Grinding Gear and Deterministic Crafting

Hello GGG and Exiles!

I have been pondering the nerfs to Harvest and the nature of Harvest a lot lately. POE has always had a few strong divisions in its player base. Players with tons of time to play the game vs. players with only casual amounts of time. The line is blurry on where the divide is and I'm not writing this to pin that down. I think players would all understand and agree that such a division exists regardless of who would put the line where. There is also another division along lines of mechanical skill. Mechanically gifted players *cough*Mathil*cough* are naturally going to go farther, faster, simply by not being taxed in a way someone like myself, I lose the cursor when my screen gets too busy, am by mechanics. Likewise there is another divide between players who have deep game knowledge vs those who just know the basic controls of the game.

Note that some precious few of us are blessed with an abundance of time, mechanical skill, and deep game knowledge. Easy examples are the community streamers and racers who provide a ton of the POE adjacent content we enjoy, or at least have access to. With this background in place now let's talk Harvest:

Harvest shined a light on something specific. It let players who didn't have the time or knowledge or skill to complete items see and feel what it was like to have access to that end game. Instead of having to farm up a heaping whack of exalts and chaos diligent use of Harvest would let you finish your items and complete a build to the maximum possible. So, suddenly, an informed, skilled, player with limited time could see what it was like when someone similar to them had hundreds of hours to throw at a league. Then, with Harvest core, this was sustained. Players kept the ability to push characters to completion.

For someone on the high end of the divide this was... Meh. They were already completing characters and for them this all but eliminated some of the core challenges they were focused on leaning into. For someone on the low end of the divide this was great. A completed character is exceedingly powerful and if you follow community content creators you've seen videos of some of the super powerful things builds can achieve.

So now, after having tasted the high life, GGG has taken the access away and put everyone back to the prior state of having to grind. It's in the company name after all.

This reveals a specific problem: POE, as designed, does not respect the time a player gives to it. What I mean by this is that time+effort+skill+knowledge does not promise progress. A person can play the game 40hrs/wk for a whole league, for example, and not find Aul. (That is, POE is your full time job.) Progress, for these purposes, can be measured in a few ways: currency farmed, bosses encountered, (It's on you to beat them yo.), gear completed, etc.. Certainly you'll get a build to "good enough" in that time but good enough is not the same.

Even if someone doesn't explicitly understand what's going on in the background they will have, or develop, a sense of their time being valued or wasted on something. Right now, the ridiculous RNG of POE's gear, combined with ever growing depth of knowledge required to build an effective character, just take a minute to look at how to scale ignite damage, or how evasion works, to see some easy examples of this complexity, makes it such that a player's time, even someone with massive amounts of time to devote, is not respected.

Regardless of how this is approached my wish for future systems in POE is that they would focus on respecting time. When I sit down to game for an evening I'm looking at playing a round of The Are Billions and whether I win, or lose (very likely), I'm going to play a whole game and get a complete experience. If I pickup a survival game like Valheim or 7 Days to Die, I can complete sever in game days, harvest useful resources, and point to someone as done. If I pull up Rimworld or Oxygen Not Included I can accomplish a meaningful piece of content in a couple few hours of gameplay. By comparison, in POE I can devote 2-4 hours to running maps, maybe complete a few dozen after paying the stash tab and trade taxes on my time, and accomplish nothing worth mentioning. That's a bug, not a feature, and anyone at GGG saying otherwise is selling something.

Likewise, if I level a character to maps and that character turns out to be bad, that's an error that's going to cost me 8-16 hours to fix depending on the league and the state of my uniques stash tab. And I'm lucky enough to have money to spend on the free game for those tabs. It's significantly worse for people who don't have them.

Should there be diminishing returns? Yes. Should a perfect character take a lot to accomplish? Yes. I'm not under any illusion that balancing these things around a gameplay experience that respects a player's time is an easy question to answer and it seems that GGG feels like Harvest missed the mark. Ok, fair enough, but this problem is not going to go away. It is, in my view, the single greatest problem confronting the game. Performance issues in an online game are annoying but expected. Death effects are annoying but whatever. Having to rebuild a character at the cost of an entire week of a league feels excessive but whatever.

time+effort+skill+knowledge needs to promise some sort of progress. If the folks at GGG bend their minds to solving this problem I'm sure they'll find a good solution. They're very good at the problem solving kinds of things and they're bold and ambitious enough to try things like Harvest, Synthesis, and Heist. It is my opinion that this problem is the only severe problem that needs to be solved. It's worse than desync, or over tuned bosses, or vanishingly rare bosses, or dropping so many worthless rare items that we have to use filters to hide the garbage.

Many thanks if you read all the way through to the end here. I hope you are all safe and well in this slow rolling apocalypse we're living though. :)

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Razlynne wrote:

Harvest shined a light on something specific. It let players who didn't have the time or knowledge or skill to complete items see and feel what it was like to have access to that end game.

Wrong. Harvest was powercreep gone mad. You aren't accessing items that no-life players had in previous leagues, you are able to deterministically craft items that have never existed outside of harvest league for real cheap.

Take a look at the top end builds on poe.ninja from Heist. Even in the top builds you will see plenty of dead mods and multi mod items. What Harvest did was allow players to trivialise the game, to the point where your build and playstyle doesn't really matter, and for some unknown reason, believe this was the power that top end players had in previous leagues.

Just compare these two builds:
https://poe.ninja/heist/builds/char/a_dem/Heist_LuckyBV
https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds/char/aphung/solo_dolo

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Razlynne wrote:

Instead of having to farm up a heaping whack of exalts and chaos diligent use of Harvest would let you finish your items and complete a build to the maximum possible. So, suddenly, an informed, skilled, player with limited time could see what it was like when someone similar to them had hundreds of hours to throw at a league.

See above. A knowledgeable and skilled player can already beat all the content in the game within a few days from league launch. Even with less time to play, that is easily achievable over the course of a 3 month league.

You do not need Harvest to complete content. And as stated above, you the kind of items you can craft with Harvest goes well beyond anything you could create even with 10000 hours without harvest. This should be obvious to anyone..but here is some stuff to look at.

SSF Ritual builds 1 month into the league:

https://poe.ninja/challengessf/builds/char/comoestoy/Hydrascale_Boots?time-machine=week-4&i=5&search=time-machine%3Dweek-4

https://poe.ninja/challengessf/builds/char/blackkfcchicken/UnlimitedBladeWork_s?time-machine=week-4&i=0&search=time-machine%3Dweek-4

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Razlynne wrote:

This reveals a specific problem: POE, as designed, does not respect the time a player gives to it. What I mean by this is that time+effort+skill+knowledge does not promise progress.

Based on what? Its always the same few players that are taking out top spots in races or the gauntlets. Lightee was able to kill the Maven during SSFHC league launch and in the guantlet within around 48-60 hours?

The same players are the ones able to clear all content every league. The game rewards knowledge and skill. If you know how your build works and how to scale your damage, what mods are important for your build and how to obtain them you will do better. If you know boss mechanics, you can push content earlier and with lesser equipment.

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Razlynne wrote:

A person can play the game 40hrs/wk for a whole league, for example, and not find Aul. (That is, POE is your full time job.) Progress, for these purposes, can be measured in a few ways: currency farmed, bosses encountered, (It's on you to beat them yo.), gear completed, etc.. Certainly you'll get a build to "good enough" in that time but good enough is not the same.

What is this based on? 40 hours a week is a lot, and Aul is rare; but not that rare..have you actually ever delved before? You have 32 maven witnesses, haven't beaten Sirus and obviously haven't even reached 250 depth. So I'm not sure what you are basing this on.

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Razlynne wrote:

Even if someone doesn't explicitly understand what's going on in the background they will have, or develop, a sense of their time being valued or wasted on something.

This only applies to bad players. Good players (new or old) are continually learning and with experience, know what there next upgrade is and how to work towards it. Bad players refuse to learn, blame their lack of progress on everything but themselves.

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Razlynne wrote:

time+effort+skill+knowledge needs to promise some sort of progress.

It already does. Based on what you have said and on your account, you aren't ticking any of these boxes.

A person who can beat all content in the game within a few days, (the first weekend?), of launch is not merely skilled. That requires a level of mechanical skill and game knowledge and free time that would be more than 3 standard deviations from the mean. (Number is dark and stinky in origin. My point is that such a person is an outlier.) You can't discount the amount of effort it took for someone to develop those skills.

All points re: Harvest are moot. Harvest is dead and personally I trust GGG in that decision. (You read what I wrote right?)

Having the free time to devote 48-60 hours to the game in a race is... Not normal. That's someone who does not have a day job, or has managed to make their day job into POE. Those people are at the very tippity tip of the spear of the player base. I don't see anything wrong with this. Those people are good and are reaping everything they.

As for, "based on what?", I laid out several examples of time investment from game to game. In terms of my own accomplishments, I've never pushed beyond Shaper or Red Tier elder. The deepest I've ever bothered delving was mid 300s. That's with around 5000 hours in the game since just before open beta ended. I don't do more because I don't want to. (I may not be able to even, who knows?) Your "good players vs bad players" concept is... problematic. I would agree that learning is a trait of good players but learning requires 1)Time and 2) Practice. This necessarily means that even under your mapping becoming a good player takes a significant investiture of time yes?

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Razlynne wrote:

A person who can beat all content in the game within a few days, (the first weekend?), of launch is not merely skilled. That requires a level of mechanical skill and game knowledge and free time that would be more than 3 standard deviations from the mean. (Number is dark and stinky in origin. My point is that such a person is an outlier.) You can't discount the amount of effort it took for someone to develop those skills.

Okay. Your entire argument is that the game doesn't reward players for their time, effort, skill or knowledge..but it seems that it does? And even if you can't complete content as quickly as those kinds of players, you should appreciate that there is a wide range of players that sit between a day 1 player and someone like lightee or alk.

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Razlynne wrote:

Having the free time to devote 48-60 hours to the game in a race is... Not normal. That's someone who does not have a day job, or has managed to make their day job into POE. Those people are at the very tippity tip of the spear of the player base. I don't see anything wrong with this. Those people are good and are reaping everything they.

That isn't the point. I'm saying that if you have players that are able to complete substantially all the content in the game in something like 48 hours, then there isn't much of an excuse in terms of gear or play time when a league is 3 months - provided that is your objective and you have played the game before.

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Razlynne wrote:

As for, "based on what?", I laid out several examples of time investment from game to game. In terms of my own accomplishments, I've never pushed beyond Shaper or Red Tier elder. The deepest I've ever bothered delving was mid 300s. That's with around 5000 hours in the game since just before open beta ended. I don't do more because I don't want to. (I may not be able to even, who knows?) Your "good players vs bad players" concept is... problematic. I would agree that learning is a trait of good players but learning requires 1)Time and 2) Practice. This necessarily means that even under your mapping becoming a good player takes a significant investiture of time yes?

So what is your point? You don't push beyond red maps or elder because you don't want to. Thats fine, there is nothing wrong with that. But the rest of your comment makes no sense and contradicts your initial post as well.

First off, yes learning how to map does require you to think. The same applies to everything in the game. You learn map layouts, how to move around the map, dangerous map modifiers and different mechanics that appear in maps. None of this is complex and doesn't take require much effort to figure out. I'm not really sure what you think the alternative should be? Remove all enemies? Perhaps make mobs deal no damage? What is your point? This goes directly back to your premise that the game doesn't reward players for their time, effort, skill or knowledge.

Lets also revisit your initial comment:

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Razlynne wrote:

A person can play the game 40hrs/wk for a whole league, for example, and not find Aul. (That is, POE is your full time job.) Progress, for these purposes, can be measured in a few ways: currency farmed, bosses encountered, (It's on you to beat them yo.), gear completed, etc.. Certainly you'll get a build to "good enough" in that time but good enough is not the same.

I'll ask again, where does this example come from? This would be like you saying that you have played 5,000 hours and never killed shaper. Well okay, you never played up to red maps, so what is the purpose of this comment?

If someone plays 40 hours a week and never delves, then why does it matter if they never find Aul?

I didnt use harvest at all, other than to screw around when I found one in a map. I never crafted anything great. as usual, i just bought all my gear when I was able. One piece at a time. The nerf will still effect me though , because the things i was able to buy will now get a lot more expensive.

It's just the way it is.

Well said.