Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

RIP game.
This change is just telling 99% of the player base who can't put 12hours daily into the game to piss off...

Harvest was the only thing keeping me interested throughout the league. Was looking forward to next league with several crafting plans for builds to play around with but now.. guess its time to find something else to play.

It's funny how your philosophy, your way of thinking, in most cases, is the opposite as mine. I enjoy playing the game with OP characters, and when I spend 100 ex on a character I expect it to destroy the endgame. But for you it's different, you want people to "suffer" in your game. GGG, you're making a game, it's not real life, let people have fun, will you?

Plus Harvest might be deterministic now, but to make a perfect piece of gear, you still need to invest a lot. You might need 10 rem / add before hitting T1, and spent 10 to 20 ex just for 1 mod. Anyway, we'll see how it is in 3.14, but the way you talk always makes people think you nerfed things way too hard and turned our mind into a negative way of thinking and you shoud probably change that. Hire a psy of something for better communication hey.

I really hope you take the community feed back from this post and then make your decision... I honestly feel that its ok the way it is because it gives you a end of league goal of obtaining strong items that YOU can craft and not just buy off .trade. The overall cost of crafting a good item this league vs harvest was a lot higher in price and honestly 20 exalts for a crazy good item that otherwise would be 50+ exalts is a good spot for the game IMO. This is the longest I have ever played a league and I started in ambush. The fun of being able to craft an item without 50+ exalts is keeping me going and I'm not sure if I will play if we go back how it was.

you opens reddit and 90% of ppl are unistalling this game right now.

Really hope you reconsideer what you're doing.

Nobody likes the casino game and the "craft system" of the old path of exile with alts/regals/exalt and lucky.

You should improve harvest somehow, make it harder if needed, but not removing it from the game. Thats a shoot in your foot

Really really disappointing! I played this league for a much longer period of time than usual, particularly because of Harvest. I did have a lot of fun improving gear progressively and without just rolling the dice. Heck, it was one the few times I kept playing to Level 100 and even continued for a good while after reaching it without getting bored.

On the bright side, there's plenty of time freed up for other things than PoE in the coming months.

uhh can you like not do this?

I pretty much never post on the forums but thought I'd throw in my 2 cents on this one. It just sounds like GGG is tightening the bottleneck and making certain crafting outcomes 'irreversible'. Making more crafting outcomes irreversible and increasing the barrier to gain these mirror tier items only realistically slows down the ultra-wealthy in game and perhaps raises the bar to be ultra-wealthy. If it is trade-able, no matter how tight you make the bottle-neck, the ultra-wealthy will get their hands on it. However, many people consciously decide against engaging with the discord and all the hoops that need to be jumped to create these mirror-tier items so the proposed changes disincentivize them from crafting and not much else since they never even engaged with harvest to create such mirror-tier items.

Reading the initial plan for harvest, the proposed changes make no sense and seem to be a strange combination of concession or mutation of the original goals of harvest. GGG seemed to have set out to create a crafting method for the masses and early game and now is balancing it around ultra-wealthy high tier/end-game crafting. I think there is a lack of clarity in GGG about the purpose of harvest and their goals, it's almost like it warped into something unintended and for some reason they just ran with it.

More importantly, for PoE2, I think GGG needs to sit down and think about what level of 'crafting' they want their average player-base to engage with. My impression of the average player before/outside of harvest is that slapping on a bench craft and alching maps is the extent of "crafting" that is done. The price of exalts which to new players sound like glorified augment orbs is also a reflection of the crazy discrepancy between some players' ability to craft and others, most people never have and at the current rate never will use an exalt orb. The low risk method of harvest was a great gateway (aligned with the design philosophy) into crafting for many, myself included. I finally put in the time to learn what mods are suffixes and prefixes and the tags they have etc. The problem is that it was not just the lowest risk method, but also the most powerful... but there are easy solutions here: remove high tier mods from the pool, make it like synthesis/bench crafting where you can only have 1 harvest mod, heck even make harvest items account-bound (you've done it with watchstones, so there is already code for it).

I don't get why you think that spamming alteration orbs on items is fun. Because it isn't. Removing Harvest from the meta will be a mistake because nobody likes the total randomness and unrewardness of Harvest-less crafting. Adding this mechanic was amazing, all you had to do is to allow people to trade Harvest crafts safely, without having to risk being scammed. What are you doing???????

also remove tower defence blight pls

They launched new core packs, with harvest back they cashed in and now they are nerfing it to shit because they can't truly balance it. They can't even deal with a discord or even making a harvest orb for crafts.

Probably I wont spend a single cent on your game anymore. Not because of harvest because how you nerf players and buff monsters in a futile effort to hold players.. not working.

And it's not negative mods, deal with it the high ranks are taking bad decisions there.