Following up on Recent Feedback

Suggestion to Harvest: Revert to the previous system, but add a type of currency item (like the Bestiary Orb) that can hold a certain craft. That way you can easily trade them.

Encounters would previously yield tens of crafts per encounter, which was very time consuming, and often resulted in an unwanted pause when grinding. Crafts should therefore be limited to a mere few, but the Horticrafting station should instead have lots more room, so you can save them for when you have time.

The best crafts should be extremely rare, and the monster encounter should be extremely difficult, making for a thrilling risk/reward situation: gamble your hard earned XP at lvl 98 for a really powerful (and valuable) craft.


The current Harvest feels completely uninteresting. You just click Blue, Yellow or Pink, depending on what you need, kill what spawns and move on. If it stays like this you might as well just remove it.

The hill to die on. Admirable that you are being open and honest about the game's direction.

I just don't understand how you think this direction is healthy for the game and your bottom line. I know you have to consider both, for good reason.

I am going to keep my eye on the game as always because I have so much invested in it, monetary-wise. However, I wont be spending a dime until minions are fixed, loot is reimagined in a positive way, or just revert it back to the way it was.

Maybe you should have created a separate league just for these loot changes and class balance changes.

Call it beta league, that way you can get good feedback without disrupting your core player base. Just a thought

I've been avoiding adding to the general clamour, but there are some things to be said. Apologies, this is a bit long.

The first thing is to say thank you for keeping with us and continuing to work on this in the face of some of the responses you are getting. I do think you are making some questionable design decisions that seem divorced from the way the game is played and enjoyed, but dialogue and feedback is the only way to manage it.

Secondly, for context, i'm a slow mapper, its all SSF and i'm never going to see the Uber content. I work my way towards T16 maps and play until my character runs out of capability and i can't craft anything better. Then i start another one, or go do something else. I quite often play hardcore, but AN and Lake have mainly killed that for me past the campaign (git gud, i suppose)

The key point for the changes for me are:
a) Vulcan rendered seems to be struggling - very long loading times at the start of each map and lake.

b) Harvest represented a way to access crafts i wasn't going to get the drops to do with currency, sure its RNG but i'm not trading anyway so that makes it exciting and worth checking out. There is now a huge hole where that was and i'm skipping harvest content. Just put it back and keep it as untradeable. You're not giving us agency, you're nerfing as you've removed a crafting layer and have nothing to replace it with. High level drops are no good, its mid tier stuff.

c) Lake of Kilandra. OMG, the scaling is broken, Metamorph one-shots of over 5.5k life at level 6 (yes, i have 76% res and armour). Surely that's not intentional. Mirror items are mainly trash; if you upped the frequency then maybe as i might get something useable or worth the trouble of working around, but i just drop them, not convinced 50% more of something that rare is going to cut it.

d) Herald of Minions is painful generally, not just in Delve. Please nerf.

e) Beyond maps, ridiculously difficult at mid level (5-6) large numbers of shards not enough to actually make a single actual orb.

So, generally, it would be ok if the scaling worked on difficulty and reward. I get that there are going to be spikes, but you might consider increasing the size of the testing team as there is a league theme developing that isn't going to help over the next 4-5 leagues before PoE2.

Aside from that, i appreciated the design philosophy's being shared and i agreed with them all. However, i think you've missed a few:

1) League content should scale and be more rewarding to play than regular content. Otherwise, why do we want to come back? The best ones provide interest and satisfaction in actually doing them as well as the materiel reward. Lake is ok, but the building the map is the best part at the moment "a bit pants" is probably how i'd describe it.

2) Pure RNG (weighted or not) is not fun. Crafting should have a level of RNG and Agency, you don't want deterministic (all agency) and we don't want full RNG, hence the system of blocks and removals, which you just nerfed.

3) Systems should not require memorisation, learning to use them, yes, learning 400 Harvest crafts so i know what colours to try and farm, no. The RNG on non-tradeable harvest was much, much better.

4) Crafting and Inventory systems go together; craft systems should show available inventory; this comes up again and again (Harvest, Expedition, Heist etc); please learn and then you won't have to patch it for every league.

5) There doesn't have to be a downside. Its ok for the players to be powerful (that's the fantasy that actually sells your game), challenges to be overcome are different from making RNG systems that are annoying or tedious to play for mediocre (or even high) payoff. Crafting is heading firmly for the latter.

Someone else produced a fantastic quote, i can't find the original version, perhaps someone will link it, saying something close to:
"I'd rather play an unbalanced, spikey game that was fun than play a fully balanced game that wasn't."

No-one plays to be average. We play to exercise the power fantasy, to cheat the system and become powerful, to find interesting items, to make more currency than anyone we know and watch things go BOOM! at the click of a mouse. Are the decisions you are making helping or hindering that? Because that's why we are here, and why we come back.

More feedback..... from just a casual solo player, who plays 1-3 hrs a day, and gets exhausted after playing 1-3 maps.

In 3.9 Metamorph, I could beat Sirus 50% of the time (I don't really have skill in dealing with specific fight stages), I'd of course use up my portals. Ten leagues later, I don't even dream about beating Pinnacle Bosses (Sirus, Shaper, Elder, Uber, Maven...) anymore, that is content I can't deal with, and I am fine with that. But it seems a shame you spent so much time creating content, only for people like myself to never see or touch or beat. My favorite build has been nerfed too much every league since 3.9 and pretty much dead by 3.19. I would need to have about 20-30 divines (formerly EX orbs) just to dish out roughly 3 million DPS, nerfed down from 8 million DPS as of 3.18.

Now in 3.19, my minions are dying despite every passive I have normally allocated on the tree (and more) just to keep them alive. When they die, I am pretty much next. I have to retreat, respawn them within the map because I might waste a portal, as I am expecting to get killed MULTIPLE TIMES by some random mob(s) instead of the map boss (or in the past, a Pinnacle Boss). This takes a few minutes to do as I have to do the desecrate cycle. So no more fast clear, just SLOOOOOOW all the way. My minions are even dying on Difficulty 4 against some unique mob(s). They even die on yellow maps even though I cleared one T15 map. I don't like repeating maps, so I buy what I need from Kirac, but I ran out of loot, despite getting a drop of 2 divines, that I put into basic gear to keep me and my minions alive.

The game is just frustrating now, and almost unplayable for me. I see myself playing a map, and that's it for a while. I also don't like playing non-necro builds (I don't like clicking a lot, which is why I let minions do all the work). I go into a map, but the difference between 3.18 and 3.19 is that I just die, not once, but 3-5 times. I'm surprised I even made it this far in this league after roughly 2 days of total playtime.

My new goal (down from trying to achieve 26/40 challenges) is to just reach a few T16 RED MAPS, and I think that's it for me for this league.

i don't agree in your harvest prespective , first you say eldritch currency was the way to replace harvest in removed crafts , the game now have 2 types of influence items , eldritch currency we were using in eldritch items anyway , but what about other infulence types , harvest lifeforces is shit anyway i have full atlas tree with full qunatity with full increase effect of modifiers on map and still get out with 600+ life force total max was 800 , this is very very bad , give us our removed crafts , you guys already nuked harvest 3 times and this fourth time is very very very bad coz it affects our crafting in huge way , i don't like rng crafting i should have some control on my crafts and safe way to save my item too so i don't waste my currency and item still shit

The game is no longer fun.
If you still like it, then soon only you will be left to play it.

"

Community feedback reports that Archnemesis Modifiers that convert rewards to quality currency and flasks feel bad. We are discussing this internally but don't have an outcome to report just yet. However, initial discussions suggest there is a fair bit of team agreement around it feeling bad.

As we mentioned in our last post, some players have noted that they'd prefer item drops to have lower variance - i.e. fewer big spikes of valuable rewards with the rewards averaged out across more encounters. This is something we're still discussing.

Big disagree, to a degree. Having flasks lootsplosion in early game is really damn good specially at T16 maps where they drop with ilvl 85. All my current flasks have t1 mods and it wasn`t that hard to alt-spam them.

There could be a trade off with less loot being converted while making the mobs more commom, the rarer loot shouldn`t be converted for obvious reasons, while the bad loot should be the one converted. So, if a divne orb drops, it just drops, while if a bad base item drops, it should just be converted to flasks or quality currency. Also, quality currency should incluse Gemcutter`s Prism. Even perhaps, at a more rare case, catalysts.

Catalysts and some other currency are more rare than essences or some of the other currencies. Blighted Maps for example, it should have the catalyst, heist, ritual and newer league nodes, similar to Expedition. The archnemesis mods should have a variant that drops these league specific loot with according balance: eg. a Tane Inspired archnemesis mod that converts drops to catalysts and even perhaps organs, a Cassia Inspired archnemesis mod that converts drops to oils and blighted maps. The same could be done for Delirium, delve, syndicate, fragments (all of them) and SPECIALLY the *********** memories. Of course, all balanced with its rarity, difficulty and other counters to make them meaningful and even expensive: eg. if a Blighted inspired arch nem mob appears, you kill it and it converts x loot, the loot would probably be less on the rare side like Golden Oil, and more on the Clear Oil side, while making sure not to reward as much oil as actual blighted maps and cassia encounters.

Also, Skin of the Lords should be modifiable with tainted currency. hehehehhe.

Harvest was already tradeable, this is the worst excuse I've seen from a gaming company. Terrible.

"This has been fixed internally and will be deployed in a coming patch."

Sure take as much time as you need, don't know why not just deploy it immediately.

"We understand that there is a call for us to bring those crafts back but it isn't really possible while allowing Harvest to remain tradeable.

Have you ever consider the feelings of SSF players? Especially for those who need to work instead of sitting in front of a computer and play for like 12 hours a day. Well as least for myself am a working exile, normally can just play for 1-2 hours a day.

Harvest mechanic is the best during Harvest League, after that is just shit. And you guys just make it shitter, good job.

Remember players will always find the most efficient way to gain the most power for their character, no matter in trade or in SSF. If everything is not efficient or in other terms not rewarding, we find another game that is worth the time.

I consider myself a long time player, I do skip league in the past but only because me personally don't like the league mechanics. But this time, is because the game itself.

Hopefully you guys can come up with something that truly makes the game great again, peace.

Somehow I really doubt you "need" more feedback. I think you have more than you actually need or even care to read on these forums and other sources.

I am sorry but your telling us you spend hours debating things that seem so obvious to many of your customers playing the game? Seems odd to me but okie dokie.

I know you are not intentionally messing with the game due to malice but man it feels like something is off. Like attention to details is low, attention to wow factor is low, attention to is this gonna be awesome and fun to play is low.

Why does it "feel" like that to so many of your players? Only GGG knows all the answers to this and has their own internal plans that are held close to chest it seems.

Will be interesting to see how all this plays out through the league and into the next.