Crafting Feedback - 9 years of playing poe

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impulze3 wrote:

Overall TL:DR
Bring back OG harvest gameplay and crafts, make it tradable, balance drop rates or move the OG crafts to a new mechanic. Remove recombinators and reduce the amount of setback mechanics or at least make them not part of the main crafting gameplay loop like vaal orbs are right now.

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impulze3 wrote:

First and foremost, Crafting in path of exile is in a state where the endgame of it is reserved for the 0.01% of 1% of players, the most neckbearded of the neckbearded elite.

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impulze3 wrote:

TL:DR Empathizes Crafting is the juice of the game, and everything builds on it. Crafting is the game.

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impulze3 wrote:

Hi, i'm a standard crafter and i know almost everything about crafting you can know along with a bunch of secrets the vast majority of players don't know .I'm no stranger to dumping thousands of exalted orbs into items or risking mirror tier items. When i say this i just say it to put some weight on following feedback.

First and foremost, Crafting in path of exile is in a state where the endgame of it is reserved for the 0.01% of 1% of players, the most neckbearded of the neckbearded elite. All crafting systems are obfuscated by having every type of craft apply a different set of rules. Creating a complex set of interactions where there is no other way than simply spending insane amounts of time to learn it all. It is non-trivial and presents an artificial barrier made of information.

The game provides you no guide how crafting works. Sometimes it gets changed without note. This leads to people who are deep into the game having to permanently keep up with the game, either you're no-lifing this crap forever or you're falling far behind leading to the usual FOMO and too-deep-in-to-quit addiction kickbacks.
By design it leads to players who spend the most time on it being rewarded the most, incentivizing to puzzle solve crafting strategies and separating the player base heavily based on generic intelligence, time-spent and higher planning skills.

The economy is built on those who craft and sell their crafted items to those who don't. Bulk crafting, casual crafting. etc etc, its all based on crafting. You will never pick up an endgame rare from a monster. ever. You farm things, sell them and buy items from someone who crafted them or you craft them yourself.

TL:DR Empathizes Crafting is the juice of the game, and everything builds on it. Crafting is the game.

This is all fine, however here comes my rant:


Major Setbacks and the never ending 50/50 :

In recent leagues more and more mechanics have been added or turned into 50% chance gambles or that include partial or full setbacks on itemization. Aisling, Maven orbs, recombinators, tainted currency.

All those new mechanics have a chance to completely wreck any progress you made. it is unfun and an absolutely frustrating experience that you can loose hours to days of progress in a single click to the point where i just feel like quitting the game entirely the more of these mechanics are integrated into the game.

yes, harvest had setbacks too but they were rarely absolute and you just had to invest time and you could smoothly progress your items until they were perfect. it lowered the distance between the 0.01%, 1% and the common pleb players by reducing the knowledge and time-spent required. allowing everyone to play the game and not have to depend on the neckbeard elite economic crafters supplying the entire server with items while making massive profits.

This was not wanted, its was making those who invest insane amounts of time in poe to feel less special and have alot less of an advantage. Its alot less obfuscated if you can just progress everything with just one mechanic meaning the game becomes less of a time sink. So harvest smooth progression was nuked from orbit.

To replace a smooth progression with a "-1 or +1" two-steps-back 3-steps-forward random walk progression is incomprehensible. It exists just to waste as much time possible, to make us spend more time in the UI than actually killing monsters and it feels malicious to force that on us. It is absolutely infuriating. 50% chance to delete a mod you need with aisling, 50% chance to delete all your modifiers with tainted currency. Maven orbs nuking mods. I know this type of risk/reward exists since vaal, but the game was never balanced around you having perfect vaal implicits. However the game is for sure balanced around having gear crafted with these mechanics. It is leading to you absolutely having to engage [Removed by Support] (unlike vaal) and enduring these never ending 50/50 setbacks.

It does not even feel like you're being rewarded with the crafted items anymore. It feels more like a chore you have to do just to keep up with the ever rising requirements of the game and it feels like you just escaped getting screwed by a 50/50 instead of winning anything.

TL:DR making high risk/reward mechanics >>required<< to progress gear to a comfortable level is a huge mistake. It is making crafting extremely frustrating and unfun.


Harvest changes
I know there have been alot of discussions about this but i just want to emphasize this again.

You turned harvest from a game mechanic into a strongbox clone that drops crafts in the most annoying and user unfriendly way possible. You cannot trade them, you cannot save them to a degree where its comfortable and you most of all have no meaningful gameplay attached to it. you removed the gardening, seeds, planning, thinking etc etc. and kept only the crafting station with extremely limited space.

This mechanic is still one of the most powerful mechanics in the game for crafting, but at the same time its one of the worst mechanics in the game in terms of gameplay and fun factor.

[Removed by Support]

I know this is not very constructive but i just wanted to let this off the hook: harvest gameplay without gardening, planning and seeds fricking sucks. The 15 crafts limit sucks and not being able to trade the crafts sucks even more.

Overall [Removed by Support] the only reason i want it to stay is because i'm afraid i'll never be able to surpass the OG harvest created items without it and that i don't trust your ability to rebalance the game around it not existing.



Recombinators
Same song, its incredibly powerful but has insane setbacks and risk/reward. If you balance around this one aswell and force it down into the core game we will have one more annoying 50/50 mechanic to ruin the reward of hours of playing in a single click.

Its bad for the current neckbeard economy aswell since it does not produce many meaningful intermediate items like other crafting system that can be sold to fund further crafting. Its an all-or-nothing mechanic thats even more powerful than harvest with even less gameplay attached to it. I hope this stuff gets deleted [Removed by Support]

If you keep recombinators you may aswell delete the entire affix weight system because it gets ignored by recombinators anyways.



Overall TL:DR
Bring back OG harvest gameplay and crafts, make it tradable, balance drop rates or move the OG crafts to a new mechanic. Remove recombinators and reduce the amount of setback mechanics or atleast make them not part of the main crafting gameplay loop like vaal orbs are right now.