Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

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Chyster wrote:

Chris Wrote: "Using currency items like Exalted Orbs or Chaos Orbs on your gear is a powerful, risky and exciting way to improve it. But because these items work equally well on both low- and high-level equipment, it's generally considered best to save them until you're crafting your end-game gear."

How is it you can be so out of touch with the highest percentage of your player base?

Oh, wait, you did post that the largest percentage of the player base will never get past mid-tier maps and that you were ok with that. So you are out of touch by choice.

Well, being one of the little guys (and according to you) I'll never get to endgame gear to use currency on. So your statement does not resonate with me and the largest percentage of your player base.

Also, because you don't pay attention to the little guy, please understand that we do not waste Exalted Orbs or Chaos Orbs on gear. You've got way too much crap in your RNG engine for us to use them like that. Most of us will only see 4-5 Exalted Orbs in any given league. We save them, not for spamming on end game gear. We will never see it and you are ok with that. We save them to give to insensitive traders that post things for sale, but may or may not respond to buyers. And Chaos Orbs? These are mainly used for trade or rerolling crap mods on maps.

WE DO NOT USE THESE CURRENCIES ON GEAR DUDE!

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spokipo wrote:

GGG confirmed that they are doing the game for 1%, I think that the conversation with them can be ended.

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Okkuro wrote:

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spokipo wrote:

GGG confirmed that they are doing the game for 1%, I think that the conversation with them can be ended.

Conversation you say....
I thought it needed two side for that, so far this looks more like a player monolog to me...

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Communication is Important
At Grinding Gear Games, we've always treated communication with the community as a priority. I spend several hours of each day on external communication (that's not counting answering emails), but feel that we can still improve the way that we communicate with you guys. This article explains some of the ways that we're planning on improving communication in the short term:

The Development Manifesto
The purpose of this development manifesto forum is for us to open topics on specific issues that we're working on so that we can explain how they're going to work. It's also a great place to discuss specific design philosophies that we base many of our decisions around. Please note that there are still plenty of topics that will be posted! This initial set are just the ones that we have ready in the first pass. More will be added in the coming days/weeks.

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Kersiak wrote:

I get that these kind of wall of text posts can be tedious for someone so I'll hide the reasons why I think Harvest needs to change, GGG is going to change it anyway so, if you don't care, we can jump right to the point.

Spoiler

I'm not much of a forum guy, I prefer to spent my free time actually playing the game instead of doing other things around it, I only read important annoucements, take notice of them and keep going on.
This time, by the way, this announcement felt a bit too detached from what I wanted from the game, so I went reading things around and discovered that many other players felt the same way.

The Harvest system gave many people like me, casuals who are playing the game mostly few hours a day and not even every day, the chance to complete their build with powerful items that they could never be able to craft before. Items that only people like streamers or "professionals" were able to achieve, by playing 12-16 hours a day, making not one but at least 4 or 5 characters per league, each one with a "mirror tier" (or even multiple mirrors) gear.

As it is right now, even if it gives me, such a casul, so much potential, Harvest is really too much exploitable. Plus, the community created the TFT discord servers in which you can trade (amongst other things) Harvest crafting rolls, making it even more easy for you to create your "dream" item. Plus... Harvest is totally FREE, you get a roll and you can slam it on an item for free. For these reasons Harvest needs to change, I get it.

The point is that all the changes you're going to introduce are about to kill it for the most of us casual players (the majority of your playerbase), by giving even more power to that small % of players who can access the game for so many hours.

I've been playing this game from a lot of years, yet I "only" have 1660 hours of game time and I can tell you I've NEVER EVER thought of using an exalted orb on any of my pieces of gear... seriously... NEVER.
I have a friend who is playing the game much more than me, he got almost 4000 hours of game time, twice mine, and even he NEVER used an exalted orb on a piece of gear, and I'm sure that many other players don't even have this much play time so... I hope this gives you a glipse on how much detached from reality is your statement about the exitement of using exalted orbs.
Common players only whant to drop exalted orbs to use them as currency and buy better gear and that's it, making the exalted loose its original porpouse.

What can be done to give these kind of currency items a "higher" porpouse and, at the same time, making Harvest less exploitable?

I thought about a couple of solutions, which I'm sure can change things.

1 - Give to any Harvest roll a cost equal (or even higher) to its function.
If I manage to get a "remove phys/add phys" I actually have to pay an annullment and an exalted orbs to use it.

2 - Create specific Harvest rolls for each influence you have in the game and give them a rarity equal to their weight.
This way, if I want to use an influence roll from the harvest not only I need to be lucky enough to find it but I also have to spend the corresponding influence exalted orb to get that mod on the item.

3 - Remove the Harvest bench from the hideouts.
Only if I find the Grove I can access the bench and modify the item, you can even put it behind a specific bossfight...
If I want to use the station a bossfight begins: if I win I get access to it, if I lose I get kicked from the Grove and it closes.

There is also a 4th change but I know that this goes against your policy of making averything in the game tradable so I'll hide it.

Spoiler

4 - Make so that every item modified with Harvest bench becomes untradable.
This way if someone uses Harvest you can be sure it is becouse he needs it and not becouse he wants to exploit it.

With or without these changes I'm sure that the little % of playerbase that is getting mirror tier items right now are still going to get them.
But I'm also sure that these things can make a difference without killing the fun of using Harvest for the most casual players.