Early Access Feedback - Feedback from informationally self-isolated player - Crafting system - Forum

As in the previous similarly-titled post, "informationally self-isolated" means my exposure to the rest of the community is extremely tiny (a few hours of streams, a couple wiki pages and some questions in [redacted] discord about [redacted]), which means that my thoughts are ~completely unaffected by the thoughts of the rest of the community.

Three notes before the start
1) There is a big BUT in the middle of this post, so please try to not make judgment based on only the first half of the post.
2) I (probably because [redacted]) didn't (so far) feel much need to trade with other players, so this is a post from a 99% SSF perspective (i've bought, like, 4 crafting materials items)
3) This post will only talk about the core... principles/mechanics of the crafting system, not about balance, because i'm currently only in T12 Maps (i play probably rather slowly and not only PoE 2), so i can't evaluate balance, or, like, the way craftinga system functions in late endgame.

The crafting system itself i quite like:
1) The crafting system being largely irreversible is good, because:
> It encourages you to... be constantly crafting what items you get, because crafting even sub-optimal items is better than having a bunch of currency, but no items to craft.
> The constant crafting mentioned above means that you are getting upgrades incrementally, which is also nice.
> It means that the way you craft changes based on what currency you have / as you start getting more currency. Because, again, if you have a big pile of currency, but no items to craft with it, that big pile of currency is, essentially, useless.
2) Reforging, Vaal Orbs, and, later on, presumably, other ways of recycling your crafts as ways of increasing crafting efficiency are also nice; especially since they do require some amount of decision-making (i.e. do you recycle a particular triplet of items as Magic, or do you Regal them all to get an unidentified Rare of that base type, but at the cost 3 Regal Orbs).
1-2b) Although, most crafting outcomes being crap starting from rather early endgame is a bit annoying. But, also, not annoying enough for me to look much for ways to deal with that, so maybe this point is already addressed / not actually an issue.
3) Looted magic/rare gear being both a major source of crafting supplies and a potential input into the crafting system (be it as item to be reforged or an item to be finalised) adds some decision-making to the item vendoring process, which is nice.
4) Alva as a way to... exchange your ability to trade for, essentially, more item drops is also rather nice. Would probably be even nicer if gear was also traded through the Auction House (and, thus, had a gold fee) and not via the website and manual trades. On the other hand, it would then possibly be a situation where either strictly Alva or strictly AH is the objectively correct way to spend gold on items, so maybe keeping neither gold nor currency as the cost for trading gear with other players is a better idea.

BUT

This crafting system requires a constant stream of items as input ->
-> a player has to be able to easily discern which the dropped items they can use for crafting.
And, while my item highlighting scheme that lets me do that (screenshots below), the default scheme (be it the actual default or (presumably/seemingly, still the de-facto default) NeverSink's filter) does not.

With it you have to either
- read and interpret each item's name,
or
- hover over each item and look at the sprite and stats / requirements
- (or, i guess, with NeverSink's filter - tweak the rules every time your priorities change)

All these options take far too much effort. Which means that my opinion of the crafting system is probably rather different from that of most of the playerbase.

So, you have a crafting system that requires a constant stream of rather specific and changing base items as input, and a default item highlighting / filtering scheme that in no way supports that requirement.
But current filter system has problems other than just "bad default filter", so it deserves it's own post.

My filter screenshots (or, rather, my highlighting scheme screenshots, because as of now i haven't yet felt the need to add any automated filtering).