Harvest Statistics: Challenges and Seeds

Having 1 challenge is highest therefore it looks like the best one to get.

The only terrifying thing was buying t4 scarabs for achievement, too low drop rate from harvest and client crash on vulkan when i spawned 17 bosses.

Posted this on reddit and ripped my karma but here's what I felt about the league:

So just a bit about my PoE experience and why I feel like my opinion should hold some merit: Been playing PoE on and off since we only had two acts, gotten 36+/40 challenges on the last four leagues(for the MTX) and 15-20ish on some others. Stopped playing HC three leagues ago because I felt the game was getting too many unfair one-shot randomness in the end-game. Since I have a family and job (gasp, how is this possible? If you got to red maps before harvest you had no life!) I didn't have time to remake my toons all the time.

In my experience games that has a high learning curve and very hard encounters survives for much longer and retains a bigger player base. Games that makes everything available to everyone are games that people play for 30~ hours and then never pick up again. I think a lot of the success PoE has is because of the fact that there's, for most people, always a harder boss or encounter to work towards. If they were to make every encounter available to everyone without them having to put any mention-able time to get there, I think the game would lose a lot of its attraction.

With that said I think PoE had a pretty solid way of progression. If you're one of those people who say you would never reach red tier maps before this league I can't take you serious. Like, if I no-life and play 10 hours a day for the first three days I'll reach red tier maps. Even if you just fuck around and it takes double that time it would still only amount to what, half an hour played/day before the league ends? In these cases it's really not the game at fault at all and if that's too stressful or whatever there's always standard where you have no "deadline" what-so-ever to reach the end-game at your own pace.

To be blunt: When GGG is balancing the game and adding/removing parts of it. Should they listen to the people who clears all the content or the ones who never even bothers to play long enough to reach it? Probably both, to some extent. But it's insulting that people dismiss any criticism to harvest as elitists wanting to run mirror services.

So, harvest. It's fucking clunky. The whole garden setup is messy as hell even if you're OCDing it like me. I absolutely and utterly, with all my heart and soul, HATE the way we store crafts. There's no way to get a clear view on what crafts you have saved. Just throw everything in your stash and search for a key word then rummage trough your 50+ tables there to see if you maybe had that one craft you needed. There's probably not an argument in the world that can defend how it works and I have no idea why it's made this way instead of just having one table (with added storage) for all your crafts.

A big part of the league was also to sell and buy crafts, I personally didn't even bother with this part because GGG provided no way to do this other than spamming $trade. So the player base had to set up a disc and later a website so that people could even access the mechanics. What. The. Fuck.

Doing maps felt like playing standard because nothing related to the league happened in the map itself. Unless you planted and harvested outside of maps it sort of killed the natural flow of mapping adding to the clunky feeling of the league. "Flasks up, killing shit, gotten my buffs and cds aaaaaaaand... oh I have one field ready... ok let me just jump in here.. oh I lost my buffs alright, which one is ready now... oh ok the t3 field... alright killed everything there now let's just loot all these seeds and store them in the chest way over there to see what I can plant now... oh, five crafts are good to save... oh, only had three storage slots connected let me just run and get a new bench..." you get the point. After a while I just did it for the challenges and then sort of ignored it except planting some targeted null crafts.

Which brings me to what most people get mad when you say; harvest makes the crafting too easy. Targeted nulls and slams are too powerful in the state they are now. Like 100% explode roll on chests from three crafts? Being able to lock prefixes to target slam three resist items with three (pretty common) crafts? It's too good. There needs to be some sort of middle ground to this. I'm not talking about the god tier 10x mirror items that people are showing every single day now but the very good items you can do with very little investment.

I think a lot of the people who say they never crafted before harvest sort of explains themselves, without knowing it, why they never reached the end-game. The crafting is a fucking mess in PoE and learning the mechanics behind it takes a ton of time. What I think this league did is that people have put that time in, for the first time, to actually learn about the crafting. Removing harvest wont remove your knowledge on what can and cannot roll when you, as an example, slam an item.

The harvest crafting sort of killed all the other ways to craft since it's just better in every single way. There's no drawback to it at all. Essences, that were already a bit obsolete unless you SSF became even more "meh". Most fossils become totally useless. Exalted orbs lost all use except multimod etc etc. You have this intricate and fleshed out system in place and all of it is just pushed away to make place for a poorly implemented mechanic.

So you basically have a game with one way to get very overpowered items that is way better than all other ways to do it, and that mechanic is according to most players (considering the low amount of players left this league) really boring. IE: Not really a fun league.

So to end my rant: League was super easy, I've never gotten 36 challenges so fast before. Three new free MTX, can't wait for the next league to see what they throw at us. (Some armour MTX this time maybe?)

"Interestingly, while the amount of players that completed 12 & 24 challenges is lower than Delirium league"


GGG does not understand the comparative results.
What GGG should focus on is this.

I'm tired of little update PoE and GGG that do not attempt to capture the beginners.

"

fullbordad wrote:

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witkop525 wrote:

I seriously have no idea how people can get these challenges done. I have so much trouble beating Sirus at Awakener 1 and getting level 100 in the first place... How do people do this? Don't come with some stupid motivation like "You're just bad" because I have been playing a lot of games for a long time and I haven't seen many games around that are at this level of difficulty. It's literally insane.

Not to mention the Toxic Waste and the Gardens challenges. Terrible challenge designs and can't get them done.

Dude you're trolling right? You've only done 15 challenges, you can pretty much reach that point without even entering maps if you're actually trying to get the challenges. Getting level 100 for the end game grind challenge is something pretty much everyone skips unless you go for 40/40.

OT: Got 36 in four leagues now and 15~ ish in some of the older ones. Didn't play Delve, Timeless or TD league at all. So I guess I can call myself a veteran of PoE and here's my TL;DR input:

The league made it too easy to get super good gear which let you get to T16 juiced map farming super fast. The snowball effect on this league was insane. In hindsight it would've probably been more fun to play SSF this league but I usually skip that since I can't play too much (Kids, work, life).

Never gotten 36 challenges so fast in a league and I didn't even push for them. Still have two easy ones left as well (Scarabs and map completion).

I think for SSF this was a good league, for the rest meh. The mechanics were clunky and boring. The way you stored crafts was horrible. Might write a longer post and explain it better but for now:

Meh league.

Here I am trying to spend 100% of my time (not even working at the moment due to Covid etc.) on POE getting everything done. You must be insane for thinking it's all "easy" and/or do-able for casual players who have work/life/kids besides playing games all day.

For me, what makes me want to play a league are often more so the challenges than the league itself. That said, once I complete the challenges I will happily continue playing, but if the challenges are too out of reach it makes me feel like quitting early.

Harvest league for me has been quite different to the typical however. This league I feel a constant sense of progression throughout as I can work towards my own goals. Previously I would get that sense of progression from challenges, but this league it's from the league itself which is really really nice. I will likely play this league till the very end.

As for challenges, I typically aim for 36 each league, unless the 36 reward isn't very nice, or the challenges themselves aren't fun.


Challenges that I don't enjoy doing are:


1. Those that tend to require specific builds. I don't enjoy rerolling and if I did reroll, I don't want to reroll to a build I don't like just to do a challenge.

2. Those that rely heavily on RNG. For example the 5 essence challenge this league. It's okay if other challenges can be done as an alternative to hit 36, as long as Endgame Grinds or similar doesn't become one of them.

3. Those that push you to run content you do not enjoy, or in a way you do not enjoy. For example, Delirium had a Betrayal based challenge that required syndicate members to be placed in specific safehouses. Doing this (for me) meant I couldn't put them where I wanted them, or I would be losing out on the challenge.

4. Those that require doing silly things like getting a Delirium boss to be possessed by a tormented spirit. I am on the fence about this one as it can be done if you're smart about it, but the tormented spirit AI really needs a tweak for these spirit related ones to be fun.


Those that I do enjoy:


1. Those that are league specific. These often give a fun way to discover the league and a sense of progression. I enjoy these as long as they are not really heavily RNG reliant.

2. Those that require completing unique maps, unid maps, twinned, and corrupted maps. This does not include map tiers.

3. Those that are part of the main story. For example, defeating all Atlas Conquerors, or other X boss. These give a nice sense of progression.


Too many unenjoyable challenges will often make me choose not to play the league or to just give up on the challenges.

~0.38% of players have completed 36 challenges and earned the Harvest Portal Effect.

If I was a game dev I'd want 99.62% of my player base getting to 36+ Challenges, not alienating that percent.


tencentGGG has a knack for misinterpreting their stats to explain the way they want to game to be.


-We're certainly interested in hearing from those of you that did hit 36 challenges this league;


You are focusing on and asking the wrong people...

The league mechanics didn't really seem all that interesting so I didn't give it a try, there's already more than enough crafting complication in the game to learn. I was semi-interested in getting the "easy" 12 challenge reward if it was useful, but footprint effects aren't all that interesting to me. Having a portal reward for 36 is certainly a draw, but for someone who hasn't mastered the game yet, that's a lot of work to put in and I chose to play Standard SSF so I don't have to deal with the pressure of a time limit to get certain goals done in time. That's my 2 cents.

Also can you please do something about the reCaptcha used to log into the website? It makes you solve 5-10 captchas just to log in. I know that doesn't sound like a big deal, but I find it extremely tedious. 1 or 2 captchas should be sufficient to prove I'm not a bot. If a bot can pass 1 or 2 then I doubt 10 will stop them.

removed by me

LOVE this league