EASY constructive FEEDBACK (HARVEST edition)

I was expected to find orbs of each recipe in harvest that you collect. Now we will have another tab to buy ;)

When I saw that they drop coins I was puzzle. This game is designed around orbs and interactions between them.

We have a market to evaluate if a particular orb is too expensive or too cheap and adjust the frequency ratio accordingly.

I didn't play harvest or since, so I dunno what was lost.

I did play a bit before the league launched and I still want to try the improved lab offerings (I'm sure I'll be disappointed, but new is new). The harvest craft was able to upgrade those, so I thought to myself, lets do a harvest. I removed black thumb from my atlas and went into a harvest.

What do you know, a unique boss. Lets give it a go, what can possibly go wrong. Thing kept spamming rares for 2 min straight, with their insane harvest HP bars. I ran around in circles like you normally do, to not die. Unfortunately whoever designed the terrain in the harvest area must not play the game, as I occasionally got stuck on the parapets you can't see at all from all the visual vomit that is your average poe since betrayal was released. At some point I got surrounded after getting stuck, and died.

What do I have to show for that unique? 27 lifeforce thing and the rolling flames unique jewel. I thought to myself "who would've expected the drops will be garbage" and went to check how many offerings I can convert with the "drops". Turns out, 0. I didn't find the recipe.

Black thumb again it is. Dunno why this thing even exists, the few crafts I noticed were useful are gone. And a lot of the costs are deranged. Its like they let an intern set the costs and told the intern to do it conservatively and safely, so that "nothing breaks". Then no1 who plays the game reviewed the changes and it went live.

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zlefin_actual wrote:

@merlinbolt it's rude to accuse people of just jumping on a bandwagon when they have legitimate complaints.

No, it isn't, many of the complaints are petty and mob-minded, and in fact Chris has confirmed that there was no loot nerf, so most of the complaints were not even based in reality, but in perception and mass delusion.

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zlefin_actual wrote:

chris is also the one who's screwing up poe right now. It's reasonable to be angry at people when they screwup and double down on their screwup rather than fixing it.

There is simply no basis for what you're claiming, Chris is largely responsible for making this game what is is, and it is the best game in the world.

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zlefin_actual wrote:

also harvest should be useable by those still leveling; it shouldn't just be for red maps only; some people don't even reach red maps and we deserve to be able to use all the mechanics.

This is a child-like request again, what would you say if someone said the same thing about divines or mirrors? No, harvest should be an endgame crafting tool, and the fact that you can accumulate small amounts of lifeforce during levelling is a very nice system, as it allows you to see progression, it would be as if you could accumulate divine shards during acts or early maps, that you don't plan on using until you get to the endgame. Most players don't even use chaos orbs until they get to high tier red maps.

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Kulze wrote:

How about... a written roadmap? You know, like a good chunk of the 'good' games out there often do.

Also there's literally games out there which do that stuff despite having only 1-2 devs. It's a common staple nowadays to do it and keep the community engaged, it's not the 'special' thing to do anymore.

I don't know what you mean by the roadmap, and I don't play any other games because I'd rather be playing poe. But I haven't seen what you mention in my many years of gaming, outside of poe. To my knowledge, most game developers rarely even bother to explain changes in written form, let alone talk about what's coming or do interviews. Maybe it is more common nowadays, but I doubt it's done nearly as well as what Chris delivers.

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Kulze wrote:

First of all, he always wanted to make the game basically a copy of D2 in terms of difficulty and item acquisition, this has been quickly thrown out the window with them moving into another direction.
People found out that it might be fun in a special mode specifically tailored for it. And well, all the power to them to produce it! I'll even try it out, yes, from time to time with my expectations going in there to have that, yes, it'll be enjoyable.

But enforcing it onto the mass of players is non-acceptable.
Those changes have obvious downsides any long-term player could name you in a day. Those changes have been brought up by Alpha testers that they're an issue.
Those changes aren't finished fully either, they are preparation to the future. And that's how we're given them, as is, not as should be.

So yes, whoever is responsible for that going through in this manner despite the knowledge of the existence of the issues should literally step down. Heck, I lost jobs for far less messing up then GGG did with their multi-million dollar company in the course of the last 2 years.
This is unacceptable, this shouldn't ever happen and especially not repeatedly despite the community putting emphasis on that exact point as to why it happened.

I believe you're totally misinterpreting Chris when he talked about hard mode. And also, 3.19 isn't hardmode, it doesn't resemble hardmode in the least, and it's been confirmed that there was no loot nerf, outside of beyond and delirium. So all of those people claiming 50-90% loot reduction were simply repeating something they've heard others say, with no actual experience to back it up. It wasn't even derived from actual players receiving less loot, it was all a misunderstanding because people read something Chris wrote, didn't understand it, and started deriving wrong conclusions about it.

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Kulze wrote:

What warranted the removal of prefix/suffix crafts entirely from Harvest?

As I said in my first post, I believe it was a mistake to remove that, and it was an even bigger mistake to remove the reroll values crafts. But there is a reasoning behind why they removed those, and it's that harvest got a lot of other buffs in 3.19, and they didn't want to make it the only mechanic worth farming. They also wanted to keep cheap reforges for levelling aid purposes, which I believe was another mistake, but it's one that most players actually believe is good. They're mistaken, but GGG has to balance what's good for the game long-term, and what's good for short-term player retention during a time of widespread complaints.

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Kulze wrote:

What warranted the upgraded versions of the crafts removed from Harvest as they were the important ones?

I don't know which ones you're talking about. Augments and remove? We got new ones that act similar to aisling slam now. Again, it was done to reduce overall harvest power to counteract the huge harvest buff that was the ability to accumulate and interchange infinite crafts.

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Kulze wrote:

What warranted the jewel enchantments being removed from Harvest?

We got easy and powerful synthesize and fracture crafts now.

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Kulze wrote:

What warranted the loot being pushed into very very specific mobs instead of overall drop-rate?

I don't see what the problem with this is. Are you more excited if a very valuable item drops from one monster, or if many less valuable items drop from many monsters?

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Kulze wrote:

What warranted allowing AN to have combined mods which make them outpace your character and one-hit you?

Characters shouldn't be immortal, and if there were no one-hits, it would be easy to make immortal chars.

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Kulze wrote:

What warranted reducing the minion survivability for end-game builds?
What warranted creating an easier experience for minion builds early game then ever when they already had a massive head-start in that stage?

I don't play minion builds. I don't know if that's true.

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Kulze wrote:

What warranted the nerfing of tainted currency?

Tainted currency was overpowered and restricted to a particular league mechanic, which incidentally was the best league mechanic in all of poe's history in my opinion, but it was scrapped because too many people complained about it, for the wrong reasons I believe. In any case, if you believe the game was fine in 3.18 without tainted currency, I don't see what problem you have if tainted currency comes back but being less powerful and harder to obtain than in scourge league.

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Kulze wrote:

I still find that comment fairly appalling personally spoken. I know exactly what I want out of PoE.
I want fights to matter but not be senseless. Allow my defenses to matter in any state of the game.
Don't give me too much dps during the progression, give me the right amount.
Give me something to look forward to. After an evening of playing I wanna be better off then before. More maps, more currency, not less.
Give me a deterministic way to progress my gear. This ties into the thing right above, I don't know if I'll end up with nothing or gonna have to re-do the whole expensive process 50 times more right now. The 'steps' have been removed.
Let me focus on the important stuff for a loot-based hack&slash, the actual loot, the gear on the ground. Meaning while important I don't care about small-scale currency, just auto-pick that and store it in a friggin spread-sheet, it's not worthwhile to know outside of enjoying 'a number going up' anyways.
On that notion, remove arbitrary mechanics which are a detriment for QoL. Wisdom scrolls do nothing. The feeling of excitement is the exact same when I identify an item in my inventory and it turns out great versus hovering over an already identified one on the ground. The difference is 5 clicks per item minimum though.
Give me a liiiittle bit more pickup range, just so my character doesn't crawl around on the floor scurrying up the stuff there and it actually lets me pick up items behind obstacles as that's still not fixed after years.
Make my map-tabs in Standard not be utter garbage with the broken conversion mechanic.
And many... many... many more things.

Most of the things you claim you want are already in the game. Others would present challenges if implemented. If there were no wisdom scrolls and all items dropped identified, itemfilters would get wise and show you only the items with the best mod combinations, as such crafting of midgame gear would become irrelevant, as would much of the economy, because it would be pointless to spend many hundreds, or even thousands of chaos orbs worth of currency crafting items that are no better than the ones you find on the ground. Likewise, Chris has talked about auto pickup and auto trade many times. You may think it would be good, but players need to feel the weight of items, trade, and crafting. You might as well suggest auto crafting bot that automatically rolls over items until it finds what you're looking for. At that point poe can quickly become just a spreadsheet game, and I don't see many people lining up to play with spreadsheets.

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Kulze wrote:

That's what I want. My fights to be balanced and my loot to be exciting and not tedious.
Yes, I want the ability to become god-like when I push my character.
No, I don't want to needlessly struggle in the core-content from intentionally frustrating mechanics put in.

This is contradictory. If your fights and loot drops are balanced, they can't be exciting, because nothing out of the ordinary happens. If your character becomes god-like, your fights aren't a struggle, so they can't be exciting. If you were able to overpower juiced T16 maps with ease, soon they would become just another kind of campaign, something you only play to get to the actually challenging content you want to do, instead of being something exciting and rewarding.

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Kulze wrote:

That's quite hyperbolic though. It's the argument 'Too much loot is bad' which yes, it is, agreed. But it adds the notion of 'Hence we're going to reduce the amount you get now'
That last part opens the question though. Was the amount of currency an average player got too much? Or was it badly balanced in another place rather? What is too much currency? What is too little currency?

I would say to the last 2 questions there is actually an answer:

Too much currency is when you can ignore trading to push a character into post end-game in 2 weeks as an average player.

Too little currency is when the average player has struggles to use it for their basic experience or to start using on their gear.


That's my take on the last 2 questions, the most important ones. So, fell the former status into one of those? Because right now we're in the second.

No, we're not, and loot was never nerfed like it was claimed. It was all a delusion, most players got the same amount of loot, and after the loot buffs that the complaining players forced GGG to implement, there is now more loot than in previous leagues. Except, again, for beyond and delirium.

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Kulze wrote:

Exactly! You got the point there completely!
This though shows their testing is sub-par! It shouldn't release in such utterly broken states in the first place.
If and only IF they manage to actually bring in things with proper testing and later then it's by far better then what happens at the moment.

If they never made mistakes, it would mean they're not taking risks, if they're not taking risks it means they're not doing enough to improve the game. Poe has become the best game in the world precisely because it does take risks and it does improve league after league. Again, most of the changes in 3.19 are good. A few are bad and they should be fixed. Most of the post-release fixes implemented due to player concerns were not done for the good of the game, but to appease the mob.

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Kulze wrote:

Or you used Discord and circumvented all those issues, creating a paradise for scammers and power-gamers having an unfair advantage compared to other players.

Another contradiction... No, the problems weren't circumvented. You had to go outside of the game, talk to other people on another platform when they may not even be online at the time, arrange trades and take risks. Now you don't have to do any of that. You also can substitute crafts you don't want for the crafts you do want, and players who don't want any crafts can exchange them for items they do want, quickly and without risks.

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Kulze wrote:

It was the worst decision outside of the removal of Bestiary crafts as well as the removal of the unique fossil mods the game has seen to date in regards to crafting.
The only reason Harvest was OP was because the other options already had been removed.

No, this is wrong, no other mechanic provided the benefits that harvest gave you, because harvest respects metamods. Perhaps you could say the original aisling slam was better, but it was only the finishing touch on an item, the last mod you would add, you couldn't use it to craft a whole item like you could with harvest.

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Kulze wrote:

They could and were actually, so that part is not true in the first place.
Secondly it was to alleviate the former 80 hour end-game grind (from start to finish) for a 'mediocre player' that needed 10+ hours for the campaign which has been increased to 200+ hours nowadays.

Harvest crafts had item level maximums. I don't know any players taking 200 hours to finish the campaign, other than first time players. I don't think I even took 200 hours to finish the campaign the first time I ever played the game back in the end of bestiary to beginning of incursion league.

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Kulze wrote:

Or I could just run Essences for a quick buck and buy the respective craft.
I could double-corrupt an item at any level with a temple.
I could fossil farm in Delve to create the currency to acquire such a craft.
I could do heist to acquire the currency for it.
I could do low level expedition to get enough artifacts to actually create a decent item from that mechanic to progress to end-game.

All of those allowed me secondary measures to actually get to that 'starting line' for the powerful crafts. Now it ends with it, everything beyond is gone.

Essence should be the main way to craft levelling items, because essence has many tiers and you can use lower tier on levelling items, or save them and upgrade to higher tiers for endgame items. Harvest can't do this now, and it shouldn't try to do this because harvest provides so much more power than essences, as it respects metamods and essence doesn't. Harvest can now also easily fracture an essence mod, so you can get two essence mods on the same item, and then continue your crafting through harvest again.

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Kulze wrote:

Early Harvest literally gives no lifeforce. It's utterly broken. Yes, would be great! But the notion is moot since it's not existing.

It does drop lifeforce. I suggest you play more and learn about the mechanic. It doesn't *always* drop lifeforce, just like other mechanics don't *always* give you something of value.

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Kulze wrote:

They are useless for that now though? Name a single viable craft to use on those.
Re-craft is a worse option of fossils.

Re-craft? Do you mean reforge? No it's not a worse option since it respects metamods, in fact it is a much, much more powerful option than fossils for crafting high tier items. Fossils are made for spamming during the beginning of your crafting process, whereas reforges can be used to help make near perfect items.

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Kulze wrote:

Flask enchants? Useless.

They are actually quite overpowered at the current cost and I believe they will have to be nerfed.

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Kulze wrote:

Enchant Armour/weapon? Useless outside of very very few fringe situations.

I don't believe you have played many endgame suited builds if you believe this.

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Kulze wrote:

Reforge influence is achieved easier with fossils and also is useless since you can't suffix/prefix anymore anyways.

Again, no. It respects metamods.