulations of going back in time to favour the 1% of the top players that can craft nice items, this cant be the solution, it all makes sense in Pathofmath video, do you realy want that to happen? go back to how crafting was before? Harvest was rare as it was, just make the crafts more rare or something, this is the best that GGG has to offer as a solution to Harvest crafting?

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Jadran wrote:

So wait, several months ago, before Harvest even existed, PoE was a bad game? Because this thread makes it sound like it will be a bad game now after Harvest is nerfed. I don't get this logic. I'd assume tons of people had fun with it before Harvest.

It's like: imagine you eat ice cream for the 1st time in your life. It's absolutely phenomenal. Now, several months later your parents come and say - no more ice cream for you son, it's actually not good for your teeth and overall health. So yeah, most kids would throw a tantrum here. But does it mean life berfore ice cream was terrible?

I will still play this game, it is just that i won't spend 3 months on it playing daily and theorycrafting and materialising my ideas into actual characters. I will play it for few weeks, make 2 chars max, one budget farmer one that I theorycrafted, get to the final boss of the league, quit the game and wait next league.

R.I.P POE

In the last Seasons you always make one step forward and two steps back.
You will again lose players for this "necessary" changes.

While I know almost no one cares about consoles (yes GGG, this includes you), but this change greatly affects us due to much lower population and lack of the volumes to trade. We just don’t have the shear volume of crafts available the trade.

It seems to me that so many of the folks complaining about it being so easy are those that just acquire their crafts from trade.

I have done many, many harvests and have seen very few top end crafts - but those I have gotten have been really fun to start getting better gear. I have enjoyed crafting my gear - that is the joy - not trying to exalt slam and get T10 useless mods on an ilevel 86 item.

I guess this means I go back to being a field hand farming the currency......

Why destroy the whole purpose of harvest crafting and ruin endgame itemisation for like 99% of casual players, like it was pretty much before the Harvest league?

My suggestion would be to make items that were altered through harvest crafting untradable, so the discord fiesta doesn't make it so easy to get the desired craft anymore.
Or lose some tags on some mods, so they won't be easily obtainable or forced by harvest crafts.

There are a number of ways nerfing harvest, but in my opinion the game was finally at a point where, if you put enough time in, anybody could at some point craft their first really good item piece for endgame and not have to farm 40 exalts until you go to the trade website and buy it from the 1% who somehow got all the currency in the world to have those crafted.

Please don't ruin influenced item crafting.