Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

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...and the expert players can show off with really good items that took a lot of effort to make.

Strong disagree. Players who play a ton and follow any content creators in the community at all can show off really good items took a lot of time to farm the currency for. Having a heaping whack of disposable time to devote to a game is not skill. It's devotion or dedication depending on just how heaping that whack is.

I don't want to spend ages farming currency to spend ages searching trade for items and SSF is not faster. This disrespects my time and I'm guessing I'm around 5000 hours into the game here. I take league starts off yo. I have serious love for this game but this silly, pointless, grind is only part of it that is scuffed IMHO. Harvest meant that I could at least know that time would in fact yield progress. These nerfs take that away in a serious way.

If Harvest isn't how you get to a place that respects my time please find one that does and that you're happy with relative to the game's long term health.

Also...

Know what's missing from this? Anything at all that tells me how you're going to make engaging with trade suck less. You could solve a lot of this by making it possible to trade things that traded accessible. You walk right up to the problem by pointing out that people were going to discord servers to trade and then... Do nothing to make crafts actually tradable. All you've done is limit the market to make the trades you didn't outright remove harder to find. People will still be going to discord servers looking for the trades you left in. or boss carries. or. or. or.

Recognize and honor the things that people trade and give us a decent system to do those trades in a transparent fashion OR make them impossible to trade. This (permanently) scuffed in between state is dumb.

Just because something isn’t in line with the original intent of the game does not instantly make it bad. I would be very curious to see player retention numbers for Harvest and Ritual leagues in comparison with other leagues.

If you’re so concerned about no-lifers making perfect items, just add a temporary untradeability to items after Harvest crafts are used. Like you have to kill 2000 monsters with it in your inventory before you can trade it again, or whatever.

I would prefer a full removal of harvest over this bastardization.

I have never made a post or reply on any of the official forum posts, but I've decided that now is the time.

This is really disheartening.



Allow me to preface this by saying that while I'm not the best or most 'hardcore' player (I have tried dabbling in SSF before but have never fully committed, much less HC), I still have about 2000 hours of playtime and have a deep deep love for this game. As of recent, I've been wondering about how my love for the game might persist or how it might fizzle out in an anti-climactic way as power is slowly taken away from the bulk of the playerbase and funneled back to the highest echelons of the PoE community.


I didn't play during Harvest league. The last league I played before Heist (flashback only for challenges as I didn't like Heist as a whole) was Metamorph, and before that I was a pretty casual player in Standard since about 2014 on an older account (I even had a Garena account back in the day). After getting back into the game around last year and going full force, I slowly rediscovered my excitement for this game and even more as I chipped away at the hours, figuring out missed league mechanics and relearning the ones I had forgot.

I have since spent almost 1000USD in the game according to Steam, and I do not regret any bit of that as I wanted to support the devs of my favourite game. Whether for better or for worse, Path of Exile has no competition. Allow me to repeat that: Path of Exile has ZERO competition in the modern sphere of ARPGs.

This has made me fear that GGG might become stagnant and complacent. (Some might argue this is true, although I think the recent amount of content as a whole has been amazing. So much content for a free-to-play cosmetic-MTX-only game is astounding and I have so much respect for that)


However, when it comes to balance, I have major doubts on how in-touch the dev team is from time to time. I have only been able to play as much as I have in the past 6 months or so because I'm currently on a gap year due to the current pandemic so I don't have to be overseas nor studying. Having all this time to experience the ups and downs that the community faces in terms of nerfs, I see why some are very vocally angry.


This is not the way. I fail to see why you have to take power away from the everyman who probably has less than half the time I do to play at the moment and instead throw it all back to the 1% of GG mirror crafters who find their fun in crafting with your less than stellar crafting system. Don't get me wrong; that is the beauty of PoE in that it is so complex and filled with many systems that one can pick and choose which area of content they'd like to interact with. I like to map, make currency, and spend as little time crafting as I possibly can - but that is not a fault. You can't say that the PoE layman is being ignorant and refusing to learn how to craft as most of us know the basics to intermediate levels of crafting. You can't expect everyone to be able to mirror-level craft just to fix some items or save an item from a total brick just like you can't expect absolutely everyone to find profit in doing 24-hour boss carry services.


What you are doing is removing QoL from people who don't even want super mega endgame items but just want to have a little bit of control in swapping resists, removing dead mods or just slightly improving their mid or upper mid tier items and instead forcing them to interact with and/or to spend more currency than was needed before on the 1% of people who dedicate their time almost solely to high level crafting.

It's really disheartening. I mean look at the state of this game. The main way for people to fix their items and turn them into relatively halfway decent items in today's PoE requires them to go into a third party discord for god's sake.

Instead of fixing the problem, you push and pull in this almost meaningless way and it's almost insulting. You are doing nothing about the main problem of having to hand your items and let them be at the mercy of the people who have those crafts, not to mention the fact that 90% of the time I spend trying to harvest craft my items I would have already quit entirely if I spent any amount of that time without my second monitor; Having to race like rats to be the first to get a craft from a discord channel with over 150,000 people.


You are slowly chipping away at my love for this game with your propensity to be so out of touch with the majority of your playerbase and instead cater to the vocal minority of reddit and top level streamers who are literally paid to play the game. This is a terrible move and I hope you find a way to fix this area of your mistakes.


With respect to the dev team and all you have done, please do something about this. It's not like harvest is some super-cheap cheese way of crafting that takes a couple steps and makes mirror-tier items. It still takes time and the level of crafting one can achieve is proportional to the amount of currency one invests into harvest crafting. Some people are happy with just hitting T2/T3 mods and will stop investing there. Others will invest more and get better results (rightfully so)

This is only going to make the game worse with the amount of half-hearted changes that you have been making to these systems that would have given more power to the players that don't have 24 hours a day to be playing your game. Some have children, others have double digit shifts, and others just don't have the luxury to learn an archaic system that is only as rewarding to the people that have the time to spend exponential amounts of time further using that system.


Very very disappointed.

feels like you're ruining ssf experience. making the game harder for casuals in the wrong way

weird but ok...

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ax1m wrote:

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This sentiment was summed up by a member of our design team who recently said "We don't want to take away the feeling of closing your eyes and Exalting an item, scared to see whether you ruined it or not."

You should straight-up fire whoever said that, no joke.

ive come to really resent dev's making decisions based off one person/small groups of vocal people. its really just oppressive and tone-deaf at a certain point.

:(

Why are those kind of things ALWAYS changed this way instead of the other? Instead of removing the completely utterly broken stuff, you decided to make it "very rare" instead. This makes people who play the game 24/7 even more powerful than already. Why can't you move towards your general playerbase for once?
I'm not mad over Harvest getting nerfed, I'm mad about the way you deal with nerfs. I enjoyed Harvest, I enjoyed this league. I'm okay with it being nerfed. But making it rare instead of removing what's so broken in your eyes? Please just give other than those 5% of your playerbase a chance as well. I mean I also play 8-9 hours daily esp. during the first month of league, but I still play casually and for fun, not for the min-maxing of my "time" or "efficiency" or whatever's important on this game. Why is always everything moving towards more = better? Are people in your office who come up with ideas that are for once not about pure RNG getting fired?


Please, for fucks sake, stop balancing the game on those people who are the top 1%. 99% of the rest of your players are getting more and more left behind, by you.
Harvest finally made it possible for me to make my own items because I got not the efficiency and knowledge and whatever else others have who make 10 Ex an hour. I can count the times I was thinking about actually using an Exalt for ex-slamming on one hand. Make your game fun for everyone. Those 1% that are brainlessly playing will stay at the top, no matter what you do, the top tier items just look different then. It doesn't change anything.

should have removed Harvest altogether, it´s a boring mechanic.

I agree 100% GGG. Really good decision.