Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

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MischievousBot wrote:

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Silence4tw wrote:

lets be honest here, its a gentleman move by chris. Blizzard pass over lots of their playerbase by the immortal desaster and now, chris the gentleman that he is, gives it all back in the possible D4 release year. its crazy how fast u moved from the voice of the playerbase to 100% disconnected from it. i guess the epic quote from that blizzcon youtube video still stayed until today: no king rules forever. you had a good run it was nice to be part of it, thx for all the good memorys and see you all in D4.

+1, really nice of you Chris to push half your player base away to give D4 a chance.

Here I was thinking D4 didn't stand a chance after Ritual, Echoes and the return of \\Harvest//, guess I was wrong.

+1

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ph3l0n wrote:

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Suslikwishmaker wrote:

in this thread, an entire lot of people that don't know what a looter game is about.

This isn't a looter game. The best gear is from crafting, not dropped. It would appear you don't know what a looter game is.

For real was about to say the exact same thing, can't be a "looter" if 99% of the loot is dogshit.

Crafting means u make something that u want not dump a lot of RNG expansive currency thing and pray to get what u want.

Is this a kind of April's Fool joke?

Mr. Wilson you are so out of touch with us players...

Been playing since closed beta. This is the first time I've ever really contemplated just not returning to this game.

It's become so abundantly clear that there are a large percentage of decision makers at GGG who don't really play their own game, or haven't played it like most consumers do in years. There's more out of touch statements in this manifesto than I've seen from the devs of a game in a long, long time.

Well, 250 pages of comments, most of them voicing the samge thing.

Why would I post?

Personally I don't care about crafting but I can't stand GGG keep focusing on wrong things purposefully.

Why mess with Harvest if you have delayed homework?

For example, 100% Delirius has SH*T performance even on high end computers why was never corrected?

PoE has the worst ingame trade system I've ever met and no improvements since YEARS.

Sometimes the game can't handle itself and just crash to desktop (on 5way legion happens regularly).

[Removed by Support]

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KicsiSVK wrote:

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Giammafix wrote:

"Why would I use a regular Exalted/Divine/Annul Orb when I can get one through Harvest that has a deterministic result?"

Because EVERY SINGLE TIME I used one of those damn Annul orb I bricked my items...didn't even take 3 annuls, just every first one I used on some good item with a rare mod, had to choose THAT mod among the other 4...
that doesn't feel good at all.
The nerf would be "good" if you could allow people to store the craft in some orb (like Einhar's bestiary orb) and make harvest crafting and trading safer and integrated in game.
At that point, nerfs would make more sense.

Completely relate. Every goddam annul takes the mod I want to keep. It's like they target the rarer options. But sure use them to get recked.

stuff like Einhar crafting "remove random suffix, add random prefix" is still 1000 times safer than using annul/exalts XD

Completely understand this change, but feels like the top items are really prevalent mainly due to the discord trading rather than the 'how op' harvest crafting mechanics are.

Several thoughts:

- I won't argue about the how augment or remove harvest craft are much better than currency crafting, but the point on make the game RNG based misses the mark for me. The whole harvest drop rate is RNG, and as you have pointed out the probability is weighted by how good the harvest craft is. Therefore, I don't think it's fair to say that harvest crafting is deterministic without an RNG aspect. Not to mention the tier of the mod is far from certain.


- Does SSF or HC SSF have the same problem of folks have too many mirror tier items? (ie imagine discord trading is not a problem) I took a look at HC SSF top players' profiles, it's not apparently to me that they have too many mirror tier items. Though, my sample points are very limited.

- Yes some harvest crafts makes annul orb or exalted orb crafting seem like the stone age. But I'd still argue it's a problem with the prevalence of crafting options that's available to the users. No singular build requires all of the 'OP' crafts, or even close to it. That's why discord trading is both tedious but also feels mandatory (since it's possible). The players get too many good crafts that they cannot use but are worth exalts for some 1% player. This is a major area of complaint AFAIK, and the path will not fix this issue.



My recommendation:

I know you guys spent way for time on this than I did, and I do not expect to change your decision. But here is what I would recommend, and should be maybe rather simple to implement.

- make harvest crafted items not tradable for X days. (let's say X for being 7 days but honestly can be less)
- rationale: mainly focus on the tradable aspect or discord trading of harvest crafts (do you trust your item with someone else for an entire week? or wait one week for a singular craft? or wait another week for potential to sell?)
- potential implementation: add optional attribute to each item: last_harvest_craft_timestamp that's updated each time a harvest mod is apply to said item. Said item cannot be put into trade or guild stash until the X days has passed.


Other nerfs are probably still warranted and can be complementary, but don't nearly have to be as heavy handed in that case.

You say items are sacred yadi yada...... but Harvest is what make my items MY items instead of AN item.

I want to make MY great items.

I have never had more fun than during harvest and now ritual.

The people who are rich enough to craft top tier items before harvest will be able to do so after. The only people being hurt are us middle and middle+ players.

I do not want to go back to grinding currency just to spend time on the trade site to find the item I need. I want to make them.

Nerfing harvest is a bad idea.

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MischievousBot wrote:

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Silence4tw wrote:

lets be honest here, its a gentleman move by chris. Blizzard pass over lots of their playerbase by the immortal desaster and now, chris the gentleman that he is, gives it all back in the possible D4 release year. its crazy how fast u moved from the voice of the playerbase to 100% disconnected from it. i guess the epic quote from that blizzcon youtube video still stayed until today: no king rules forever. you had a good run it was nice to be part of it, thx for all the good memorys and see you all in D4.

+1, really nice of you Chris to push half your player base away to give D4 a chance.

Here I was thinking D4 didn't stand a chance after Ritual, Echoes and the return of \\Harvest//, guess I was wrong.

Lets be honest, D4 never has/had a chance in the first place. It's also years away. The quality of things Actiblizzard has been putting out these days has been dogshit, D4 will never live up to what D2 use to be and simply because of it being a different team that developed D2 that had a vision for the genre in which the current Blizzard never had.

D2 remaster is also going to be just as big of a lie as Warcraft III: Reforged so I'm not expecting much good from it, mostly expecting half of anything we see to not even be in the remaster on release as it's just another attempt of Activision getting a money grab.