Why 3.13 was so great

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j33bus wrote:

Except that Chris explicitly told us to stop saying that 3.13 was great and start telling him why. So apparently he doesn't know.

We also know slogs are kinda fun the first time and not so much the second, it's why nobody wants to do acts anymore but were hyped for that first run in 3.0. This is a game and thing put in that don't add value to it just gating get recognized as that quickly.

I think he was making a good faith attempt to find reasons that aren't obvious. I don't think he'll find any.

Consider this: a 'deterministic crafting scale from 1-10' with 10 being the most deterministic. There are people who claim Harvest was only a 3/4/5 because there was still randomness involved. Meanwhile Chris considers it a 9 and thinks that anything over a 5 has no permanent place in PoE.

I believe Chris was hoping to fish up some other things people liked to see if they could compromise on specifically because he knows they won't be compromising on Harvest. The best you'll ever see is stuff like new Aisling, Fossils, etc. Things that remove one and only one layer of RNG, not all of them repeatedly.

The good news is they always add new shiny things to power creep the game with, so at least 1/3rd of your list will happen.

I can only provide my personal perspective on 3.13 but hopefully it provides some value to the discussion.

First thing to get out of the way: I'm not a power player. I have never and will never craft or own anything super-powerful so Harvest means absolutely diddly-squat to me. In my context, it's a little helpful to basically roll a few attributes on a particular item and hope for a good enough outcome to be useful.

I don't care enough to spend any time researching the particular strategies to maximise returns. It's good at lower levels to link 4 socket items and maybe some other base level crafting like that. By comparison, I never have hundreds of fossils or resonators or Essences to enable effective crafting. I might have a small handful to thrown at an item and hope for the best, and of course we all know how that works out!

What I did enjoy about 3.13 though was the reward mechanic. Being able to actually select what would be useful to your character was phenomenally good for someone like me that typically loathes trading and is not wanting a 6T1 item. It's the first and only time I've played SSF and was a perfect match for that style. It reminded me a little of some of the earlier races with the endless dungeon where you had chests with a range of items to choose from.

The mechanic itself was reasonably good as it didn't break the flow of the game too much. You generally came across the alters as you cleared a map and they provided extra mobs which are desirable in the current game state. I didn't like the alters with rotating beams and tended to skip them as I find that mechanic tedious. Some maps made the mechanic problematic to play though such as dungeons with tight rooms or locations with multi-level areas.

I like that you run up to an alter and by mousing over it you quickly and clearly understand what the encounter is going to be. I don't have to go to a separate screen and third party website to understand anything. If I need to visit a third party to understand what the game is wanting me to do, that's an abject failure of game design.

Now, I recognise that there are a lot of players that enjoy the minutiae and intricacies hidden within the game, the ability to apply an incredible depth of knowledge and derive rewards from that. That's great, I'm not suggesting we remove that type of play from the game. I do however often see players like myself derided and dismissed because I'm just not good enough or hard core enough or dedicated enough for the game. I don't accept that though as a well crafted game should be able to offer multiple levels of interaction and meet the needs of a variety of players.

What do I normally want from a league? For me it's an excuse to perhaps try out a different skill or a different interaction of items. Because I do not exploit the efficient mechanics and hate trading I'm never going to be top tier and that's fine by me. I'll find a way to struggle through and push a build to where I can.

I don't particularly feel that 3.13 was the best state of the game, but 3.15 just absolutely is the furthest I've ever been from that. I also enjoyed Breach, Legacy (who didn't), Blight, Metamorph and Delirium for differing reasons. I hated Talisman (grind at least 125 amulets to get a chance at something good, but it never was), Synthesis (play chess with temporary maps that disappear and once again, forced speed meta) and Harvest (the garden and seeds is again more tedium micro-managing that I despise). Most other mechanics were... well, fine.

I don't want or care for power creep. GGG started the playerbase down that path though when they added timers to the gameplay. Can't kill something fast enough - you lose. All I've ever wanted from the game is some interesting mechanics (Strongboxes, Breach were enough for me) and a chance to try out a unique that enabled an unusual gameplay mechanism. Let me roll a bunch of different characters to try out different skills. Make the game too complicated or an obvious time sink and I'm just going to skip over that.

I just came here to kill monsters and loot stuff. That's all.

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j33bus wrote:

Now to be fair, I didn't say anything about build diversity, that was never the problem. For the most part build diversity is fine...

You didn't, and I probably included it because that's the only reason I liked Harvest - and defended it; because it did give me the ability to choose my build and skill based solely on what I wanted to play, and not on the skill's/build's ceiling. Because I don't think build diversity is fine ATM.

I still think one of the main reasons why people embraced Harvest, was because it (indirectly) highlighted so many areas of PoE's progressions systems that are lacking, and not because Harvest by itself was so amazing. Not trying to be a hobby shrink here, that's just how I see it.

3.11 and 3.13 was ALL about Harvest. Trading in those leagues was all about Harvest. Harvest WAS the game, which is a clear sign that it was tremendously more powerful than anything else in the game. To center the game around one mechanic is not the way to go. Some might say that without Harvest, the game in centered around only trade, and they might have a point. But again, that's just Harvest poining out flaws with PoE's progression systems.

I still think they nerfed Harvest the wrong way, but I still firmly believe that it had to be nerfed - a lot. Maybe the best thing would've been to spread the power of Harvest crafting throughout the game, and removed it completely.

"I felt forced to harvest and nothing else"

Seek professional help. Sounds like a compulsive disorder.

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Krayken wrote:

I hated it. Harvest ruined the experience for me.

Having to deal with TFT.

I never once did a transaction with TFT. It was just myself and one guildmate.
Nobody HAD to use TFT for trading, they did that because they wanted a billion exalts.
Harvest crafting allowed people like myself to finally craft the gear that before were unable to obtain via trade because we never had 100 exalts to blow on an item, or even have the knowledge to craft without Harvest.
Did I have Mirror tier gear? No but I was close, but still had a lot of min/maxing to do if I wanted perfect gear. And that was after 2+ months of playing and grinding which I was happy to do because for once I felt powerful.
Also had a sense of accomplishment that I made all of that gear myself with the exception of a pair of boots that I "stole" off off trade for 5ex that should have been selling for much more.

For casuals like me I'm willing to bet that we are the majority. After playing every league since Harbinger, my standard stash has a grand total of 99 exalts.
Sure I spent them as I went, but in no way am I the kind of player that has hundreds of them every league. The most I've ever had in 1 league was 57 and that was the league before Harvest (Delirium?).

For me, the problem with harvest was clear: It made all other crafting means in the game totally obsolete, it was extremely dominant and we could make 99.9% of any item with just it.

That's a self-destructive design. Each craft mechanic must complement each other, one helping the other, there can't be "just one".

However, harvest made crafting MUCH more enjoyable. Nowadays crafting is so nasty, there is so much chance of failure that most people simply prefer to buy the item.
Besides, what's the logical reason we have lots of mods that are practically impossible to get? Does GGG not want players to min-max their builds?

It was extremely gratifying to have the BiS of each item in my build, and it gave me additional motivation to play, and especially I can say that: I MADE EVERY PIECE.

I hope GGG rethinks the way crafting works, as the layers of RNG involved are insane.

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kenbak wrote:

For me, the problem with harvest was clear: It made all other crafting means in the game totally obsolete, it was extremely dominant and we could make 99.9% of any item with just it.

That's a self-destructive design. Each craft mechanic must complement each other, one helping the other, there can't be "just one".

However, harvest made crafting MUCH more enjoyable. Nowadays crafting is so nasty, there is so much chance of failure that most people simply prefer to buy the item.
Besides, what's the logical reason we have lots of mods that are practically impossible to get? Does GGG not want players to min-max their builds?

It was extremely gratifying to have the BiS of each item in my build, and it gave me additional motivation to play, and especially I can say that: I MADE EVERY PIECE.

I hope GGG rethinks the way crafting works, as the layers of RNG involved are insane.

I disagree with it making all other crafting means obsolete, I still found myself alt spamming, augmenting, regaling and scouring items until I got at least 2-3 mods I wanted on an item before attempting to use Harvest to finish it off.

Other means of crafting still had its uses and were stepping stones a lot of the time before using Harvest. What I would of liked more with Harvest is say you wanted to use Add/Remove Fire and it costed 1 Exalt that you would actually have to use 1 Exalt to use that Harvest craft, thus making it so currency still had its intended use and possibly making it so the cost would still be high to get that perfect item you wanted. I'd also of liked seeing it so that Harvest crafted items were account bound thus forcing you to make items yourself without the possibility of profiting from the system.

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firenovix wrote:

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kenbak wrote:

For me, the problem with harvest was clear: It made all other crafting means in the game totally obsolete, it was extremely dominant and we could make 99.9% of any item with just it.

That's a self-destructive design. Each craft mechanic must complement each other, one helping the other, there can't be "just one".

However, harvest made crafting MUCH more enjoyable. Nowadays crafting is so nasty, there is so much chance of failure that most people simply prefer to buy the item.
Besides, what's the logical reason we have lots of mods that are practically impossible to get? Does GGG not want players to min-max their builds?

It was extremely gratifying to have the BiS of each item in my build, and it gave me additional motivation to play, and especially I can say that: I MADE EVERY PIECE.

I hope GGG rethinks the way crafting works, as the layers of RNG involved are insane.

I disagree with it making all other crafting means obsolete, I still found myself alt spamming, augmenting, regaling and scouring items until I got at least 2-3 mods I wanted on an item before attempting to use Harvest to finish it off.

Other means of crafting still had its uses and were stepping stones a lot of the time before using Harvest. What I would of liked more with Harvest is say you wanted to use Add/Remove Fire and it costed 1 Exalt that you would actually have to use 1 Exalt to use that Harvest craft, thus making it so currency still had its intended use and possibly making it so the cost would still be high to get that perfect item you wanted. I'd also of liked seeing it so that Harvest crafted items were account bound thus forcing you to make items yourself without the possibility of profiting from the system.

You don't even get the point here...
Let me illustrate:

Try making a tailwind + elusive + t1 Life + Onslaugt ALL elevated boot with your regals + alch.

Don't distort the real point here, you know what I'm talking about. GGG could delete any other crafting means in the game, as long as Harvest still existed as before, but now, WITHOUT harvest, we need all other crafting means again, yet we can't even come close to the quality of items from before...

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kenbak wrote:

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firenovix wrote:

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kenbak wrote:

You don't even get the point here...
Let me illustrate:

Try making a tailwind + elusive + t1 Life + Onslaugt ALL elevated boot with your regals + alch.

Don't distort the real point here, you know what I'm talking about. GGG could delete any other crafting means in the game, as long as Harvest still existed as before, but now, WITHOUT harvest, we need all other crafting means again, yet we can't even come close to the quality of items from before...

Not quite sure what the point of this example is, but why would you state it as if it’s some kind of necessity towards acquiring adequate gear? Triple elevated T1 life or bust? Give me a break…you can get boots that are 90% as good as this for a fraction of the cost with meta crafting, awakened orb, and a veiled orb assuming you want the movement speed.

Harvest existed again in a meaningful capacity so I could actually progress my gear rather than just farm 3 mirrors to make finish my builds. (I personally preferred the harvest league mechanic as it was during harvest league, but it was still better than nothing to have it back in 3.13.)

Delve also was good, and the economy had the healthy feedback cycles between delve fossils, fractured maps, maven farming, crafting gear for builds to do all those, alva for corrupting for those builds, etc. All that is massively missing since 3.14. Economy feels like shit, gear progression is once again the dumpster shit of trade and rng exalt slamming/metamod blocking, delve is effectively nonexistant, fractured maps are gone, scarabs now have far less supply as well making normal mapping less enjoyable and targetted, time is less valuable for making money now too due to the constricted economy and removal of endgame farming avenues/niches.