Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

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spaceace7373 wrote:

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seandkiller wrote:

The Harvest nerfs are even worse than they mentioned in the Manifesto.

It feels genuinely depressing seeing the Grove in a map now.

i know the feeling. with the state that harvest is in now, it honestly should be removed. i've had 12 so far and not a single useful craft. it's sad to see harvest reduced to what it is now

Before the nerfs, Harvest was very common to find, so that not having a good craft most of the times was fine.

Now with the lower appearances of Harvest, plus the further nerfs it feels like a useless league just like prophecy, exiles and tempest. But they nerfed all league mechanics, I am doing heist and I am like "why waste my time for 1 alt and 2 Transmutes"...

I dont understand why we cant find things while playing, why do we have to trade?

rip harvest and tft still rules economy

ps bots also rampage

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illdyking wrote:

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Obright wrote:

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illdyking wrote:

Why do people whine so much.

You can probably beat most of the game on SC with 50C gear, you dont need harvest gear for that.

I mean, you got 6 rips, 6 portal.

TRANSLATION: "Why do people want to keep playing after they beat act 10? Who do they think they are?"

Maybe they are just sick of hitting a brick wall unless they play an expensive meta build?

One of the problems we've been discussing in here is player retention, and frustration with not being able to participate in the endgame. It's one of the reasons why new leagues peter out after 2 weeks, and why leagues with harvest crafting last longer.

Your post literally supports the position you claim to oppose.

...Dude, harvest league was the shortest league of all leagues.

https://steamcharts.com/app/238960#1y

That first hump represents the peak player numbers of Harvest league on the steam client (125,432). Notice how the number of players tapers down at a fairly natural, normal rate. Now look at the next league, Heist. It's the one without any Harvest mechanic. Not only did it cap out at fewer people (121,595), look at how it flat-lined completely until the next new league began. That flat-line represents standard league, the only constant pool of players this game has. That's how bad Heist league player retention was.

Now look at the next league with the Maven (and more importantly the harvest mechanic). If you'll notice, not only does it retain players for longer, it peaks at over 157k players.

...But here are the most important points:

Look how player numbers fell, just after this announcement dropped. Those player numbers were the lowest since 2016. What that means is that the nerfs actually shook standard league, which is really saying something.

Yes they came back up at the beginning of this league, but look how sharply they have already dropped. That is more than just remarkable, it is without precedent in the history of this game.

People logged in to see if GGG really went through with nuking harvest, saw that it was actually even worse than anticipated, and just quit. There was absolutely zero endgame content to entice people to stay, so...

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Obright wrote:

https://steamcharts.com/app/238960#1y

That first hump represents the peak player numbers of Harvest league (125,432). Notice how the number of players tapers down at a fairly natural, normal rate. Now look at the next league, Heist. It's the one without any Harvest mechanic. Not only did it cap out at fewer people (121,595), look at how it flatlined completely until the next new league began. That flatline represents standard league, the only constant pool of players this game has. That's how bad Heist league player retention was.

Now look at the next league with the Maven (and more importantly the harvest mechanic). If you'll notice, not only does it retain players for longer, it peaks at over 157k players.

...But here are the most important points:

Look how player numbers fell, just after this announcement dropped. Those player numbers are the lowest since 2016. What that means is that the nerfs actually shook standard league, which is really saying something.

Yes they came back up at the beginning of this league, but look how sharply they have already dropped. That is more than just remarkable, it is without precedent in the history of this game.

looks like a really good increase for Last Epoch. huge increase in numbers

https://steamcharts.com/app/899770

i've seen so many good items get bricked over the last couple days and people not being able to progress. it's not possible for me to even finish my gear without massive amounts of currency to buy the decent items. i just can't progress without mindlessly grinding maps for hours on end with little reward to try to collect the currency. progress stops and people get tired of it and move on to other games.

i only play standard and have noticed a huge change in player numbers, an influx of new players and they don't seem to stick around very long. yes, there are lifers that will always be there with their "i'm better than noobs" attitude telling new players if they want help to go play league. my play time has decreased to about half of what it was. i really want to finish my build to actually get into the endgame bosses. harvest needs to be fixed as even i have passed it up a couple times now which is sad because harvest is really the only reason i play.

my first time playing was the last 2.5 weeks of harvest league. i made it to level 80, had the grove completely filled and could farm all tier seeds. complicated as hell to set up and connect everything. it was interesting, involving, challenging to set up and harvest to say the least. loved it. then the league ended and heist happened.

i played the whole heist league and hated it. i only played in hopes harvest would come back, which it did. at first, i was getting at least 2-3 harvests a day with 20-30ish maps which made the grind fun. then it was like driving into a concrete wall and the harvest spawns all but stopped. day after day of grinding over 600 maps while only getting 5 harvests is truly pathetic spawn rates.

i play standard because i don't like to keep starting over. i also play the build i use because i like it and it's fun. i have put some of my real money into this game for stash tabs to make playing a little better. but when you can't progress without mindless grinding playing like the game is a job 12-14 hours a day... at some point, you just get tired of it and walk away...

So the Devs nerfed Harvest because it completely replaced other crafting options...

And then proceeded to turn the Grove into a treasure chest of one-socket resonators...

with fewer mod choices,
no safe way to trade them,
limits on how many you can store,
and restrictions on influenced items.

Nice work balance team...

harvest is so worthless now, like not even a meme its literally a waste of time, the time it takes to kill the mobs and look at the abysmal craft options you could just run another map instead or do literally anything else. The crafts barely sell for even 10c each now unless you get the 1 in a million fracture craft or someething and as far as using them yourself they are no better then just a 1 socket fossil craft

Even the still "decent" mods like fracturing or the reforge keep prefix/suffix have been made incredibly rare like we are talking 1 in 100 harvests and thats with the full tree specced in haewark.

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Obright wrote:

https://steamcharts.com/app/238960#1y

Look how player numbers fell, just after this announcement dropped. Those player numbers were the lowest since 2016. What that means is that the nerfs actually shook standard league, which is really saying something.

Yes they came back up at the beginning of this league, but look how sharply they have already dropped. That is more than just remarkable, it is without precedent in the history of this game.

People logged in to see if GGG really went through with nuking harvest, saw that it was actually even worse than anticipated, and just quit. There was absolutely zero endgame content to entice people to stay, so...

Interestingly enough, I can think of one other time that the playerbase took a hit very similar to this one. A hit big enough to drastically reduce the size of the upcoming league despite it being well liked and deal a notable blow to standard.

Abyss League was even smaller than the dumpster fire of Bestiary 1.0 and came after the very successful Harbringer League, even though Harbringer had a kinda weird four month duration rather than the standard three.

But something else interesting for PoE did happen in November 2017...

The trade manifesto was released.

So I'm going to be that guy and point out the elephant in the room. The two most significant losses of players that PoE has ever had were the time you flat out told us that there would always be price-fixers, scammers, and bots in the game because you refuse to do something about it, and the time you gave us a league that completely fixed solo-play but then nerfed it into being literally worse than useless because trading harvest crafts broke the trade economy.

You made a game which has the core fantasy of going from washing up exiled on a beach by an oppressive theocracy, to punching gods in the face and exploring the multiverse, by looting your way across a hellscape borne of the foulest creations from the minds of men that will stop at nothing to kill you. Then you decided that the best way to represent the inherent struggle of doing that was to gate all the interesting build-diversity enabling tools behind an absurd level of RNG.

Harvest was a step in the right direction, but is now useless. Bestiary 1.0 for all its flaws was a step in the right direction with deterministic beast-crafting, but now we see so little of Einhar that he is the worst of the masters by a huge margin. The crafting bench changes in Betrayal are a mixed bag, the base bench is mildly better but now all the really good stuff is gated behind Betrayal which is yet another league that we don't get to interact with nearly enough.

PoE and PoE 2 need a loot overhaul, and not a small one. Something akin to fossils as baseline currency in place of alch and chaos orbs. Fewer but more impact-full basetypes that scale with player level through their given range. A crafting bench that straight up lets you pick two mods then rolls four more.

Harvest was an experiment in the extremes of what could be done with crafting, and it was very, very, close to being ideal. Less randomness is more fun for the 90%+ of the playerbase that doesn't trade, because trade is garbage.

How I feel, after 7 days.

I leave League on the third day because:
1. Must have the strongest gear to do content.
2. Do not see realistic ways how to obtain this gear.
3. Therefore on StandartLeague - the biggest chat ever.
4. But still lose my interest in the game even in Standart, because do not see the way how to improve my already very improved gear.
5. Not have an achievable goal - lose motivation.

Yesterday I caught on to the thought that I was trying to persuade myself to start the game.
This is a bad sign.

What needs to do, to improve this game:

1. Deterministic craft.
2. Normal automated trading platform. Will be great if in both directions - WantToSell and WantToBuy.

In my opinion, both of this points - are about one main goal - how t obtain better gear.


PS
For me - do not see any significant technical problem.
All works well.
Thanks.

The problem only - gameplay.

The issue for me right now is that Harvest feels terrible to encounter. That feeling is compounded by how often it shows up now due to the buff to its spawn rate. The reduction of crafting options is disheartening to experience as a players - slaughtering an entire garden for 4-10 crafts per node, half of which being useless, is a frustrating experience.

I had approached this change with cautious optimism, but it's significantly worse that I had expected. I found, for the first time since I started in Harbinger, that I don't really want to play. The game's still fine, and I'm sure it will continue to be fine, but I can't justify some of the decisions made this league.

Harvest nerfs, master mission nerfs, map sustain nerfs, and various other changes make getting to end-game feel unsatisfying and tedious. Rather than nerf mechanics, we should be buffing underperforming skills and mechanics to bring them up. I love the lab change, but I don't want to enchant a random Hubris because spamming it with Chaos isn't crafting, it's tedious and boring.

I'm a high school teacher with a family, so it stands to reason that I'm fairly casual when it comes to PoE. I've killed Uber Elder and Maven, but I don't make mirrors, and I'm still stoked when I see Exalt drops. I have a huge chunk of hours in the game, but most of it is spent casually mapping, AFKing in my hideout, or levelling new characters with my wife. Harvest was a way for my wife and I to experience new builds; we play pseudo-SSF in Trade League so we can play together without trading, so salvaging gear via harvest was the best thing to happen to us in years of PoE. It allowed us to experience more of the game, and we loved it. We've both already quit this league because we don't see the process as achievable or enjoyable as casual SSF players.

I've been checking the current players graph on Steam, and while it's too soon to make any significant judgement it appears to be spiking downward much faster than Ritual. I expect many players are feeling the same frustration I am. It feels as though GGG are making decisions to purposefully make their mechanics unfulfilling and unrewarding. People might compare it to a time before Harvest, but that's not the reality we're living in. We've experienced how satisfying and rewarding PoE crafting can be, and we really don't want to go back. Harvest was well loved in the community, and while it had serious issues, gutting the mechanic instead of the problem crafts probably wasn't the right call.

I'd love for GGG to re-visit Harvest. It was a huge QOL for us, and we're all fairly sad to see it go.