PoE peaked in 3.13 and I am afraid that it may never go back up again... version:2

interesting question is, how to give more power to casual players and not giving the power of crafting perfect items to professionals.

harvest horribly failed on that despite some crafting being bound to item level.


regarding ritual, i casually play with a friend from time to time for some hours, reached maps, advanced to t2 maps and now i'm back with no maps at all cause none drop and i have to buy them.

rituals are pretty uninteresting except for currency items but even then it's often not worth stopping for the risk of getting set back as a squishy summoner.

so is this game dying? don't think so but it's a nice and entertaining time waster now if you don't have the intention to win.

winning itself got more difficult but eventually they need to have some challenging content and tasks for those professionals.

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vio wrote:

interesting question is, how to give more power to casual players and not giving the power of crafting perfect items to professionals.

harvest horribly failed on that despite some crafting being bound to item level.


regarding ritual, i casually play with a friend from time to time for some hours, reached maps, advanced to t2 maps and now i'm back with no maps at all cause none drop and i have to buy them.

rituals are pretty uninteresting except for currency items but even then it's often not worth stopping for the risk of getting set back as a squishy summoner.

so is this game dying? don't think so but it's a nice and entertaining time waster now if you don't have the intention to win.

winning itself got more difficult but eventually they need to have some challenging content and tasks for those professionals.

There is a thin line between being able to win the game (aka clear all content in a smooth way) and being able to painfully clean some of the content in rags...

GGG has a lot work to do from stability to rewards and loot in PoE.

"

Aim_Deep wrote:

thats elitist...no ones opinion is more valid than another in this instance. If a noob hates this league thats one less paying customer same as you.

Now, if we're talking how do I delve 2000 I'll give more credence to your thoughts.

Actually, to be specific, you gotta delve deeper than 4.5k solo, which was my solo rank in delve league. If we ignore the party delvers I'm the original #1 solo delver.

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Azarhiel wrote:

There is a thin line between being able to win the game (aka clear all content in a smooth way) and being able to painfully clean some of the content in rags...

GGG has a lot work to do from stability to rewards and loot in PoE.

it's not a thin line, the gap is rather wide. and it should be.

winning only feels good if you had a long and painful way or if others massively fail on their way and struggle.

of course, nobody wants to be on the side of those that lose but that's how it is:

if you're not winning when the game gets a bit more restricted in throwing exalts on you, you are probably not that good as a gamer.

The biggest issue with the nerf (no... nerf is not the right word... total obliteration) to harvest, is it removed any deterministic crafting from the game.

Yes, you have essence, for guaranteed specific rolls. But items have 6... And when the odds are stacked against you in such a horrific way, there's just no real way to craft an item that you really want, unless you have godly amounts of currency to throw at it.
This is out of the reach of 99.99% of players.

Smart loot is needed. GGG are too against it.
Deterministic crafting is needed. GGG are too against it.
People will eventually get bored of everything being insanely RNG based.
People will grind if there's an actual realistic chance of character progression and getting what they want/need.
But the current ability for this is just not right. It needs to be fixed.

Take a simple example.
You farm.. and farm.. and farm.. eventually getting enough currency/materials to craft an item you need/want.
Essence, fossil, harvest reforge, whatever it is.
And after 100's of attempts, you make something nice. say 4 nice affix's.
But 2 bad ones.

What can you do?
Annul and pray.
That is it. and if you hit one of the nice 4, your item is completely FUCKED. there is no come back. There's no way to fix it.
With harvest, this was not the case.
But now, it's gone.

Standard is suffering big time from this.
Those who have these godly items will never sell them.
You either farm for weeks and get a mirror + 200ex+ fee, and pay for a copy, or you just settle for shit gear and shit builds.
These items are not going away. Harvest is not coming back.
There's no way to fix this situation in standard.

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Orbaal wrote:

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MrsDeath_ wrote:

The nerfs craft system -harvest to be specific- and characters has received made Poe a worse game in every way possible than its former self which can be simply named as 3.13. I am afraid that Poe may never go back to its old glory -3.13-.

Thats a very pessimistic outlook.
I took it the other way around.

The way I see it, GGG got rid of stuff and thus freeing up design space for new toys that might be introduced down the road.
Especially Harvest was pretty much invalidating older crafting methods and also preventing new crafting methods from being introduced in the future.
It should have never gone core as far as Im concerned.

Now that Harvest is somewhat nerfed, GGG can actually introduce another crafting league down the road that will have some sort of impact. Same goes for everything else they did nerf.


Sure, it might be painful shortterm but I think its beneficial longterm and thus I dont care about shortterm downsides.
It was the right call for the games longevity and to be honest: I trust the devs vision for the future of this game much more than someones butthurt feelings.

Look at it this way:
If the devs were actually listening to just half of the stuff suggested by the community the game would have been dead, rotten and forgotten years ago.
The only reason this game is still thriving is the fact that the devs DONT listen to the community and have the balls to do their own stuff.
I respect and support that.

This is an interesting perspective.

The way I see it that older crafting methods were elevated by harvest crafting. You were supposed to prepare a base with all the other ingredients via regular crafting then switching to harvest craft to finish up the final touches. I think first introducing an efficient and superior method, for the 2nd time, and then nerfing it down to nothingness is what angers most people. It threw the monkey wrench into the 3.14 and made it unplayable for most of the people. The nerfs were too heavy this time and a lot of people struggled to the point of quitting.

I believe there can be a balance while introducing these kinds of changes but taking this big of a leap was unnecessary and too big of a change for players to grasp in one patch change.

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vio wrote:

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Azarhiel wrote:

There is a thin line between being able to win the game (aka clear all content in a smooth way) and being able to painfully clean some of the content in rags...

GGG has a lot work to do from stability to rewards and loot in PoE.

it's not a thin line, the gap is rather wide. and it should be.

winning only feels good if you had a long and painful way or if others massively fail on their way and struggle.

of course, nobody wants to be on the side of those that lose but that's how it is:

if you're not winning when the game gets a bit more restricted in throwing exalts on you, you are probably not that good as a gamer.

That's the problem here :

Long and painfull way ? For how long ? 6 month, one year, ad infinitum ?

I'm not winning when the game starts to cut me off thing that are mandatory to progress like good stuff found on the ground and not in a shop and a good crafting system that is not a casino...

"

MrsDeath_ wrote:

I think first introducing an efficient and superior method, for the 2nd time, and then nerfing it down to nothingness is what angers most people. It threw the monkey wrench into the 3.14 and made it unplayable for most of the people. The nerfs were too heavy this time and a lot of people struggled to the point of quitting.

I believe there can be a balance while introducing these kinds of changes but taking this big of a leap was unnecessary and too big of a change for players to grasp in one patch change.

For the most part I do agree.

Harvest shouldnt have gone core, that would have avoided the outrage or if does go core, it should have been severely nerfed from the start.
Then collect data and if the devs think Harvest could and should be stronger than the heavily nerfed core version actually is, they could have buffed it the point where they want it to be.

Its far easier to communicate buffs however tiny those might be than communicating nerfs ever will be.
This was a major mistake and GGG paid deerly for it.
Also trying to balance Harvest by rarity was not the smartest approach to put it mildly.


Parts of the community reacted in a predicatble way. Kinda like children when their parents take away the candy bars and started to cry to force changes.
GGG obviously couldnt give into this, even if they wanted to, because then the community would only learn one lesson: Cry hard to force changes and GGG would have experienced this every single time they wanted to nerf something popular enough to spark outrage - which isnt exactly hard these days.
At least they did stand steadfast and didnt give in, thats pretty much the only saving grace in this whole Harvest fiasko.

I dont blame the community for reacting the way it did react. GGG is fully responsible and brought this needlessly onto themselves. They should have known better.

Having said that: Bringing out the nerf hammer and bringing down a whole lot of content while the community was already pissed off was a very smart move and I applaud GGG for doing so - even if I dont agree with all nerfs.
But they kinda already did hit rock bottom and couldnt get much worse, so why not use this opportunity and do all the unpopular stuff right away?
The alternative would have been going through this outrage for several leagues in a row, each time they were going to nerf whichever mechanic.
Getting it all done in one big swoop was genius and balls of steel right there.

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vio wrote:

interesting question is, how to give more power to casual players and not giving the power of crafting perfect items to professionals.

harvest horribly failed on that despite some crafting being bound to item level.

Well, Harvest actually did bring casuals and "professionals", "1%" or whatever you want to call them closer together. Pros had mirror-tier items all along, they got a bit better. Casuals got a massive improvement in the average quality of their items.

But yeah, balancing anything by rarity doesn't work, and only benefits the top end of the player base. If you seriously want something to help casual players, but not the top end of players, it has to be common. And it has to be not too powerful. For example, you could have left the old Harvest in place, but limit it to work on items with at most 4 modifiers. That way, the average joe could have made 4T1 items, but no one could have made 6T1 items. But GGG decided that that isn't a good route. I personally disagree.

The way it is implemented now, Harvest is balanced through rarity and most efficiently used through TFT by rich players. And I am pretty certain that the difference in player power between casuals and 1%-Players this league is larger than last league. Which I generally think is bad.

let s be honest here , GGG gave players too much.

The reason people are complaining is the addiction to crafting creep and power creep made them dependent to enjoy the game.

On his own the game is perfectly fine without harvest or loot pinata league but players got addicted to it.

Biggest mistake was to even create something like harvest. When Chris said harvest could break the game it also broke players expectations.

IT was a silly idea to let something like harvest going live just to powercreep players and try to attract them in.