Dissecting and analyzing Harvest Manifesto + Data collection. A clash of philosophies.
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Hello!
With the uprising roar in the latest Manifesto about the current implimentation, and planned changes, of how Harvest is to be approached, I've decided to put my own two cents into the mix and give you, as a forum reader, and the Devs a little bit of an insight on how, I think at least, this whole debacle is to be understood, giving my own angle on this. I've "tried" as best as possible to put everything into categories into my lengthy essay, so please bear with it, if you want / must! Overall this will be put into following catagories: 1) A collected poll of a lot of comments and listed into categories with percentages to understand the sample size of player responses I base my Data from. 2) Dissecting the Manifesto into its several parts and understanding the clash of philosophies between the majority of (negative) Player-feedback and the Dev's view on the game. 3) Proposed / Upcoming changes you suggested to follow trough. (We dive into the patchnotes you may have for 3.14) 4) Issues GGG and players have with current harvest implimentation and possibilities to adress them. Collected Poll of comments
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To understand what I mean by this is that I've painstackingly read trough 150+ pages of the Manifesto's comments, and put them into four major categories. Note that I've only taken into account the comments that have been posted as a direct reply to the manifesto, and haven't taken any outside resources such as reddit or other forum categories on the homepage of GGG. Mind you that all of it was also down to interpretation, although with only a very select view, all the comments I read were easily identifyable in these following categories:
Comments that agreed with the upcoming proposed changes: 121 (7.8%) Comments that disliked the upcoming changes proposed: 1218 (78.8%) Comments that voiced a neutral opinion or had both good and bad to say: 67 (4.3%) Comments that were off-topic / questions / fluff or discussions: 138 (8.9%) Total comments read and listed by me before I felt that I've had enough and felt exhausted to read all of this (Mad respect to GGG_Forumsupport for your stamina...): 1544 I want to note that while this is a sizeable ammount, I believe that there is a good possibility that the number for people agreeing with the changes might be larger, due to the fact that voicing your opinion against the majority, often has resulted / met with harassment. I would imagine the ammount would be closer to 10% or above, but this is merely a gut instinct. Dissecting the Manifesto bit by bit
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The way that this is shaped is that I've taken into account every opinion, as best as it is humanly possible for me, and put it into perspective against the view that the Developers for Path of Exile have. This means you'll see quotes from the Manifesto, followed by pointing out the good intention in it, or the issues it bears, or the issues the playerbase takes on it. My personal stance is that Harvest was an addition that pointed out how incrediblly bad the crafting options prior to Harvest was when you put time invested vs results in here, but more on this in a later point.
Note: If you don't see me mention something that you feel should be mentioned, let me know! 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. Many players would even argue that it's best to save them to trade for already-crafted items. In either case, using valuable currency items on your levelling gear is generally perceived to be non-optimal.
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This statement does hold truth in it. It is indeed a risky, powerful and exciting way to BEGIN your crafting on an item via the use of chaos orbs, alterations and regals, that bears risk because you often end up with undesireable rolls. But past that point, the risk of exalting an item far outperforms the potential of having to restart your item entirely to achieve even a passable item. It is at this stage where players consider this less of a crafting session, and more of a gamble. A gamble that leads to a huge sink into one's currency pockets, with little chance of success. Harvest filled this by giving you a more deterministic way to gamble. You still can hit nothing of desire, or the wrong thing in many occassions, or a low roll, having you to start over, but it gave players more of a hope, than say dropping an exalted orb into an item.
Towards the end of Harvest's development, it became clear that this was a very powerful crafting system.
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Again a true statement. However what it also outlined how pale in comparison crafting options have been before Harvest. Let's put the options players used prior to harvest or had as an option and the issues it bears:
Essences: Incrediblly powerful and deterministc ways to get one desireable mod and start from that point on, however, are incrediblly slow to obtain in bigger numbers without trade, unless you focus on Essences on the introduced Maven passives in Haemwerk Hamlet. Crafting bench / Multimod: Was effective to patch / fix your item with what it needs, or to create something utterly powerful with multimod, but involved a lot of time to even get the unlocks in the first place, as many are gated behind special places (Delve, High Tier maps, Alva, Prophecy Chains) or need an incredible time to be aquired in comparison trough unveils. Fossil crafting: While finding a specific fossil can somewhat be target farmed by playing trough the appropriate zones, it was still a very slow process. However, this IS the closest, the player ever has gotten to what Harvest is in 3.13 now, albeit it includes many steps in one (Blocking phys mods via Metallic fossil is sort of like anul orb for phys mods, as an example). Meanwhile, harvest allowed all of this in a more sped up fashion, if you chose to target run for it (People running Hamlet for this is, to me, like people running Delve, but that is up for interpretation). So maybe it's not Harvest itself that is too powerful, but all other options being too weak in comparison? This seems the general consensus of the comments I've read. In the end-game, Harvest Crafting allowed the creation of some ridiculous items, mostly via a set of deterministic crafts that interacted with specific types of mods. This had to be toned down, and we had to choose between two ways to do it: either by removing the dangerous crafts, or by keeping them in as rare possibilities and then balancing by rarity.
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This is an odd thing to point out. Fossils also interacted with specific types of mods, and yet this feels fairly unchanged in its power. The real issue here I believe is that Fossils and their respective Resonators are something that the player spends on, while crafts from Harvests are practically free. I also don't understand the notion to put crafts as "dangerous". They don't harm the player, they make the player look forward to having a goal that is reachable. The reason why I mention this, is because more than half the comments that consider the suggested harvest change to bad, also said that they've played this league a lot more than any prior, while I only saw one person comment that due to harvest being stale, they've quit sooner.
With Harvest integrated into the core game with 3.13.0, players still made ridiculous items. Even the crafts we made quite rare felt pretty common when the entire community was pooling them together and using them on the right items.
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This is an odd one again. The way this is worded it seems that the devs actively are opposed to the community playing and working together. I do hope that this isn't the case and is just a missunderstanding. On the other hand why does it matter to a single player what another player has made? Why does the pizza my neighbour eats that he made with the help of 5 others impact my enjoyment of my pizza that I made myself? Personally speaking, it doesn't, and shouldn't.
The second issue was that players felt overwhelmed to get so many crafting options. It was possible for up to 100 or so crafts to be given to the player per grove, and this caused people to feel obliged to consume them otherwise they would be wasted.
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Thankfully you've adressed this nicely by simplly reducing the ammount of crafts you find per harvest, while finding harvest more often. The frustration is lessened if you find it more often, because then it feels less bad to skip on some crafts, given that the next batch would be close to find. Positive vibes, GGG.
Players also expressed frustration that the most effective way to get the best items in Path of Exile was to join a discord channel and try to trade for these incredibly crucial crafts.
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Can't this be fixed by simplly implementing the harvest crafts as orbs, similiar to everything else and then be tradeable like anything else? We already have a similiar system to this in the form of Prophecies or Menagerie. You find one that you want to trade? Seal it for a cost and sell it away, I don't see why Horticraft station would be exempt from this? You "seal" the craft in question that you want to trade away, pay an upfront cost to do so, and all's good, no? Funny enough, I've been running a lot of harvest, I found it quite fun, and the way I was selling and buying them was trough trade chat, and it worked wonders to me, but maybe not everyone is keen to do that while mapping.
The first part of this that concerned us was that Harvest was critical in making the best items
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Majority of the playerbase viewed it more that this isn't just "critical" but "Possible" for the playerbase, especially when you don't have huge ammount of time to invest playing the game, or don't trade.
"Why would I use a regular Exalted/Divine/Annul Orb when I can get one through Harvest that has a deterministic result?"
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This issue isn't fixed with the way you want to implement harvest into 3.14. It merely reverts back to the playerbase saving up their currency in order to buy already finished crafts. This is why a lot of people also say that you might as well delete Harvest as a whole, I feel at least, because the high-end items will be as unobtainable as before, and will be instead purchased from others, as before. This feels like it hurt SSF the most, if anyone.
When we were designing Path of Exile, a critical aspect of item acquisition is that it is through random (rather than deterministic) means.
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As much as it pains me to say this, maybe it is time to consider your way of thinking outdated. The main thing you want your players, I assume at least, to also let them have fun. Seeing your currency diminish as you roll random mods after another, isn't that. It's not even crafting at this point, as it is gambling. The old way of reaching your goal was: "I have X ammount of currency I can dump into this, let's hope I get it" while Harvest changed it into: "Bit by bit, I am creating a gearitem that fits well into my needs." This is actual crafting. In comparison to a real life example, imagine forging a sword. You toss the ingot in, melt it down, then forge it. And you cycle trough that process until your sword is finalized. This is harvest. The old way would have you throw the sword out in the middle of smithing it, because you missed with your hammer.
It's also important that items are hard to perfect. Ideally there's significant diminishing returns in the currency item crafting process, which lets most players get something good enough relatively easily, and the expert players can show off with really good items that took a lot of effort to make.
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This already was in place. I've seen items that I would never in my wettest dreams be able to aquire (DEspot Axe Dragon's roar anyone? 1600pdps 2H axe? What a legend). Redoing an item that was perfection even with harvest would take you a considerablly long ammount of time, but not an IMPOSSIBLE ammount of time. It was based on effort, not on luck, which is what the playerbase personally prefers. The expert players are still showing off their insanity of epic gear, so nothing has changed here.
Hard to perfect also states that you acknowledge a process that builds bit by bit. The old way is just restarting the process over and over until you manage to luck out. This, again, isn't crafting, it's gambling. But then there would quickly be nothing left to achieve. It was an interesting experiment, and we understand that some players will likely be attached to this level of incredibly easy crafting, but it's just not the Path of Exile we set out to make.
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Based on the comments I've read this seems to be incorrect, and following steam statistics, this is also incorrect. Let me emphasize this: Many players that outcried to the nerfs of Harvest, also stated that this is the longest time they ever played in a league, including me and my guild friends (we are only 6 total, but still!) feel the same. I've died SOOOO much in Hardcore, and made so MANY hardcore characters, ever, and majority of it, was due to harvest, and how fun the maven bossfights are, mainly because I got to a point, where they felt possible.
But if you don't take my word for it, let me present you some steam statiscs of the past leagues. (https://steamcharts.com/app/238960#All) Notice how two MONTHS into the league, the playerbase has been on average stronger than some leagues had on their start. Clearly there is still a lot of fun to still had, and judging by the comments, the reason seems to be overwhelmingly because of harvest. 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."
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But, we already have this kind of thing going on. And it's called Alva from Incursion league. You have this exact sentiment with double corrupting gem, or even more so with the corruption altar in T3. You close your eyes, you pray to Chris Wilson, Kuduku or whatever god you deem worthy of praise, and click. You open your eyes, and either cry with happiness, or wail in upset. The scenario of people putting an exalted orb into an item, and praying it turns out positively, isn't a scenario that, quite frankly, exists anymore. Nor does anyone seem to miss it. Sorry Dev-member, but with all due respect, why fight progress?
3.14 Changes for Harvest by GGG
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Note: This is going trough every patch line suggested one by one, and emphasize what the majority in the comment section has adressed in this. Some of my personal opinion is also contained in here, but I try my best to stay objectively towards it all.
Previously, every seed in a patch granted an instance of that seed's craft. Now, only some of the seeds do (so you're getting far fewer of the crafts that were overwhelming people with their quantity). Higher-tier seeds are closer to the 1:1 ratio from before.
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I actually love this. And people that spoke positively of harvest in an argumentative fashion, also pointed out an issue that this has: Frustration to be optimal. It's true that there can be an overwhelming number of crafting seeds in there, so this keeps it down a bit. I find it funny that you consider this a nerf, but ultimately, this feels more like a buff to me.
Some mods that had overly-deterministic behaviour have been removed. These include all annulment mods (other than the ones that remove a mod that isn't of a specific type before adding one of that type), and all type-specific divine mods.
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While I agree that this is quite harmful, this would involve a lot more RNG into the mix. The playerbase seems to be rather split on this one (and I mean the one's that put actual criticism into their post rather than saying RIP, etc). On one hand I agree that often these were used to guarantee remove unfavourable mods, and with removing those, more RNG is involved. On the other hand, it feels like a change that seems sort of, unnecessary, like change for the sake of change. This will have ultimately be tested out a bit more to see how painful it truelly is, but at least for now, I don't think this is a bad mod, although I feel like making anul crafts just more rare would have been more agreeable.
Crafts that add mods of specific types (like Physical Modifiers, for example) to items can now only be applied to non-influenced items, except for the existing mod that applies an influenced mod to an influenced item.
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This feels wrong. You are aware that the best items most commonly come from them being high tier and influenced. The way you've worded your manifesto so far is evidence of that. Naturally, influenced items is the one thing that people want to craft the most, yet this is now negated. Basically the way crafting would shape is pre-crafting an item with no influence on it, harvest slap an influence in, hope it hits the right one, then -+InfluenceModCraft? This feels unncessarily tedious, and something I personally wouldn't agree with. This, if anything, feels more like a slap in your face, than a thought out change. I know this is more in line of your own perspective of the game, but I can't feel like it's poorly translated to what the majority of the playerbase really wants.
The chance of encountering a portal to the Sacred Grove in a map has been increased by 60%.
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In line wiht your first change about the seeds being less possible to give you crafts, this is a good step. You encounter harvests more often and they feel less overwhelming. This is a nice equalization to the first change proposed.
The Heart of the Grove encounter is now a map fragment that sometimes drops from Tier 4 Harvest bosses, instead of randomly appearing in place of a normal Harvest grove. This allows you to trade the encounter if you don't feel up to it, and it means that finding The Heart of the Grove when you are in a map with difficult mods doesn't lead to an impossible encounter.
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 Issues GGG, or the Playerbase, has and possibilities on how to adress them.
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People forced to use Discord (TFT) to do their trades for harvest.
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I've mentioned this before, but this stems massively because you can't put the items into the trade market. This could be fixed by making the crafts themselves sealable at a cost similiar to how Prophecies, or Beastiary orbs, already work. This would also fix the whole issue of having harvest crafts done by other players based on trust with the risk of having your item stolen, as an exchange of items never takes place, just an orb being purchased by others players trough the tradeAPI.
Harvest is too determenistic, rendering other crafting options obsolete
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I've seen someone suggest that if it's too easy to add a specific modifier onto on item, having it be removed from tags that could target it, would be a lot easier. As an example mentioned was Crusader's explody mod. You would alteration spam until you hit that mod specifically, and then from that point on add mods onto it of choice. This would mean you'd have to change your stance on not being able to add crafts to influenced items (regular crafts mind you), and it would also require a lot of in depth looking to mods as a whole, but I felt this was a pretty cool idea. The point being is that this was actually crafting, too, while the previous illiterations of creating an item was closer to gambling than putting effort into gear.
A different one was to add more mods with the specific tag, so you wouldn't be able to target it more accurately as we have now, but this personally feels like a step into the wrong direction, so I only mention it here as a basic thought. Personally I think crafting with essences, thanks to Hamlet, has been quite successful and fun :D! And people like crafting with fossils too as far as I am concerned, so I don't think other crafting options ever will be as obsolete as you may think it is. Player have less things to achieve
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This really depends on how you look at it. THis is the first league I felt strong enough to actually fight things like Awakaner, Guardians, Shaper and the works. And harvest sort of enabled that. I feel like a lot of players feel like that. Harvest made goals reachable, even for plebs like me. Having that be taken away, left a sour taste for all. This is less of a suggestion really, but more a personal input of mine on how successful Ritual league, with the implementation of Maven, but also trough the aid of Harvest, has been for me. It's been quite the fun two months!
The clash of Philosophies and personal opinion
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Something that stuck out to me and many players too, is that you directly contradict yourself in your own statements, or use some words incorrectly when it comes to expressing your philosophies on the manner at hand.
For starters, you acknowledge that the game is about the aquisition of powerful items, yet you stop the means to do so in a more crafting / controlled fashion, rather than just testing your luck. It's here where I think you need to re-evaluate your ideas of what is good RNG, and what is bad RNG. An example of good RNG is Prophecies and Cadiro. Hitting something not good in it, still doesn't feel like a huge loss. Hitting an exalted orb onto an item, and hitting undesireable mods, however, does. You speak about how when you craft an item, it receives a random modifier, but, why does it have to? If the point is to keep people play for longer, then you need to give them more approachable goals. Statisticly speaking every league had a quicker drop in shorter time, even major one's like Act 10 release, Shaper and Elder, etc, than 3.13 had. Isn't this sign enough that this is a success? Why is it treated like it's a failed experiment? In the same vein it is STILL hard to perfect items, but I feel at least I am able to reach this apex. Before that, it was like a lost cause. An equivelent of buying a lottery ticket, hoping to win big. Except, that it also sucks out the fun of the game. In the end I have to ask that you re-think your philosophy on items, because as it stands, it's less enjoyable than the one we got offered in 3.13. The sentiment of closing your eyes and praying is, frankly speaking, an outdated nostalgia. I am sorry if this is insulting to the member who expressed this, and to the people in GGG who feel that way, but in the end, isn't the goal of a game to have it be fun? If you actually managed to read trough all of this, I salute you. Thanks! And please, keep it civil. I've seen so much harassment in the ever so growing comment section of the Manifesto, I'd dislike much to see it continue. Let's have some faith in GGG, after all. Sincerely, Rakushi (P.S: If you find spelling mistakes that are major, please do tell!) Last edited by Rakushi#4150 on Mar 11, 2021, 11:02:55 AM Last bumped on Mar 22, 2021, 5:04:01 AM
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My thoughts on it are more to do with GGG as a whole.
They have lost control of the development of POE. The game is so full of useless stuff. They have Delve but need to put in something like Harvest?? They have Breach but they need to put something like Delirium into the core game?? There are so many examples of this. You could take half the game out and it would still be too much. Think Chris and whoever is considered upper management at GGG need to really have a long discussion of what is actually wrong with POE. |
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Good summary, thanks for the hard work!
I still believe that Chris' biggest mistake is "balancing" the game with rarity. This is absolutely hopeless in a game heavily invested in trade. If an item/mechanic/craft is super powerful and rare, it will be traded. So how can rarity possibly balance the power? The people who spend all day grinding at top efficiency or trading non-stop will be able to simply buy these items, as always. The price doesn't really matter. But the vast majority of people who just want to play this game to have fun killing monsters will never own such items. They will only be shown them in youtube videos of streamers. And because those have these items, everyone else can see them casually nuking content which seems absolutely impossible to all normal people, save those following a guide to one of the few broken builds of the league. This breeds resentment, which can be ignored. Or exasperation, which leads to quitting. But unfortunately, that's not all it does. Because the top players then complain loudly and publicly that the game is too easy. Which it is, given the power level granted by the items and their experience with the game. This will cause the devs to make the game harder, meaning even more impossible for the vast majority of players widening the gap between the top 0.1% and the rest.
An aside
Note that the powerful item also makes getting game knowledge easier: If you can assume to survive some of what the bad bosses throw at you, you can much more easily learn how they work, do them more often and generally learn the fight.
People with lesser gear simply do not have that opportunity. And so the gap grows even more. End result: An ever-widening gap between the players. And neither group is happy, except for a few who actually profit off trade. The goldilocks spot where the game is hard but doable for average people and where skill matters more than build templates and gear is eradicated. At some stage, tencent will overdo it and actually lose the casuals. Then the player base will be too low to pay for the running costs and PoE will have died to such a simple mistake (2nd line in this post). What a shame! May your maps be bountiful, exile
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" Agreed, and I think this is where the casual side of the player base is frustrated. A substantial portion of us have no interest in pooling vast amounts of resources together to create broken mirror-worthy items. We just enjoyed having a more straightforward way to create half-decent ones. I think removing influenced items from harvest crafting was a step in the right direction. However, removing targeted annulments was not. The former lowers the overall power ceiling, while the latter simply makes that ceiling more difficult to achieve. I don't have a great alternative, but perhaps something along the lines of a targeted annulment with a downside instead, i.e: - targeted annulment also gives your item the Harvest influence, which gives no benefit and restricts it from having any other influence - targeted annulment adds some minor universally negative implicit to the item that can't be removed - targeted annulment reduced item level to 81, or reduces maximum affixes to 5 I'm sure others could come up with better ideas, but the point would be to allow more deterministic crafting, but with a lower overall power ceiling. That way top-end players can't outright abuse it, and it doesn't completely invalidate other forms of crafting, but casual players can still use it for lower levels of progression successfully. |
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I guess all that is left to see is to wait and have hope in GGG :D
I've decided to go a few pages deeper into the comment section of the manifesto as it is reaching 300+ pages (All of that in quite remarkablly short time). The negatives and "fluff" of comments pile up, while the one's positive about this lessen ^^; Thankfully at least I don't see AS much harassment and hate-speech in there (god forbid, I saw one of those posts that got deleted and the person well-deserved it), but if I had to associate a number, I'd say the negative response rose up to round-about 83-84% ^^; I'll try to monitor this more, and hope we'll see a response sometime soon from GGG regarding the outburst! |
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" No surprises here. Its always like that and means very little. Its just that angry people are way more motivated to post their opinions than happy or indifferent players ever will be. It doesnt reflect anything else and the data accumulated this way mean little to nothing Im afraid. But kudos nontheless for putting in the effort |
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The other day, the first nine (!!) threads in feedback and suggestions were about Harvest. I have never seen anything like that, not even close, about no topic whatsoever. Not about the trading manifesto, which was highly controversial, either.
I really feel that this is, by far, the most unwanted and badly received manifesto they have ever put out. I wonder if they read this feedback and suggestions forum, if the information ever reaches the people that make decisions (Chris Wilson for example), and whether anything will be done about it. As it stands for now, my motivation to play has taken a quite significant hit, not only because I dislike the changes themselves, but also because of what they say about GGGs philosophy for this game and about whether they understand that widening the gap between players is good for the game. Remove Horticrafting station storage limit.
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" It should be noted that while there is a lot of negative feedback on the topic at hand, a lot of it is also just plain hate-speech and harassment. We already know that they look at the feedback. If anything we should also be grateful that development manifesto's happen EARLY, and not, you know, on patchday. Only because they don't respond in here, doesn't mean they aren't looking into stuff ^^ It certainly is the biggest outburst from the community however, and at the very least, I believe GGG is taking a deeper look into it to discuss. Unless they feel like that IS the way they want to go with. THat's fine, it's their game, but it would mean that my choice would be to not play as much in leagues as I have :) |
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Hi Rakushi!
I agree with most (if not all) of your points. Thanks for taking the time to write all this and even throw in some of your personal experiences with the league. My experiences are very much like yours. I've never had a league where I've had this much fun - and I've ripped so (soooo) many characters. Harvest enabled me to try out new weird skill gems and ascendancies and see how they could actually work in a world where they theoretically wouldn't - that being pre-harvest. Isn't this game about the experimentation? To try new builds? Surely there must be a reason why we have a skill tree that wont fit in fullscreen mode? Surely there's a reason why we have so many ascendancies to choose from? Why we have so many skill gems? I'm not sure if you brought up this point, you probably did, but when you talked about the gap between the player base getting wider, I think that's one of the reasons why people tend to play meta builds. They're cheap, they'll do all content - and the reason why they're good is that they do not require any specific - let's face it - unreasonable mods on items/gear to even make it work for the majority of the player base. That's the problem I have with the system as it stood before harvest was introduced in it's current state. In SSF for example, you're pretty reliant on luck (and that's fine to a certain degree, don't get me wrong) when it comes to crafting. It feels bad wasting your precious 200 chaos orbs, or 2000 alterations on one or serveral items that may or may not hit those very much needed mods you need to make your desired build strong enough to reach endgame - to check those boxes that a strong skill gem and ascendancy combination already has going for it. And if it does, you'd hopefully not slam a t8 mana roll on it and brick the whole thing. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of other ways to craft an item, whether it be through essence crafting, alt/regal or fossils or meta-crafting, for most builds this wont be enough without a lot of time and a lot of luck. This, to me at least, feels more like gambling than gear progression. Now to my point: The gap between the players will absolutely, as you previously stated, be greater if they choose to implement this patch for harvest, and as a result of that the build diversity that we finally got to see and experiment with in ritual league will be smaller. Because why would you risk playing a gem that you love or an ascendancy that may or may not reach end-game (whatever that might be for you) if you're too reliant on luck to get the desired items, if you can do it with a build that doesn't require anything of the sort? I think this holds true for many of the newer players and even to some degree the more experienced player. You can argue the fact that in trade league you can buy the items for currency, but then why craft items at all? Let the rich craft the items and use your currency as, well... currency, to buy it. Gamling to me is not the gear- or character progression I would prefer in the game that I love, and from reading the forums, a lot of people would agree with that. But if I'm wrong, then so be it, and I'm gonna be 100% fine with it. I've got 8000 hours played in this game, I've reached lvl 100 and I've done all content on SSF HC before harvest was introduced. Some of these stuff might not apply to me, but they sure might apply to the majority of the player base. I might not think this game is impossibly hard, but that's not why I play this game. I love this game the most when I get to try out new things, new skill's that I havn't tried out before, ascendancies that seems interesting, not necessary because they look the strongest, or because it's few of the viable options for a league starter on the latest patch note, but because they appeal to me, just like certain skill gems do. It's impossible to balance all skill gems, and I understand that there's no way that they will be close to even in power. But I want to play the game the way that I like, and I think harvest filled that gap. There will always be strong gems that trivializes that game with next to no investment. That wont change with or without harvest. I just want to have fun... you know? You can argue that it makes the game more challenging and it's in itself a challenge to make those underused gems or ascendancies work - I'm certainly one of them (hello 0.2% Berserker). And I'm not saying that it's impossible, it's not. But for a less experienced player, it might be. I think harvest was a good implementation and I don't agree with the approach GGG's taking with this change. but hey, that's just my 2 cents on the matter. GGG has made an amazing game that keeps implementing new ideas of progressing, especially when it comes to crafting. What I find incomprehensible is why they would take a step backwards on a system that gave the players a reason to come back to playing and enjoying. I do love the game though, with or without this change, but I do hope that GGG listens to the feedback they're given. Thanks again for the time you've put onto this post. I hope that GGG takes a look at it! Rymdleffe out! Last edited by RymdLeif#4291 on Mar 13, 2021, 10:59:51 AM
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" I don't think I've mentioned the player gap getting wider again, and if I have, I feel like this may have been written under the influence (as in, anger ^^;) and the likes. My opinion on the matter about the player gap is, I simplly don't care about it. Why look into someone else's bowl if I am happy with mine? Comparing yourself with others that are more succesful always will sap out enjoyment out of you, or has at least for me. I am glad however that you've found enjoyment (and baffled you found the time and stamina) to read trough all of this! It may actually need a lot of cleanup, but, I think I've done enough to put my opinion trough! Let's have some faith in GGG :) |
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