Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

What will most likely happened in April.

1. GGG continued with their changes.

2. They also upgraded the loot ( items and currencies ). About time they do that anyway. Make the item loot drop more useful and have more rare mods.

3. Half of the Uniques will be revamped. Unique supposed to be "unique" but now we can get a lot of the Uniques mods ourselves via crafting. It should not be the case. Unique is suppose to have unique mods that is a strength and unique mods that is a weakness to compensate such that whoever uses them need to balance between the mods. Currently we see people crafting similar strength mods and do not have to worry about the negative mods in Uniques. Unique mods is also made specific to certain skill or classes and only benefit that classes greatly.

The group who supports the Harvest nerf will be happy that GGG stick to their guns and get a bonus in upgraded loot and revamp Uniques ( which everyone calling for it for a long time ).

The group who wants Harvest to stays the same will claim victory ( although they didn't get what they championed ) in that they will say GGG listened to them and gave them something to compensate for the Harvest nerf.

GGG can relax in peace having 2 satisfied groups plus they needed to do the changes 2 and 3 anyway. Now is a good time to do it. Everyone live happily ever after!

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Overmind29 wrote:

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Eisbehr wrote:

The entire community is in turmoil. Whether it's the players or the content creators. I think it's significant that GGG hasn't even spoken up in the last six days after this post. There hasn't been such unrest in a long time and I would really be interested to see how they react to it. Do they ignore the condition of their players, or do they respond to it?! Who knows. All in all, a very weak performance in terms of implementation and communication.

They will never respond, because they don't need to. And they never do. It was an announcement, not a discussion opener. They made up their mind and told us how things will be. We can't do s**t about it. Which is really sad to see. They know people will buy MTX anyway and enough people will play next league regardless of what they do, tbh even if they added shop XP boosts, purchasable non-cosmetics and currency, it would still change nothing, people would complain, it would cause an uproar, but in the end enough people will still play so they would not care.

Well, true. But tbh, the most changes haven't received so much comments and controversy than this manifesto. This is a clear exception in changes. I mean, this has a high impact for players, the game and the future. And not so predictable like they nerf skills after they add new mtx to them. Thats another kind ...

GGG at the launch of Harvest league:

"

We can't wait to see what the community creates with harvest crafting!

GGG now:

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Players easily filled gaps in their builds while levelling, and made many, many mirror-worthy items.

1) LOL!

2) TRANSLATION: "Players who found or earned a mirror were suddenly blessed with a wider variety of mirror-worthy items to dupe, without having to sacrifice build diversity as much in order to use top-end gear."

Where is the problem? We're not talking about many, many identical mirror-tier items with the same three synthesized implicits, we're talking about a wider variety of top-grade items.

Is the problem that the 1% might have to sully themselves by actually competing in a market rather than monopolizing it, forcing them to be even more elite than they were previously?

3) LOL!! Get gud, scrub!

The lack of response from GGG I'm concerned by.
Regardless of where people's stance on the matter lies(although it's clear the overwhelming majority think all this will do is hurt build diversity and make the end game near impossible to reach for casual players(all true)) the lack of response to this much outrage/response from the community is unusual for a developer.

Even if they are going to hold their stance, some sort of statement should still be made. Giving absolutely no reply when such a large community response is present is a giant 'F U' and would only demonstrate that they don't care about nor listen to their community in any way.

Please respond at least acknowledging your communities disappointment if nothing else.

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We can't afford to gamble with what little currency we have.
If you're so dead set on making nice gear hard to acquire, then please add an in-game auction house that would allow sales of items while offline. This is why casual players have little to no money. They can't stay online long enough to wait for sales. With little to no money they can't afford to craft gear, nor can they afford to buy nice gear.

Adding an in game auction house would be exactly in line with tennants outlined in this post. It would lower the use of third party tools, and it would combat scamming(Price fixing, price changing on PMs, etc). It would also save player's time(all the waiting around to see if you'll get a reply, and not getting one, sometimes over 5 times in a row) and allow casual players to make more money, allowing them to actually afford this 'crafting' or buying gear they need.

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If you consistently refuse to make any changes that benefit the casual player and only make changes that continue to keep the top on top and make the rich richer, then I will lose any respect I have for you as a company and your product.
I may still play your game since I was fortunate enough to be able to make myself a set of gear this league that let me break out of that pit(Fought elder/shaper for the first time in the 7 years I've played this game. Heck I hadn't even been able to beat shaper guardians before this league, since I played off-meta abilities without the gear nor currency to fund them), but I will not be spending a penny more than I already have(and I was really close to buying the Imperial Eagle pack before this manifesto).

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anntari wrote:

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We can't afford to gamble with what little currency we have.
If you're so dead set on making nice gear hard to acquire, then please add an in-game auction house that would allow sales of items while offline. This is why casual players have little to no money. They can't stay online long enough to wait for sales. With little to no money they can't afford to craft gear, nor can they afford to buy nice gear.

Adding an in game auction house would be exactly in line with tennants outlined in this post. It would lower the use of third party tools, and it would combat scamming(Price fixing, price changing on PMs, etc). It would also save player's time(all the waiting around to see if you'll get a reply, and not getting one, sometimes over 5 times in a row) and allow casual players to make more money, allowing them to actually afford this 'crafting' or buying gear they need.

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THIS!!! i really dont understand why its so hard for dirtbag elitists to understand this?

Is GGG just pretending people are happy about this?

I accept that Harvest needs to change, but announcing "Harvest is being burnt to the ground" with out an accompanying "and here is how we are going to improve all the things that made you need Harvest" is pretty poor.

I really hope they just miscalculated badly, and thought they could just hold off until the 3.14 tease before telling us ...

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anntari wrote:

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We can't afford to gamble with what little currency we have.
If you're so dead set on making nice gear hard to acquire, then please add an in-game auction house that would allow sales of items while offline. This is why casual players have little to no money. They can't stay online long enough to wait for sales. With little to no money they can't afford to craft gear, nor can they afford to buy nice gear.

Adding an in game auction house would be exactly in line with tennants outlined in this post. It would lower the use of third party tools, and it would combat scamming(Price fixing, price changing on PMs, etc). It would also save player's time(all the waiting around to see if you'll get a reply, and not getting one, sometimes over 5 times in a row) and allow casual players to make more money, allowing them to actually afford this 'crafting' or buying gear they need.

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Yes. This. Time online is a multiplier on currency from items you find.

1) You must be online to find it
2) You must be online to sell it.

It's terrible watching Youtube videos saying "you'll make this much per hour" and KNOWING you can farm the same things, and get < half the returns ... if you play < 8 hours per day, or live in a quiet timezone like Australia.

No only that, but on launch weekend (i.e. the only time I can set aside to play 16 hours in a day), the last 3 leagues have had such unstable clients that it's hard to complete anything meaningful.

I had client crashes for the first 3 weeks of ritual, multiple times per hour. It ruined an otherwise good league.

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dragonborn441 wrote:

Actual PogChamp

I just love how they hire them to "POG" in the first few posts :D

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Quiex__VZ wrote:

It is, but consider their position. They have just succeeded in pissing off almost the entire player base. There has never been more outrage at a decision in the history of the game. They are at a crossroads now. If they act like blizzard and roll over for the player base they will keep people, but at a cost to the core functionality of the game. People can cite loyalty all they want, but everyone knows the truth....when it is no longer fun, people quit. The short term gain (appeasing the player base) will destroy long term profits when people craft out the best stuff and reach the best "end game" one can hope for. Then those people will turn around and RMT the stuff (we know this is true) to other players who will then feel a sense of completion and quit as well repeating the cycle.

Right now they are desperately trying to figure out how to appease the players without seeming weak, yet without screwing over the base functionality of the game. They have to plan their next move VERY carefully because they won't get another. I saw this recently in an Everquest Emulator server (rise of zek 2.0). The player base whined about something, so the GM's created a massive change to the game system in favor of them. Those that didn't want the change threw their hands up in degust and said "screw you we quit" and they did. Then trying to repent of their decision they changed it back. The people that left didn't come back and the players they had originally supported got pissed said "screw you" and left as well. The game is now officially dead.

If GGG's next announcement fails soothe over the player base enough, or does it too much they'll deal a massive blow to player base, the same way blizzard did with Diablo 3 (I came to PoE because I heard from friends that blizzard backstabbed the economy by yanking and nerfing valued items on the AH, rather unforgivable). GGG will respond, right now that response probably has their highest priority. One word out of place will have nasty consequences. Just give them time and let them reach a decision.

This.
It's a manifesto, which is supposed to encourage player feedback so that out-of-touch decisions are prevented from becoming reality. They communicated, we responded. Now give it time and give yourselves a moment to understand their position before they respond so that you can look at their response objectively instead of being pre-outraged.

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anntari wrote:

The lack of response from GGG I'm concerned by.

They do respond. But in other, uglier ways. They just locked the account of Path of Math, one of the streamers that made a very well structured video about how these changes will impact the players. It was against GGG's decision to nerf harvest to the ground. And the video was well articulated, without any hate spam or "OMG GGG is bad etc etc etc." And people were on board with the points he addressed...

The "reason" for locking the account? A fake screenshot from a discord server. No connection at all to the well reasoned arguments he brought against these nerfs... none at all...

See, this is where the radio silence coming from GGG, followed by these kind of actions only tarnish their image even more in my eyes. And I sure am not the only one...
It's been 5-6 days since the manifesto. Still couldn't get myself to even log in back to the game to finish that 36th challenge...