Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

Good job GGG! You calculated a long time and as usual you came to the right conclusion and implemented it poorly: from now on, all the players that don't play poe for a living( 99.9%) won't be able to access end-game content because everything will be so damn steep. Ritual was a fail imo(the league mechanic) and was only saved by the fact you brought back harvest.

You are killing the game bit by bit same as blizzard.

Want to nerf something ? Nerf the fucking mechanics that punish the 99.9% of the player. E.G. if you don't have a build to kill maven fast you'll run that stupid "memory game" 3 times / phase. Your logic is "you can't afford a stronger build so we'll make it harder for you to get any drop and limit your chance to improve and favor once more the 0.01%". Flash news: without the 99.9% your game would be dead so you might wanna hear what we want.

But hey, the same way I hated ritual and decided not to pay for supporter pack, I'll do it next league.

I ABSOLUTELY HATE this with a purple passion

Too much RNG is NOT a good thing.

And Path of Exile is back to dogshit. Path of Grinding for Shit.

I guess, it's back to Sekiro for me.

There's a lot of clever people that are drawn to this game, and willing to see through some very blatant/biased decisions like these because the trade-off b/w challenging fun and the obvious rigging tilted in favour of "challenging fun" in our minds.

This one, would be the one that upsets the apple cart, it appears.

"

Metaxe wrote:

The only imbalanced item is headhunter, everything else is optional to use. To make tons of currency and farm everything you need a headhunter. So
yeah, let's keep it in-game, and make only a really useful way to get as close to the power level of hh as possible worse.



Yeah, as an analytic myself I know that what people want is not what people need, but that hurts.

Itemization of Oshabi was a good idea. Perhaps removing aug to influenced items was not. I imagine this will make little difference to the majority of the player base, including myself.

"

Minguito wrote:

every time, more and more convinced, that the game, is for people who can put their a°° in the chair 24/7, and farm, or use bots, that are benefict to developers and company...

Thanks GGG. Now you are more closer to D3, with every step.

Your argument, is that the harvest crafting, is broken. Broken is the bots are since, a couple of years, ruining the economy of the game.

[Removed by Support]

That's LITERALLY how I've felt about it also. They are really reminding me of the old D3 team with Jay friggin Wilson. I switched from d3 to poe and until now it was quite enjoyable.
EotA is a great freaking league, it pretty much lets everyone engage content they want to engage and play all sorts of builds with harvest.

But they seem to be wanting more and more to dictate how we play instead of the players deciding what to like and enjoy. Perhaps they think players are having too much fun?
And why is a lot of people having good items a bad thing for the game?
More access to more content is better.

Perhaps GGG wanted the active player count to be higher on month 2 and 3 than they were hoping for. I am sure they made a pretty penny or two from mtx in the first month with the huge spike of players, hitting an all time high.

Greed or dementia I can't put a finger on it.

Probably the worst post I have ever seen from GGG. Absolutely does not represent my gameplay experience at all. I will not be spending more money on MTX or private leagues (which I very much enjoy) as a result. The deterministic crafting afforded by harvest was the only thing that gave me personally even a small hope of crafting an interesting item. I quit playing leagues when my gear upgrades stop being attainable, and that is universally before GG items are even close.

I played POE for some time and it scares me how every league you widen the gap between top1% players and everyone else, while upping the ceiling of difficulty and also upping the floor. Basically making it impossible to complete the game unless one ups their /played from league to league and follows the meta closer and closer.

You introduced fights like 10-boss romp or maven where extreme dps trivializes it, but only a handful of players can afford builds that achieve such level of dps. Meanwhile old staples like essence drain fall out of favour because they can't zerg bosses.

You could have limited making "OP items" by for example making it that you can use augment craft only once per item. Then it's "harvest touched" and can no longer be affected by harvest. This means simple crafts that help people get build out of slump would work, but triple maven orbed elevated chests wouldn't exist. But nope. You always have to hurt the bottom level player first.

I already know I won't achieve this league the same level of gear as I did in harvest, because items which cost 10ex to craft in the past now cost 50ex and also run into continuous risk of getting your item stolen by scammers. You do NOTHING to ban these scammers and thieves. Even reports with tons of evidence get ignored. You can't "name and shame" them here but TFT discord has a blacklist and reddit often has posts about scammers and you NEVER ban them. You created an environment where the safest, most reliable and fastest way to get good items is to steal them from other players for 0 repercussion. It's sad and disgusting.

This game is balanced in a way that unless you craft in bulk, it's worthless to craft. Did you find double corruption temple room? A harvest augment craft? Hillock's quality bench? Split beast? Best thing you can do with it is sell it to top1% player until you gather enough ex to buy his semi-scuffed fallout craft (because you'll never be able to buy the good one).

My favourite build tops at 3mil dps WITH harvest crafts and probably like 1.5mil without, but instead of nerfing the players who run 300mil dps builds let's just nerf everyone while putting stuff like maven which you either have to spend 50ex+ to have a build to beat or play one of the stupider meta builds which you "forgot" to nerf in the last round (you remembered to nerf tricksters and golemancers, but slam boiz are fine eh? or self-poison assassins?)

The crafting system in this game beyond bench crafting is extremely inaccessible and as I said, if you're a semi-casual, your "interaction" with crafting is: sell everything, gather 10ex+, buy the item from someone else who crafted it. That's the reason I can never play SSF because atm it's balanced around players who spend 12h+ a day in game and farm crafts. Normal person can't do it.

And you keep adding stuff that again, only top end players can enjoy. Tell me, what can a casual do with a maven's orb? Most likely nothing besides selling it. Since again it follows the philosophy of "50% chance to brick your item" it's only useful to mass crafters who can easily recoup the broken items in the cost of the remaining ones which didn't break.

You also did nothing to help with pain points like veiled crafts, worse, you nerfed kalandra's craft prophecy so it's even more expensive to unlock the important crafts.

I'm losing motivation to play this game because I'm facing a situation my build is neither tanky enough not high dps enough to play comfortably, but each upgrade costs me 10ex+ from now on either in crafting costs or in price of ready made item. So it's just not fun to play, it's an endless cycle of trying to crawl out of poverty every league just to get 36 challenges and then feeling burn out from the amount of grinding meanwhile nolifers who can play 10x more per day are zoom zooming with their OP builds.

A game that is balanced around nolifing stops being fun. One reason I stopped playing World of Warcraft and moved to POE was that: WOW became an endless list of chores to do daily / weekly just to stay afloat. POE was fun because you could choose content you wanted to play and have some variety. But unfortunately if you make builds so expensive to craft, a player can't just "play what they enjoy" and feel accomplished, they have to "play what's optimal / profitable" or go nowhere. This leads to burn out.

There are times when I feel like why do I even map, when I make more currency through flipping, but flipping is not fun, it sucks enjoyment out of the game, but it feels like the only avenue to get enough currency to upgrade my build.

And the difference is you mostly hear voices of streamers, top end players who are 40/40 3 weeks into the league, you never hear voices of players who are even more casual than me but still want to accomplish something in the game instead of getting stuck in yellow maps. For me, to "not get stuck in yellow maps" and get my challenges every league feels like a monumental effort, I'm not young anymore, I have obligations, I can't pull all nighters anymore, play 72h straight at league launch etc. It just sucks that you want to cut casual players out of your game.

In the end who's gonna profit are moguls on standard who are gonna mirror service their triple maven orbed elevated chest with 6 perfect mods.

LOL

"

The question was whether we should preemptively nerf it before players saw it, or try it out for a league at full strength.

Classic GGG, implement something that will obviously be "too" powerful then loop back and nerf it to hell, repeatedly ... as if players enjoy tasting true power and then having it taken away from them )-8

Also classic GGG balancing against the more casual players, who benefited a TON from easier harvest crafting.

Oh well, we should all be used to this by now (-8

Fantastic reply. After I cooled down a bit, I wanted to have a list of things one can do within the harvest mechanic as a compromise. I searched for a bit to see if there are similar posts. This one is an excellent place to begin with for GGG.

I really wonder how the meeting in GGG go while coming up with the "manifesto", if they couldn't come up with such sets of rules of balance, despite being the actual "developers" of the game rules/mechanics!?

"

MackBesmirch wrote:

I have a pitch: what if instead of Harvest crafting serving the same purpose of currency, Harvest crafting could instead contextualize currency we'd have to spend even without it?

Like, instead of a Harvest craft acting like a chaos orb that will re-roll a rare item with a fire modifier, what if the harvest craft would say "Harvest Craft: Fire Mod -- using currency on an item in this window will roll at least one Fire mod."

Higher-tier Harvest crafts could be "Harvest Craft: Fire Mod Lucky -- using currency on an item in this window will roll a Fire mod with lucky values."

Or maybe "Using any Conqueror's Exalted Orb in this window will result in an item with any conqueror Influence and one Influence mod."

Or mimic other stuff available elsewhere in the game, like the Temple of Atzoatl:
- Spend a stack of Vaal Orbs to double-corrupt an item
- Spend an Ancient Orb to change a unique to another unique of the same type, including league-specific items

A lot of the Harvest crafts could even stay the same but require the currency to fuel them:
- Spend one Jeweller's Orb to re-roll the sockets on an item 10 times, keeping the highest number of sockets
- Spend an Orb of Horizons to change a map into another map, but prioritizing maps you have not yet competed yet.
- Using a Gemcutter's Prism on a gem in this window will add quality to a gem between 1% and 10%, but not raise a gem's quality above 20%


We'd actually HAVE to use our currency to get deterministic results, but the deterministic options would still be RNG in terms of discovering them. Then it'd really be end-game only, cuz you'd have to save enough currency to take advantage of the Harvest crafts when you got them.