Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

Many people seem to be dismissing a lot of the criticism of this discussion as the game was fun before harvest so even if they removed Harvest completely it will still be fun.

Not only is this not the point it is not correct for many players. Many players never craft gear, I looked back and I have had a PoE account since 2013. in the eight years I have been playing I have not once truly crafted my gear more than socket colors, sockets, links, or crafting bench (maybe). I have farmed currency to trade for almost all gear used in the game after hitting maps. This wasnt "fun" this is what I did because it was a necessity for me to continue to enjoy the game. In ritual league I started crafting my first gear through Harvest. I bought the base still because lets be real dropping bases is still a pain. and crafted my first chest piece. I also got a really difficult socket coloration on a chest piece for another character that I tried to chrome and ran out of currency but in the end was able to harvest craft what I needed.

I dont bring this up because I believe that the game is ruined by nerfing Harvest. I bring this up because the game was BAD before Harvest and then people found something enjoyable and now they want to nerf it and make crafting BAD again. Is the overall game fun? Sure, for some. But for others like me who spent 8 years hoping they would make crafting fun, or make trading less painful, or make the drops actually worth while. But instead people like me and there are many like me, never craft, will walk on coals to trade because its the only way to get the gear we think we need to continue in the game, and will stop picking up rares unless we are doing the chaos recipe to buy said gear.

What this manefesto has done is open our eyes ever more to realize that GGG doesnt want these things to improve in the ways that make the game more enjoyable for me and people like me. Add to this the constant rebuking of making trading easier and you have an ARPG based on loot drops that is bad at loot drops, bad at trading, and bad with crafting.

Why does loot not drop identified so we can actually filter in the good loot? Why is there so much bad loot even given? (Think about how useless the drops are and if its useless WHY HAVE THEM IN THE GAME? Seriously why do we need a white item dropping from a map boss? Who actually picks that up? If no one does then why does it even exist? Why does the community call it a "trade" league but the devs actively put barriers and want to make it hard to trade so people dont trade as much? Why do the devs think anyone who is an average player uses an exalt to slam an item? These are all fundamental issues with the game that have existed before Harvest and will exist after and the game is not more "fun" for them.

The game didnt all the sudden become fun because of Harvest but it did add some fun for people like me and opened the door for crafting that in 8 years I have written off because its not worth the time and effort for my enjoyment.

The developers have a vision and that vision runs counter to a lot of peoples ideas of what they find fun (eyes closed exalt slamming) This just made it clear again to many that they dont plan on changing and for people like me who want to enjoy this game but know that it will not be what we hope it will be is disheartening.

Like many others I have decided to stop playing as this manifesto was the last straw. It wasnt Harvest mechanics being nerfed it is their design philosophy on items, trade, and crafting and how that gates content for me and what is needed for me to reach end game. I believe that PoE and GGG will be just fine without me and I wish it the best. But lets not pretend like many of the concerns being brought up arent widespread felt frustration and lets also not pretend like the game has no flaws in its basic mechanics and it feels like these are by design more and more.

Good, should have just been removed, and not gone core at all imo
Now everyone's pissed cause you took away their candy, they took harvest for granted even though it's only the 2nd league to have it..

Some sort of middleground could exist but as it was, crafting godly items was just ridiculous.
Face it, those items could never have been made without harvest doing the heavy lifting, and i'm pretty sure GGG never imagined people would fill their gear slots uniquely with influenced mods. It's likely they balanced around having a few of those mods per piece, instead you're now seeing daily showcases of 5 w/ elevateds.

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cgexile wrote:

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MobileForce wrote:

Personally, I agree with all of the changes, harvest was very powerful and has reached a more stable level with this patch.
However, the PR that this one post emenates is just awful. The choice of words is absolutely appauling. Stop treating your players like children who want to smash on the shiny exalt button all day. Nobody in their right mind uses an exalted orb for slamming an item. Most of the time, just getting the item you want from trade is literally cheaper than an exalt.
Now, trade is a whole other can of worms i don't want to open.

"very powerful" because of trade and rapid accessibility. Trade is pretty big variable here. Think of it as a 'more' multiplier on Harvest. It took me 2 months to find 2 "deterministic" remove defense crafts. That's powerful? Seems perfectly balanced to me. This is the rarity that someone in SSF would probably experience as well. Could I find that craft in under 1 minute if I engaged in trade/forum? Probably. The trade element is what made harvest so OP, because collectively players could pool in together or quickly find the crafts they need.

Trade is the problem and not the Harvest mods themselves. Did you see people complaining that they couldn't even find Harvest chaining maps in Haewark? Yeah nevermind actually getting the craft you needed - first you had to find the damn tree! The manifesto is just veiled messaging to never implement account-bound items. The league mechanic was balanced just fine. In fact given its rarity I would have removed the 10 craft cap as well.

The actions of a few killed it for the majority of players.

Pretty much sums it up.

GGG, if you're looking to replace your project leads, look to your forums. Your players seem to have more sense than you. xD

Maybe its finally time to start taking David Brevik's advice and start utilizing Bind on Equip type mechanics when it comes to Harvest crafting.

The entire point of Harvest is to make it possible for people to craft decent items for themselves and 99% of the issue with Harvest comes in the form of the Discord and Trading for the crafts to make perfect items. Doing such things without trading can take all league to complete even a single item currently or half way complete a couple items for your build even farming the correct regions with points allocated for harvest. It gives players not any control over their crafts but, also Goals... Something this game is starting to sorely need.

So eliminate the ability to trade the crafts. Only YOU who finds the crafts can use them and once you do use them on an item that item can no longer ever be traded to another player. Seems like a hell of a lot better middle ground. Everyone wins.

Going this route just kills diversity even more than it already is because everyone has to go back to outright buying ludacrisly overpriced items or in the case of some builds (The more creative ones) items that simply do not even exist. Thats one thing Harvest does so well is allows players so much control over crafting that it allows players to create items in such a way you can tailor them to your build no matter what it is instead of just buying overpriced item that are tied to known Meta.

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HowToGusta wrote:

GGG, if you're looking to replace your project leads, look to your forums. Your players seem to have more sense than you. xD

These "players" are maybe 5-20k vs over 500k that don't complain/post at all because they are happy or don't care.

Why did you remove this from the news page? Strong leadership

Ok, so considering all you did was remove the annuls, im fine with that. I was afraid that u intended to remove deterministic crafts entirely, that wouldve made me quit and find another game. Your argument about exalts being obsolete is stupid though, complete nonsense in fact. Chaos and Exalts are THE standard for player trades, they will NEVER EVER EVER be obsolete because of this. Just because less people are chugging Exalts for their listed effect does not mean that now people dont want exalts. The only things harvest makes obsolete would be the metacrafting mods that protect either prefix or suffix mods, but you didnt even mention those, and anyways, those arent useless when compared to harvest crafting, just slightly less necessary. Honestly, if you want to help accessibility how about you include an actual IN GAME player shop system that doesnt require your players to go to a third party website just to buy items? I dont mean the half-assed pile of garbage you have in the console version either, I mean a real listing mechanism with real filtering options. An actual IN GAME loot filter editor is also something you should do. The fact that a loot filter is 100% absolutely required to reasonably play in end game but you have to go to a third party website to get said filter is absurd. Literally any other dev would look at the fact that loot filters and player item listings are a part of the game but have no in game mechanism to use those features and say the game is unfinished. How about you stop screwing around with crafting and actually give us a finished product after more then a decade.

Lets talk about something else thats absurd and has gotten zero attention since the games creation, framerate drops and stuttering. Before you say anything, no, I am NOT playing POE on a toaster and I dont mean the console version either. I play POE on console AND pc because I have friends who only have a ps4 that I like to play the game with. Now that thats done, the real point here, I have a computer on my desk here that can run CYBERPUNK AT MAX SETTINGS WITH PERFECT BUTTERY SMOOTH GAMEPLAY! When I fire up POE fresh off an install, however, I get framerate drops when a lot is going on and I get that stuttering where the game randomly hangs for a second at some arbitrary interval. Only by going in and doing a plethora of performance tweaks am I able to get the game to run as intended without framerate drops and arbitrary hanging. This is obviously the result of poor optimization. There is no reason why, with a pc that can run a new release game, a game that was hyped mainly for its insane graphics, at max settings, I should be getting any loss of framerate or hanging or any sort of loss of performance on a dinky little free to play mmo that is MORE THEN A DECADE OLD! Not only that, but the game obviously has a memory leak somewhere. It is common knowledge no matter what system you play this game on that if you dont restart the game every couple hours, it WILL eventually crash on you. This is usually preceded by a gradually worsening drop in framerate and responsiveness of the controls. This is textbook memory leak behavior. Somewhere, someone didnt do trash collection right or something of that sort and now every time some script runs it leaves an instance of something in memory that never gets removed and when that script runs again, a new instance of that thing gets stuffed into memory along with the old unused instance and before long, all the games allocated memory is taken up by unused garbage that wasnt properly taken care of leaving not enough room for the game to function any longer, resulting in a crash from lack of available memory. Restarting the game causes anything and everything the game used, including those unused trash bits, to be cleared from memory, which prevents the eventual crash. How about you work on fixing your optimization and tracking down that memory leak instead of messing with crafting?

Heres another absurd thing, Lockstep vs Predictive vs useless console hybrid mode.
Lockstep prevents rubberbanding, but comes at the cost of a loss of responsiveness, you get a tiny bit of input lag. Predictive gives you responsive controls with no input lag, but it comes at the cost of constant desysnching resulting in rubberbanding forever. Hybrid mode on the consoles gives you the worst of both worlds! Im sorry... wait, no im not, there is no excuse for this garbage. I defy you, name me ONE SINGLE EXAMPLE of another game, any game anywhere on teh goddamned planet, even other games of this type like Diablo or Torchlight, where the devs have to choose between desynching or input lag, go ahead, il wait... didnt find any? Ya, thats because thats not a thing unless you screwed up really bad somewhere. Most devs would look at that and go, "huh, well good controls are pretty important, both accuracy and responsiveness, maybe we should fix that BEFORE we release the game?" Not ggg though, you guys looked at that and were like, "well, I got nothin, whatever, just release it and let them pick which kind of broken they want their controls to be. Whats that? its been broken for more then a decade now and we wont even acknowledge that its broken let along provide any sort of a fix? I KNOW!! Lets expariment with powerful deterministic crafting!"

Dont even get me started on how effectively unplayable the console version is once you reach red maps.

TLDR: MAKING YOUR GAME FUNCTION ON A FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL IS AND ALWAYS WILL BE VASTLY MORE IMPORTANT THEN ANY CONTENT UPDATE OR BALANCE CHANGE WILL EVER BE! STOP WASTING TIME ON THIS GARBAGE AND FIX YOUR GAME FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIVES!

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Demonoz wrote:

So eliminate the ability to trade the crafts. Only YOU who finds the crafts can use them and once you do use them on an item that item can no longer ever be traded to another player.

The game is already set up that way, except for making the items non-trade-able afterward. That will result in wasted crafts, as people either use crafts they don't need on junk items, or delete them to make room within their 10-craft limit. Meanwhile people that are desperate for them can't buy them from you for all the tea in China. NOBODY is happy.

In my opinion the problem isn't trading crafts anyway, it's the fact that you can't. You're forced to use outside avenues and forums where you have to hand over your items to strangers, trust them not to brick your shit, and people are getting ripped off left and right - rather than networking everyone's horticrafting stations together so that crafts can be directly transferred using the game's own, safe internal trading mechanisms.

GGG you are too distanced from casual players. I am in my 40s and and I squeezed extremely hard to get 2 hours of my midnight time to play POE after working and family life. This league kept me playing consistently since day 1 because there is finally something that I am able to chase.

Taking away Deterministic harvest is going to kill the hope for players like myself. I am sure my comment probably won't even be seen out of 3000+ comments. But I want to put my opinion out there!

You guys are doing it wrong!

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Pelagoth wrote:

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HowToGusta wrote:

GGG, if you're looking to replace your project leads, look to your forums. Your players seem to have more sense than you. xD

These "players" are maybe 5-20k vs over 500k that don't complain/post at all because they are happy or don't care.

What is your point?

I'm sure you're not trying to say that the opinions of the people on these forums who are complaining don't matter? Or that they are not speaking for the majority just because the rest of the player base do not voice their opinions? How do you know that they are happy/unhappy? Are you psychic?

Instead of acting like that, how about you contribute something to the community? If you don't care, why even post a nonsensical and illogical comment like that?

FYI, I couldn't care less about this nerf. I will still play POE.

What I care about is GGG making these poor decisions and not addressing things like the trade issue on TFT amongst all the other flaws that people have taken time explaining on this thread.