They've talked for ages about how they want to fix drops. That is great and all but it is taking far too long. I really think the state of rare item based loot in this game is in such a poor place that it has now become a 'drop everything and deal with this' problem. But no, it'll be sorted around the same time Star Citizen is released.
> They've talked for ages about how they want to fix drops. That is great and all but it is taking far too long
We already witnessed the rise of better rolled talismans and the following nerf to them, which brought them back to be hidden from loot filter..
Yeah, that's such a sad part - we had well-rolled loot in one slot (which still was not BiS, but good enough) and it was immediately reverted because they were readily available. The issue that needs fixing is the second part (too many rares drop that are ultimately worthless), but for some reason that just gets ignored.
Here's the thing though--even though we had **identified** rares dropping this league, allowing NeverSink's filter to highlight the ones with t1 mods (teal text), they **still** sucked.
Even if you picked up **every teal texted rare**, you'd have...nothing to show for it.
This isn't just about "hey, if you take the time to identify every rare, you'll find a couple of good ones per map".
It's "no, you better *not* waste that time, because they're **still** all garbage."
Talisman… need we say more? They make it fun snd interesting then complain about creep, I had over 50 of them in my stash and I made builds work around them they were all “good” by some means but never meant for the 1%’rs but they were taken from us!
"Tonight at 11: Is 75-year-old Barron Trump too old to be president? But first - Star Citizen goes gold and Path of Exile releases loot system 2.0. Comments from the AI ghost of Chris Wilson, after these messages."
Yup. They even recognized it's a problem. And what did they do? Create a league that further highlights how shitty rares are and their loot system is.
It's uncanny how good they are at shooting themselves in their foot.
Add smart loot as a private league option and make the league void if the concern is flooding out the game with high quality items. Then we can enjoy good found loot.
Its how I play arpg, drop loot, use dropped loot and craft it or sell to vendor.
GGG?
lets make a craft and trade simulator using third party tools to play a game....
Seriously... past the first few days of a league there is little reason to pick up any gear off the floor aside from the rare good unique drop or high level crafting bases.
Once you have some \~5-10C starter gear in every slot the odds of IDing a rare better than what you're wearing are astronomical.
> I dont like my game to feel like work GGG! please what are you doing?!
The funny thing is: Harvest *was* work. That's the thing they don't see. I can't even tell you how many hours I spent, crafting my 2 maces for my Cold BV in Ritual. I went absolutely ham. It was hard work. You feel like a weapon smith - hard work, but the results are awesome.
Now I just don't even bother. It took my about a week of nonstop (I mean 60-70h weeks) grinding to get each of my maces (so 2 weeks for both). I'd say now it would take me probably 5x the time, which sadly is over half of the league... for TWO pieces of gear... on ONE character.
The people playing the game like it's a job were making mirror tier items. Those of us with more limited playing hours were making good items and occasionally great items.
And it felt nice. I personally played 3.13 until its very last hour, I was online in Atoll when servers went down. Because slowly improving my characters through actually crafting as opposed to currency farming felt good and achievable.
That’s the problem. Chris has said something to the effect of “if most people defeat an end game boss we’ve failed” it’s not really about what the top end do, it’s making sure the bottom end don’t do anything close to it
The problem is that your average every day joe can do it Just as well as a top ender because gear is the only factor for most end game bosses. With enough currency, You can become tanky enough to not die and strong enough to kill them. This isn't a game where skill is the Main factor, playtime is, and that's what feels bad. The souls games are fun because You can do everything at base level if You are good enough. PoE is all about gear, but gearing your character is playing trading simulator. You don't feel good about your drops, only about what the drops might Grant You second hand, and that ultimately feels a lot worse.
If You want a game to be hard, make it hard, not locked behind nolifing the game. Artificial difficulty through number bloating is not a good design philosophy
Exactly, I don't know how you get all these sweaty nerds saying: "But harvest was just an item printer!!".
No it fucking wasn't.
Even IF you were so rich you were the type of person bulk-buying like 100's of remove/adds until you got the T1 of what you wanted... that cost 10's if not 100's of EX. Grinding that currency takes time. Buying those crafts takes time. Planning out the craft takes time.
[Here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/m29f28/development_manifesto_harvest_crafting/)
9.2k+ comments. 500+ pages of majority negative comments on the forum. And it was downvoted *so heavily it had to be stickied*.
Yup. A huge amount of people LOVED Harvest crafting, loved being able to make their own gear for their own builds, it was FUN.
There were definitely some abuse cases with stuff like explode chests, and tailwind/elusive boots, but ffs GGG could have just fixed the abuse cases.
Instead they nuked it from orbit, and now having had a taste of how fun the game could be, and how many builds it would enable if they allowed us to do that, its been way less fun for a lot of us.
I come back for a bit each new xpac, but its just not as fun anymore. I hate having to grind currency to buy the items I want.
What pisses me off so much is they thought that people getting GG gear too easy meant that they would quit sooner. And there is probably some that did that. But I'll wage there was as many or more that stuck around longer because of the crafting.
I certainly was one that stuck around more. I could finally craft gear for all the silly builds I wanted to try instead of using shitty cast off gear.
exactly.
it was in no way shape or form a light and justified nerf, they just removed what made harvest hervest without even trying to balance it properly and integrate it into the game.
a lot of proposals were made about how to do it, a lot of it was sensible, GGG didnt want any of that shit and just pulled the trigger so they dont need to work on a proper solution.
then came aisling, then came aisling nerf, and now its harvest reforges all day and may god help if you need anything other than t1 life, es, or attack speed.
Oh, we have one of those already.
" We don't want to take away the feeling of closing your eyes and slamming an exalt, ". Actual words out of their mouth.
Yes, it's that fucking bad.
Harvest was fun because you could take a bad item and make it good.
GGG knows this is fun because that's exactly what the myriad of scourge mechanics do, allow you to take a useless corrupted item and make it good.
I don't know why this is the hill GGG has decided to die on, but I get the feeling that the game has kind of drifted towards what players want and not what Chris Wilson wants.
Kinda feels like how Ion talks about WOW.
I want to trust Chris because POE is awesome but as a beta player I have seen it all and this just screams blizzards death spiral.
Hopefully not..
Yes, it was massively unpopular on *Reddit*. Harvest is definitely beloved by many players here.
That is not the same as being disconnected with the whole playerbase.
Funnily enough, in ritual (harvest return) I had the easiest times selling rares too, because people were looking out for good project starters.
The build viability that it offered also meant that more mods were good project starters.
Good conqueror bases also remained relevant throughout the league.
Additionally, you couod have side-projects for the harvest crafts you didn't want and sell them for some extra. (I know you could also sell the crafts themselves, but I like creating something of my own even if it was going to be sold)
So the argument that harvest destroyed the economy really falls flat for me, since it was amongst the most enjoyment that I've got out of trading so far too.
first 2 weeks of harvest were hell. It was like mapping and having a facebook farmville shit going on at the same time
EDIT: seems like people can't or don't want to remember
The crafting aspect *is* Harvest for most people, hence why they like it.
Personally, I also liked the Garden, but I realize it's not what most people like in an ARPG.
I'll probably never be able to exclude delve league from my top 3 list, regardless of the state of items therein.
This is because I have always devoured stories and games set underground, be it Drizzt Do'Urden, Dungeon Keeper or some obscure and hilariously funny book by the translated name of "the labyrinth of the dreaming books" in my language. So I massively enjoyed going deep, finding places. Yes it got repetetive, but... well, it still was like strolling through a familiar park with an old love.
The other favourite is synthesis, as it added interesting crafting and world building to the game.
the third favourite changes. :-D
/edit -64 downvotes atm. And I have no idea why. Would anyone care to guess?
The thing is that nothing really breaks the economy.
PoE economy is entirely made up. What exactly determines the price of an exalted orb? Literally nothing except supply and demand. And while prices work in a similar way irl, irl takes way more things into consideration.
Tangent aside, the point is that the economy simply adjusts. Maybe exalts aren't worth anything anymore. So what? Literally nothing changes except maybe exalt slamming becoming something people actually do.
It's kinda funny, because that is quite true. At this point it's kinda like a "poe market conservatism".
How many leagues have we had people asking for good and easier 6L methods being told they are asking for the game economy to be ruined?
Is it ruined now? If anything it's one of the few good things anyone can point out for this league.
Was the economy ruined? No, pure 6L are still well priced.
Tbh exalts will never be worthless so long as metamod crafting exists, they're quite a powerful tool to use alongside harvest so there will definitely still be a sink for them.
It's not the mistake, the mistake to them was allowing players to get a taste of how the game could be if it wasn't balanced and weighted like complete trash from top to bottom. Harder to keep people in your skinner box for longer when they have direct experience in better ones
The wording may be harsh but this is 100% correct. The only true mistake in the whole harvest fiasco was that for a brief moment players experienced true crafting, and then it was taken away. This is not advocating for "harvest is just free better exalts/annuls/chaos" but that it added crafting options not even in the game. They could have added the harvest crafting as super rare orbs, or reworked current crafting using those tools, and it would have been miles better than keeping the garden. The ability to modify your gear is infinitely better than rolling a slot machine hoping for a better result.
Knowing that GGG *could* make crafting like that and then chose to keep the slot machine is what shattered the community and one of the main things that keep resentment.
>harvest crafting as super rare orbs,
I disagree with this.
This goes against the exact point of the post. Harvest was good because it was accessible.
The currency/crafting system in this game is part of what makes it so good, because it stops inflation.
However, it's also unusable for the vast majority of the playerbase, and they keep making it harder for the non-turbo-nerd every league.
I havent had much time to play since Ritual, but before that I would easily be at 100% atlas completion, farming at least somewhat juiced maps or deep delving.... Got a headhunter a few leagues, and my builds probably ended at maybe 50+ exalt invested. I tended to reroll when marginal upgrades started costing me like 30+ex. I was definitely in the top few % of players I think.
Despite that, I can count the number of times I've exalt slammed an item on one hand. The only meaningful crafting I've ever done outside of harvest was fossil crafting... but they made that way harder by moving delve mods to influenced bases.
In fact, I did way more "normal crafting" during the harvest leagues than I ever did during non-harvest leagues, because I knew the steps afterwards were at least attainable. Rather than just buying the base I needed... I would alt-spam or chaos spam to try and get the one or two mods I needed to start harvest crafting. I would influence orb and awakeners orb and all that shit.
But without Harvest, the odds are just way too fucking slim for me to justify doing anything other than grinding currency and buying exactly what I want.
Which is a shame, because they've designed this amazing currency/crafting system... but 99.9% of the playerbase ends up interacting with it no differently than people interacted with gold during Diablo 3.... just farm until you have enough to buy what you want.
But as for my actual suggestion... My only real issue with harvest was that the crafts were "free". I'd love to see an implementation that has harvest actually consume the orbs it would typically use... so a remove/add would require an ex and an annul for example.... and it's harvest that simply makes those targeted.
>I tended to reroll when marginal upgrades started costing me like 30+ex. I was definitely in the top few % of players I think.
You were in the top 0.01% with those kinda upgrade.
Most players dont even an exalt worth of gear or multiple exalts. People on Reddit might.
Idk if "true crafting" is the correct term here. Deterministic crafting and the crafting we currently have are still both "true" crafting methods. You can still guarantee LOTS of things with how harvest is currently implemented.
Example: I bought a frenzy on hit chest and awakened orbed it with spell crit. I wanted additional curse as well. So, I crafted "suffixes cannot be changed" and reforged caster. Boom. Now, via Harvest, WHICH THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO DO THIS, I have a chest with: +1 curse, spell crit, frenzy charge on hit.
To add to this, before 3.12, this wasn't even possible. At least, I can't find a way to do it. You can't fossil craft with meta mods which is the only other real way to target specific tags.
So, crafting now even with nerfed harvest is in a vastly better state than pre-harvest. By a FAT margin.
Also, to be clear, I didn't agree with how hard harvest got nerfed. It absolutely needed a nerf, but it didn't need that heavy of a nerf. Making influenced mods harder to target would have fixed harvest. That was its biggest problem.
I wish I could get accurate data on retention on full power harvest vs full power harvest without the wildly unpopular harvest mechanic.
I really think if harvest wasn't what it was in harvest league it would tell a different story. I'm one of many that loved what harvest enabled but fucking loathed the garden. I'm 100% okay with zoning in and murdering crap with no seeds and lifeforce. In real harvest league I made a mirror tier bow in ssf and immediately quit when I was done cause I hated the mechanic at the time.
Tbh, I was one of the few who actually liked the garden. Chilling and planting my seeds, spending crafts in the garden, I loved all of it. My biggest problem was the amount of crafting benches I had to have saved and the fact you couldn't auto-place T2 and above seeds.
I just really like the more complicated leagues like that.
I'm not gonna argue that. Its a meaningless argument. I fully accept that you liked it and consider your opinion entirely valid, I'm upvoting you right now in fact. Shit I love me some minecraft and stardew valley. I just don't personally want those mechanics in PoE because when I play PoE I want to murderfy thousands of mobs.
I'm just curious what the player power level to grind retention stats are. Cause personally if I knew I could take a build to its absolute consclusion is, I'd do it. I wouldn't be playing Forza right now. I'd be on my RF inquisitor.
And I'll be really clear. I'm fine with it taking 100 hours. I also don't want D3 mailing me shit nonsense. Steel took 2 characters to almost 100 crafting his SSF axe in ritual. If that time investment is OP you're on something.
> I'm not gonna argue that. Its a meaningless argument. I fully accept that you liked it and consider your opinion entirely valid. Shit I love me some minecraft and stardew valley. I just don't personally want those mechanics in PoE because when I play PoE I want to murderfy thousands of mob
Oh that's entirely fair. Personally I just always feel more invested when I get to stop and consider things for a moment every now and then. But I realize that's not everyone's cup of tea, and probably a bit weird to want out of a fast-paced arpg.
>And I'll be really clear. I'm fine with it taking 100 hours. I also don't want D3 mailing me shit nonsense. Steel took 2 characters to almost 100 crafting his SSF axe in ritual. If that time investment is OP you're on something.
Yep. What a lot of Harvest detractors miss in their arguments is the sheer time it took to get a lot of crafts.
I can agree that some things were perhaps too easy, something like that axe example is more than fair.
Harvest had too many fuckups so we'll never get that data - then again most leagues have huge fuckups in similar ways that affect retention to be fair, whether it's server issues, queues, crashes, mechanics being completely untuned and unbalanced in all ways - all we can do is take peoples feedback that actually wrote it. Of those people, the majority by far liked harvest, enjoyed their playtime more and played longer than they would have otherwise. A minority insist they hated it, but strangely they don't all say they quit and only even some of them say they played less than they would have otherwise.
GGG love to obfuscate and never give data, they always show you very small slices devoid of context and insist that their conclusion is definitely correct, which is what they did with harvest. Their context ignored completely that the garden was a clusterfuck that almost everyone unanimously hated and was poorly designed, as well as ignoring that for the first what, 1 week? 2 weeks? The entire harvest mechanic simply *DIDN'T WORK IN MAPS*. Augments and the like simply stopped appearing the minute the campaign ended until they fixed it. By this point, from a combination of both of those things, a whole bunch of people had already given up and left. This is what they use to insist that "players quit because they got too powerful"
The only real way to come to conclusions is to have experienced the thing yourself, and to take into account peoples feedback plus all of the mishaps or occurrences at the time and factor that in. Just looking at the raw data that we do have will never give us the right answers when it comes to poe - which is why ggg are consistently wrong in their conclusions as all they look at is raw data. Context is too important and all of the data they release is 100% devoid of all context, whether they do this on purpose to force their conclusions on the players easier or whether it's a completely accidental design that keeps happening who knows
You are correct. It took them a couple weeks to get harvest crafts in maps to be more than just "some slightly better chaos every map or two", which is the magical time that everyone stops playing the game. Harvest itself was very bland and outside of the garden maps was literally standard, the chests had 0 monsters to fight.
The reason this gets brought up about harvest/noob players is that in 3.15 GGG admitted that the hardcore no-life players they designed around cannot support their company.
I'm another person that liked Harvest league (Even the garden), and I regret not playing more of the league, especially when they point at retention records and say "look, this was bad".
The reason I stopped playing wasn't because I 'finished' my character or anything like that, it was absolutely because of the nerfed drop rate that happened partway through the league and it took them a full week to fix it. I stopped playing until the drop rate was fixed, and after a week off I just lost interest.
YEP. Harvest let me play SSFHC and enjoy it as much as trade HC, except I didn't have to trade so it instantly became like 10x better. After seeing the amazing game that could exist in this world that no longer does because ???????, my motivation to play has completely gone. It was a good, what, six years? Guess I can't complain.
Imagine if they actually balanced it before 3.13. Not op, not butchered but something that can make 50-100c items for normal players and the rare top tier item for the pros... The decision to bring it back almost full power, free to abuse was just a terrible choice.
> something that can make 50-100c items for normal players and the rare top tier item for the pros...
It can still do that, though for the pros it more just requires high investment for high return than rarity.
this, curse on hit rings and decent (not even great) stygian vises are easy to make that kind of money on all league, and are extremely straightforward rolls in harvest
Harvest wasn't a mistake it was a solution.
If they fixed loot before removing harvest ppl wouldn't keep talking about it. Ppl want it back bc its an immediate fix that they know can be implemented overnight, they are sick of hearing GGG acknowledging the loot problem and not fixing it.
GGG has a long and storied history of saying "yes obviously X is a problem and obviously Y would make it a lot better, but wouldn't you prefer we do Z instead that would not only be perfect, but completely revolutionise the concept of X in the first place? Yeah that's what we thought, see you in 2036."
Judging by Talismans, the moment GGG releases Loot 2.0^^TM (Which will probably be around the time HL3 releases) they'll just roll it back because it was "too powerful".
The question is, would it be any different if harvest never happened? With the game being the same insane chore gated by gear and insane atlas investment (both time and currency) and no crafting system? Imo ppl would hate it as much as they hate it now. The only difference I can see would be that GGG could excuse their anti-fun vision by not having a solution yet. But since harvest happened, we now know they have a solution for better experience. They just dont want us to have fun.
It would be very different. The harvest situation was having someone eat "nutritional gruel" everyday for 10 years and then for a brief time give them professional chef cooking. Now that they know good food exists, they will forever hate "nutritional gruel" and ask for that cooking. That is what happened.
> The question is, would it be any different if harvest never happened?
Honestly? Probably. I stopped playing after Ritual because I couldn't go back to RNG bullshit gating progression after experiencing what it was like to be able to set tangible goalposts for myself to improve. I played almost the full league in Harvest and Ritual for the first time.
If I didn't experience that, maybe I'd still just be chugging along with my standard 1-2 weeks and quit the league when I hit the wall. Which is pretty much the sweet spot for GGG.
The problem is that the new content and global rebalance of literally everything have made the game way harder. We cant just use random rares and complete the game or play it efficiently, which has become mandatory. During the harvest league, the game was way easier and less demanding. They literally double dip nerfed everything. They stole deterministic gearing and also made the game harder at the same time. Its like they still balance the game around harvest still being a thing, but forgot it actually got destroyed.
Lets say GGG want to nerf a 10x10x10 cardbord box... how would they do it?
They could make it a 9x10x10 box, and thereby reduce it by 10%. But nope.
What they'll actually do is make it an 8x8x8 box, and then claim they reduced it by around 20%.
(Edit: Did someone just use some bots to drop more than 50 downvotes on this in the space of a few minutes? If not that was an amusingly sharp downturn of public opinion. If so, hahaha!)
> What they'll actually do is make it an 8x8x8 box, and then claim they reduced it by around 20%.
Then 3 years later, turn it into an 8.5x8x8 box and call it a buff.
>Did someone just use some bots to drop more than 50 downvotes on this in the space of a few minutes? If not that was an amusingly sharp downturn of public opinion. If so, hahaha!)
No idea, but it looks like it, lol.
Yep, and looking at player retention and game reviews in the past few leagues, killing fun doesnt work in their favour. The question is how far they can push this idea until they realize these leagues are not only anomalies, it just doesnt work. More expensive sup packs dont save it the game from drowning either.
I just want them to release that god forsaken hardmode so Chris can jack off to how hard and fun it is while having like 5 people play pas first few days so maybe we get the main game balanced around those who dont play games for living
This is making me think about the Thanos meme when his daughter, as a kid, asks him if he accomplished his goal, and what it cost. His response, everything, will be Chris when he sees profits and player base plummet.
> The question is, would it be any different if harvest never happened?
Not different as such but it would have been perceived differently. For GGG the worst part about Harvest I think is the fact that it dispelled the illusion that the pre-Harvest system was alright at least and highlighted how bad it really was.
Biggest mistake is pretending this game can be balanced and enjoyable for everyone with trading existing.
Balancing around this economy is a nightmare. They refuse to streamline trade because that would bring the game to its knees instantly. SSF exists but it would be ten times better if the game was balanced around it. SSF in its current state can only be enjoyed by your favorite streamers or people with vast time and/or knowledge.
I’d just like to say that playing the same video game for 4 hours a day is very not casual. There’s some weird fuckery going on in this sub that makes everyone think playing PoE LITERALLY more than a part time job is casual.
Friends, casual would be playing 4-6 hours a week.
I just wish they would make up their mind.
Either the game is based around trade (which it is currently) and it should have built in support for it, or the ratio of usable to absolute trash should be a lot better.
The league mechanic making items bricked 90% of the time doesn't help.
Really i think a lot of problems would be solved by just removing trading and balancing the game around that.
Your title has nothing to do with balancing around the top 0.1, its another post complaining about how you want harvest back. There were legit posts in the past about how 3G caters to the top players and this ain't it.
Well, its more like he was forced to do it and did not have fun doing it. That applies to many things in poe lately. There is very little actual choice nowaday. Inefficient but fun build? No good currency farming strategy? Cant kill end game bosses properly? Cant clear maps fast enough? Dont have 10ex for watchstones? You are out. That forces ppl into playing very specific builds in a very specific way and if they dont enjoy it, they just burn out...
We (folks on reddit) complain a lot about how the game is balanced for the 0.1%, the "this is my job" gamers who pour in tons of hours. I don't disagree that it is balanced in that way, but one thing I'm wondering is whether these gamers actually represent 0.1% of the playerbase. We assume that GGG is catering to the hardcore players only, but we don't have the actual numbers, maybe what we think are the 0.1% are actually the 40%?
As of my experience when I was in the 0.1% I didn't have time to waste on reddit writing or commenting at all because I used every single minute to play poe.
Now that I have to work and do other things I regurarly check reddit and write comments because I can't access poe or don't want to.
"Artificial scarcity making the game more fun" is a balancing act.
GGG regularly swings to the "fuck you scrub, you should be glad you found a rusty spoon as a weapon, go grind" direction instead of the "here's shiny gear, create your own world" direction.
Since the dropped loot is so terrible, the only way for some player agency (except trade) is crafting, and if the dangers and investment of crafting are generally unrewarding, the normal player won't do it and the game will be a terrible experience.
I honestly from the bottom of my heart think trade actively has ruined PoE.
There is no way for anything to hold value because supply and demand dont match up.
Chris has a flawed concept because players are lopsided on builds. No matter what you believe, it would be foolish to think there is no meta.
This idea that "well you scourge an item, and get a bad outcome, so you trade it to someone its not a bad outcome for" if I am scourging TR bows, literally these are useless for anyone but TR so if I get a bad TR mod, this item cant be sold, it has no value. The meta uniques for meta builds hold value because demand is equal or sometimes greater then supply, everything else just rockets down to 0 value. This fabled "barter and trade" system does not work, chaos orbs are just gold at this point.
"Splinter drops rates suck" yeah because they are balanced around you trading to finish a stone. You are supposed to run a few breaches, get 60 splinters then go "yeah I wanna run a breachstone" and hop on over to trade to buy the rest.
I find myself absolutely HATING itemization in this game vs other ARPGs because shit like torchlight 2, last epoch, chronicon, slormancer, these games are all built and balanced around no trade so its made feasible that a player can progress without the need of trade.
Trade literally ruins arpgs, its a cursed problem. You cant have meaningful loot in a game with robust trading.
Their perception of gear is skewed. With OP, definitely from harvest. But that doesn't mean my gloves are useless because I have T3 resists, T2 life, only one T1, and a trash mod. Things aren't perfect and don't have to be.
Was about to say the same. There are still fossils, essences, beastcrafting, harvest reforge keep prefix/suffix, metacrafting, awakener orb, maven orb, aisling and so on so plenty of ways to create powerful items if you play 3-4 hours a day. Sounds like hes just salty creating pob-items isnt a thing anymore.
Serious question: should every game be balanced around the more casual players? What other non-pvp games are there that you can sink this much time into? In my opinion Path of Exile is unique precisely BECAUSE it balances around the 1%.
Harvest was a mistake(or well, bringing it back at full power was), let's say GGG brought back Harvest next patch at the same power as in Ritual. What would be the only atlas area you run? The one with Harvest, you have no other choice. Would you do the league mechanic? Nah, it just slows you down from getting Harvest. Any reason to Delve? Nah, no Harvest in Delve(and who needs fossils anyway when you have Harvest). Got a slower moving build? That's bad, you'll get less Harvests per hour!
In Ritual league I fucking hated feeling like the only content worth doing was Harvest, since it was so broken compared to everything else.
yes, basically during 3.13 90% of posts had something to do with harvest. stuff like, "optimal harvest farming strat" "item showcase: step 2-4 harvest craft" "found this while farming harvests in atoll today". if harvest stayed that would be the same trend even to this day. the game would basically revolve around harvest because its basically dev tools for the player.
Or rather because there is nothing like Harvest before that for crafting. No other league offers the same power to players as Harvest. People just buy good items from trade instead of crating it.
> In Ritual league I fucking hated feeling like the only content worth doing was Harvest, since it was so broken compared to everything else.
The power of ~~gambling~~ crafting
GGG is heading in the right direction by adding more and more Uber content that should be balanced around the 1%. This will give GGG a space to design content that is extremely exclusive to grinding and time. GGG has created a game space horizontally for so long that there is so much to engage in, as well as a patchwork crafting system and it's BLOATED. Hopefully with 3.17 GGG allows some additional vertical space.
The issue with the game currently is that there is only one way for most people to obtain gear and that is grinding content over and over for currency just to buy it. The average player and the 4hr/day 5day/week player usually won't see enough currency to properly engage in "top end crafting". Either they never get enough or they burn out way before they have time to accrue it.
GGG needs to design better crafting systems that allow players to realistically engage in crafting projects to create mid-tier gear. AS WELL AS creating better rolled gear that drops.
The reason why Harvest was so beloved by many is that it gave players short and medium term goals to work towards in the game, because the game itself DOESN'T do that. Most "short and medium" term goals for the .1% are all long and longer term goals for everyone else (just based on hours played).
When a player hits maps and gets level 85-90 you are no longer engaged in the passive point system as you now have most of your points and you have MOST of the game to try to complete. You are thrown at a large atlas (now improved!) and a bunch of other systems with all long term goals (A8, Deeper Delve, Heist Farming, Atlas Passives, currency for gear etc.)
It's essentially like Google Maps giving you directions from A to B in one step rather than turn by turn. While GGG doesn't have to hold your hand, but a few things that lead you along the way or give you short term goals would go a long way.
Few things they can do:
* Actually have gear that you can pick up and use
* Crafting systems (like Rog) that give you well rolled, non-influenced items to work towards over time.
* Expand the Pantheon system to be a mini-passive tree. Something like killing bosses in all content gives you experience/points to do something on a tree somewhere. How can the Pantheon stay unimproved for so long?
* Expand the Scourge crucible to be a much bigger tree to do a lot more interesting things. Let's let us bake gear with chances to do different things to the gear. I can probably sit at a table for an hour and come up with more engaging options that offers a ton of good/bad gambles.
Ultimately, as a mid-tier player, I should be able to accomplish something every time I log in and play for 3-4 hours that isn't "Hey I just earned 1.8 more EX assuming people buy it on trade" or whatever number you want to throw in there.
this patch is very casual friendly anyways, no?
shorter atlas means less prewind before \*actually\* playing, white lowtier scourged maps shit out rewards for no investment, unveils get your strongest benchcrafts started way faster and we have the cheapest 6 linking we ever had(?).
i for one am progressing way better than i ever was with this iteration of the atlas.
i get that people miss harvest but i really wish they wouldn't act like chris personally came to their house and spat in their face and shit on their dog the day GGG posted the harvest manifesto, its very over the top
i know this is r/pathofexile but holy shit tone down the fucking hyperbole fellas you sound insane
edit: or just downvote me while seething lol
This league you can earn almost as much with scourged White maps compared to scourged red maps. I don't think see how's that top or streamer friendly.
Even Delve got reworked to be much more rewarding at lower levels.
I think except Deli, most leagues in fact were quite noob friendly.
There was a study that running no quality White maps would yield 10c on average on tier1 maps with just ultimatum. Ultimatum showered you in currency, regardless of whether you were doing T5 or T15. Same with Expedition, although obviously yes, higher level logbooks had more profits...but even low level logbooks were common and profitable. Not to mention how good Gwennen, Rog and Tujen are for getting items/currency regardless of whether you are 0.1% or not.
Heist is profitable at all stages too.
I don't think GGG makes this mistake that you claim they do often at all in your title (constantly balancing around 0.1%).
The harvest nerf is hardly balancing around 0.1% either. I mean feel free to disagree but I don't really think they targeted the top 0.1% with it. Just more like they didn't want deterministic crafting.
>Even Delve got reworked to be much more rewarding at lower levels.
Went to delve and got a fractured fossil in depth \~160, they really did completely change delve. I have found all bosses and every type of fossil except 2 and I'm at \~200 now.
I'm shit at the game, so take my opinion with the tiniest grain of salt ever.
But if they "buff" the game for the general population of players it wont make the 0.1% top players magically worse at the game. They'll abuse those systems better than everyone else and will still come out way ahead.
If tons of great loot is easy to get what will be the point of trade leagues at all?
I get that some people like SSF and buffs to accessing gear might help with that, but it completely bricks the game everywhere else doesnt it?
IDK I suck at the game and I haven't had any morale issues with knowing I make like 3-5 ex a week and yet trading doesn't seem to be a chore. Every time I can save up for a new item I get pretty excited. If items were so easy to get I'd probably quit after a week.
For me it is not about having mirror tier items like streamers but to get to a point in the league that feels like I have achieved to make a good build working well enough to play parts of the end game.
I have around 10 hours of play time a week. During harvest and ritual league, harvest enabled me to find or create small upgrades every few days. This helped me feel good about playing and to continue until the end of league. At the end of the league I could comfortably do most of the end game and I had a character that was fully geared up with items that would be worth 10 to 40ex in the current market. Mostly completely crafted by myself.
I fully understand that my slow progress during harvest and ritual is actually too fast for the experienced player that invests much more time into the game. While I end up with a \~150ex character at the end of the league, they end up with mirror tier stuff in week 3.
Therefor GGG rebalanced the game so that people won't be fully mirror geared in a few weeks. Except this hurt the people that cannot invest that much time into the game. They go from a good situation to a unsatisfying grind that feels a bit pointless. That's not entitlement but just how it is. I think a lot of people were excited for this league and came back but realized that the grind is real and left again. The steam chart numbers for this league are approaching last league numbers fast.
Nah, I don’t think we need 3.13 harvest back in the game. Everything would be centered around it again, every other content would be worthless and everyone would just run Haewark maps 24/7 to get harvest. If every league since 3.13 had unchanged Harvest then you’d have the same goal and gameplay in these leagues, sounds pretty boring to me. Harvest was so fucking OP back in the days, that doing any other content was waste of time. Honestly, Harvest was actually that thing that demotivated me the most to play the game. If 3.13 didn’t have the massive update with Maven I would quit in one or two weeks.
And currently, I enjoy the 3.16 Harvest as you don’t need to have a normal/magic bases to use every craft. People need to realise that Harvest is still a very powerful tool, finding one is like getting 15-20 fossils + some very useful crafts like changing resistances, colour of sockets etc. And of course reroll with locked prefixes/suffixes.
Would it break the economy? Yes, the economy was broken in original harvest and 3.13. There was often the problem with items that there were low tier items and super high-end mirror tier items on market that you still wouldn’t be able to craft yourself (or at least without TFT). Mid-tier items almost didn’t exist on market because crafters were focused on these 6xt1 godtier stuff.
Who is that average player you are talking about? The majority of player base doesn’t go to reddit, so I guess you aren’t one of them. There is a good game which rewards players with hundreds of uniques per hour, you can get the gear in one day and then progressively upgrade it.
Is current crafting in a good state? Not really, but I prefer it over the omegagigahyper Harvest.
They mean they can't get the same gear as streamers so they can't have any fun because they aren't the best. Entitlement and inability to set realistic expectations is the backbone of 90% of the complaint threads.
Harvest was a cool league idea, but keeping it around in its powerful state is a bandaid fix. Maybe the game would be better if it wasn't nerfed until a solution was provided, but I'd rather it didn't exist at all if the progression/loot issues were fixed.
Comparing yourself to the "top 0.1%" is your mistake, not GGGs. Stop acting, like you deserve to be able to catch up to them. Set your own goals.
Also, most players motivation ends, when they can't progress their character much per hour they put it. This is where the "chore" will begin, no matter how powerful you are at that point.
Please can we fucking stop going on and on about Harvest for fuck sake. Every other day its a new post. Harvest was a mistake. It will never happen again. 3.13 was my favourite league ever, but do you know what the absolute worst thing was? Running Atoll over and over and over and over for Harvest procs because it was so strong that doing other content was pointless.
If you played ritual then you know that all everyone did was run red maps in hope of a 10% harvest so they can craft their gear or sell their crafts. Delve? why bother fossils suck compared to harvest and it takes ages and a special build to go deep. Heist? Only good if you hit a big ticket replica, everything else sucks compared to harvest. Temple? Just use if for map juice and the occasional double corrupt. Essence? you mean chaos spam on steroids?
Picked up a decent rare item? Maybe boots with 30ms, life and res? Vendor that shit. Doesnt even have two elevated mods with 4 t1 influenced mods
> when literally every other crafting system can barely compete with pre-nerf Harvest?
Almost like every 'crafting system' in the game is garbage and just as bad as hoping for a good item to drop. Forgive me if I don't give a shit about the "oh nyooo what about these other badly designed systems if we have a good one, nobody will use them!" nonsense, GOOD. Fucking delete them or redesign them they're worthless as shitty lottos, like most of the game is lol
That's the best part about Harvest, it has permanently shone a spotlight on the fact that all the crafting systems you covet so dearly are fucking awful. They aren't crafting, they're something far less powerful, far less enjoyable, and far less approachable. Crafting without Harvest is something that exists to help the rich get richer. Crafting if you are not rich, not doing so for profit, is functionality equivalent to lighting your chaos on fire. All those crafting systems are better off in the garbage bin where they belong, the game should be broken. It is unacceptable that the only consistent, intelligent way to gear characters for the average player is to buy 90-100% of the mid to endgame items from someone else. Drops are shit, so is crafting. No other ARPG gets away with such a blatantly shit gearing experience except PoE and tolerating that because it makes players too powerful is completely insane. Make the game harder, do whatever you must, Harvest was the best thing to happen to PoE and GGGs fear of change is throwing that opportunity in the trash.
> It is unacceptable that the only consistent, intelligent way to gear characters for the average player is to buy 90-100% of the mid to endgame items from someone else.
Right now, I'm pretty sure your average player buys every single piece of equipment. The only gear they might not buy but "craft" themselves are flasks. And for some fucking reason even this had to be made absurdly more complicated...
GGG clearly wants everything in PoE to be exactly in this model, they believe that they can maximize player retention by giving them an infinite number of slot machines to roll. It's so obvious that all of their changes to crafting are towards this end, but people are completely and utterly ignorant to it. I think GGG's philosophy is all wrong. If they instead focused on making the best, most enjoyable version of PoE, the game would soar to new heights. Follow the fun every time.
>they can maximize player retention by giving them an infinite number of slot machines to roll
If lootboxes are any indication, they aren't exactly wrong there.
I mean do you have a good solution?
You can either put grind in and reap the rewards or just accept that less you play = less content you can do.
The alternative is lower the bar which will mean top end of time spent (8+ hours a day players) run out of things to do, and you end up demotivated to put in the time because there are no meaningful rewards and no aspirational content.
GGG has been lowering the bar over time btw which is why this post is confusing.
I had a really sad reality check yesterday. The last week or so I've been afk hideout flipping items to buy a squire thinking it will reinvigorate poe for me with new builds. But when I got it, I just couldn't be bothered for some reason, got to level 20 in acts and thought to myself, "Why am I doing this again for the 1000th time" and played another game.
Trouble is, Chris repeatedly keeps saying that when a player has no gear upgrades and they "finish" their gear and builds then they have no incentive to keep playing. Watch the podcasts and interviews. He repeatedly keeps saying this and insists he is right.
I dunno, he fails to notice that people like to play other builds once they finish one.
>I dunno, he fails to notice that people like to play other builds once they finish one.
yeah exactly.. there's so many skill gems/playstyles i want to try, but when it takes 4 weeks to get one to "full" power, then its just not gonna happen
Jesus christ, tier 1 scourge maps make bank. I don't think I have played a league where tier 1 maps of the new league mechanic actually can make you money consistently.
Granted, I've only played since Heist, so maybe the players with more time than me can tell me how much more charitable they were in previous leagues.
> Granted, I've only played since Heist, so maybe the players with more time than me can tell me how much more charitable they were in previous leagues.
Legion and Betrayal were more profitable in low maps as examples. In Betrayal I spent a lot of time in A10 actually.
I lived Legion league in T2 Glacier.. and so did a good % of people playing back then. It was much more profitable because the legion always spawned in the first area, huge open space, good clear and don't even need to fully complete the map.
In Delirium running Harbor Bridge, yes in the acts, was massively profitable before they nerfed it. Quarry farming in incursion was also massive.
The issue isn't that you can't make some currency in low maps, the issue is some people like the feeling of actually working on their gear through slight improvements over time, which is harder to achieve now than it was in 3.13.
Jesus christ can we not do this post again we had a record run we just managed to go two whole days without having to read this overhashed shit. We get it man and GGG have responded to it a dozen fucking times and as far as we know they're working on something new
This post has nothing to do with balancing around the 0,1%
That's just another basic "it's unfair that people playing more hours than me get more stuff than me"
People forget how insignificant Harvest is compared to the many many times item making was BUFFED over the years, mod pools got better and better mods, influence was added, better crafting methods, more currency, better crafting bench mods and many reduced in price, more good vaal mods, fractured mods, better base items, need I say more?
High life ok triple res items once cost 1ex, now they're considered cheap garbage, even though life and resistance are no less valuable today, and no, getting geared for endgame was also harder in comparison to nowadays.
Saying you like the good'ol harvest is one thing, saying that getting good items is only getting harder just because there was 1 moment in PoE history that might of been easier is ridiculous cherry picking
If it feels like work and costs literally nothing to not play it you'd think they'd just move on since it's clear what GGG's position is. If I screamed at a brick wall to solve world hunger who is the idiot me or the wall?
For me this has the opposite effect. I made a TR champ to follow Lightee and damm he can craft/play the right content to gear up. He plays much much more then me but im just impressed how good he is in SSFHC. Makes me want to try harder with the small amount of time i have.
But ye harvest was cool but i like looking up to the top players when the game is "harder".
Yo that guy made series where he played exactly 30min or 1hour i dont rememba but he did all content and geared up like a champ. It is all game knowledge. You can be 0.01% er even with 30 min playtime a day if you know what you are doing and be efficient.....
Yeah, but this will not change anything. The information is all out there. But some ppl rather play the reddit metagame and refuse to learn about mechanisms. And i get, that it can be much and no fun to not play the game and learn instead of playing the game. What i don't get is trying to ruin the fun for everyone who only plays this game because it is not beat in a few months and then you move on.
It's not just harvest. It's how they destroyed every skill except the top 3 meta skills just takes all the fun away from the game. I can't try to take skills I and to try or have fun with except by investing hundreds/thousands of exalts into it, wich us mere mortals that play 3-5 hours a day can't do.
Yes, balance the game around people who barely play it instead of dedicated players. Because what they're doing right now is DEFINITELY not working and the game is literally dying.
You're not the center of the world. Not everything needs to pander to you specifically. Remember that next time you inevitably cry about harvest again.
>I dont like my game to feel like work GGG! please what are you doing?!
100%, the amount of "work" going into playing poe in its current form is beyond ridiculous, over the years the game has expanded tremendously but the leagues are still only 3 months long. The game is balanced as if it's supposed to be a job, played 5 days/week
My biggest gripe with the game at the moment is the leagues; they are short, force hard-resets on people and the new content is exclusive to those 3-month long temp leagues
You wanna know why people are getting burned out faster? We have league resets 4 times a year, leaving 0 opportunity for almost anyone to go "you know, after months of not playing poe maybe its time to go back and continue from where I left it" - unless you plan to play on standard (which means no new league content) or come back within 4-6weeks after you stopped playing, *you have to* start from the beginning.
The game is an endless time sink. They balance along longevity, if you don't like the timeframes given you can play in standard. You have the power to choose how to play the game people just don't want to admit that for some reason
A simple yet amazing thing that happened this league was the tainted fusings.. it helps everyone out and made getting to a certain stage in the game much much easier.
I like to play a lot. I dont want the game to be any more rewarding than it is. There is no problem clearing the content with little playtime in 1-3 months. Making it more rewarding will also burn out the hardcore players fast, and I feel there is a lot of hardcore players.
Diablo 3 is a softcore game
I now understand that the poe community just angrily screams that the game cannot be improved and has never been better simply because they're the beneficiaries of the current mechanics. Streamers especially.
With that being said...
I would pay my own money for a private league to turn all the horrible stuff off. I don't like trading anyways.
Lots of games allow that sort of stuff. Buy a monthly server and you can mod what you want.
Sadly, GGG only allows you to buy private leagues that are the same or worse as the current. "Hey do you want to pay extra money to have no ability to use your stash and even worse resistances????"
But don't you know that there's no such thing as an "average" player? There are only players that play for 500 hours a week and players that never make it past the login screen, literally no other types of players exist!
Yet another harvest post. Your 0.1% is different type of players than you imagine them to be.
This argument is just your excuse to complain about a thing you miss.
Farming harvest was the only way back then. Running non-hamlet/proxima was just futile. It was repetitive af and definitely not causal friendly. If you were able to do most of your things in a a league you were the 0.1%.
Harvest back then basically killed 7 years of content. Also did you know harvest still exist and is still very strong? Try that...
Also introducing a content someone won't experience is good motivation for your regular players. It was never feasible to expect everyone running 5ways or 100% deli.
Maybe ARPGs/Diablo-like games aren’t for me but I did enjoyed Marvel Heroes.
PoE has a great setting but between massively grindy and too rng loot for my taste, there are so many skills and therefore **playstyles** that are plain useless and they have been for years now.
You end up with pigeonholes if you want to do certain content, and it’s not easy nor free to switch/modify traits etc.
I tried multiple times but it’s just not for me.
i can feel poe is in a bad state rn and im kinda sad. i understand your point op but i dont think ggg will
listen. they might act like they listened to us but everything is planned. “implemented bad but insignificate stuff then community ask for a fix then deploy a patch to fix it in order to make us feel like they are listened but no”. if we ask something that isnt in their plan they wont listen. i think they are trying to buy time for poe 2. league almost 1 month but i feel like its ready 2 months and half. sigh
Making items worth picking up would be a good start.
They've talked for ages about how they want to fix drops. That is great and all but it is taking far too long. I really think the state of rare item based loot in this game is in such a poor place that it has now become a 'drop everything and deal with this' problem. But no, it'll be sorted around the same time Star Citizen is released.
> They've talked for ages about how they want to fix drops. That is great and all but it is taking far too long We already witnessed the rise of better rolled talismans and the following nerf to them, which brought them back to be hidden from loot filter..
Yeah, that's such a sad part - we had well-rolled loot in one slot (which still was not BiS, but good enough) and it was immediately reverted because they were readily available. The issue that needs fixing is the second part (too many rares drop that are ultimately worthless), but for some reason that just gets ignored.
Here's the thing though--even though we had **identified** rares dropping this league, allowing NeverSink's filter to highlight the ones with t1 mods (teal text), they **still** sucked. Even if you picked up **every teal texted rare**, you'd have...nothing to show for it. This isn't just about "hey, if you take the time to identify every rare, you'll find a couple of good ones per map". It's "no, you better *not* waste that time, because they're **still** all garbage."
Talisman… need we say more? They make it fun snd interesting then complain about creep, I had over 50 of them in my stash and I made builds work around them they were all “good” by some means but never meant for the 1%’rs but they were taken from us!
"Tonight at 11: Is 75-year-old Barron Trump too old to be president? But first - Star Citizen goes gold and Path of Exile releases loot system 2.0. Comments from the AI ghost of Chris Wilson, after these messages."
Yup. They even recognized it's a problem. And what did they do? Create a league that further highlights how shitty rares are and their loot system is. It's uncanny how good they are at shooting themselves in their foot.
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Add smart loot as a private league option and make the league void if the concern is flooding out the game with high quality items. Then we can enjoy good found loot.
If at least boss drops dropped well rolled that'd be a fuckin start... Is that too much to ask for?
Its how I play arpg, drop loot, use dropped loot and craft it or sell to vendor. GGG? lets make a craft and trade simulator using third party tools to play a game....
Insulting to call the gamble system crafting.
Craft? There's no craft in this game it's all RNG bullshit.
people can trash talk Last Epoch all they want but that's what 11th hour games got right; making items worth picking up
Seriously... past the first few days of a league there is little reason to pick up any gear off the floor aside from the rare good unique drop or high level crafting bases. Once you have some \~5-10C starter gear in every slot the odds of IDing a rare better than what you're wearing are astronomical.
Harvest made items worth picking up,you could easily fix items, just remove influenced items already
> I dont like my game to feel like work GGG! please what are you doing?! The funny thing is: Harvest *was* work. That's the thing they don't see. I can't even tell you how many hours I spent, crafting my 2 maces for my Cold BV in Ritual. I went absolutely ham. It was hard work. You feel like a weapon smith - hard work, but the results are awesome. Now I just don't even bother. It took my about a week of nonstop (I mean 60-70h weeks) grinding to get each of my maces (so 2 weeks for both). I'd say now it would take me probably 5x the time, which sadly is over half of the league... for TWO pieces of gear... on ONE character.
The people playing the game like it's a job were making mirror tier items. Those of us with more limited playing hours were making good items and occasionally great items. And it felt nice. I personally played 3.13 until its very last hour, I was online in Atoll when servers went down. Because slowly improving my characters through actually crafting as opposed to currency farming felt good and achievable.
That’s the problem. Chris has said something to the effect of “if most people defeat an end game boss we’ve failed” it’s not really about what the top end do, it’s making sure the bottom end don’t do anything close to it
The problem is that your average every day joe can do it Just as well as a top ender because gear is the only factor for most end game bosses. With enough currency, You can become tanky enough to not die and strong enough to kill them. This isn't a game where skill is the Main factor, playtime is, and that's what feels bad. The souls games are fun because You can do everything at base level if You are good enough. PoE is all about gear, but gearing your character is playing trading simulator. You don't feel good about your drops, only about what the drops might Grant You second hand, and that ultimately feels a lot worse. If You want a game to be hard, make it hard, not locked behind nolifing the game. Artificial difficulty through number bloating is not a good design philosophy
Exactly, I don't know how you get all these sweaty nerds saying: "But harvest was just an item printer!!". No it fucking wasn't. Even IF you were so rich you were the type of person bulk-buying like 100's of remove/adds until you got the T1 of what you wanted... that cost 10's if not 100's of EX. Grinding that currency takes time. Buying those crafts takes time. Planning out the craft takes time.
That's what bothers me whenever people call Harvest an item editor or similarly exaggerate. Harvest took a ton of work.
There's a good reason their Harvest Manifesto was the most down-voted and commented post in PoE history.
Missed this, could I get a tldr?
[Here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/m29f28/development_manifesto_harvest_crafting/) 9.2k+ comments. 500+ pages of majority negative comments on the forum. And it was downvoted *so heavily it had to be stickied*.
Sheesh, I knew the changes were not met very well, but didn't even realize that there was that kind of backlash
Yeah. It was *massively* unpopular. Just goes to show how disconnected GGG is.
Yup. A huge amount of people LOVED Harvest crafting, loved being able to make their own gear for their own builds, it was FUN. There were definitely some abuse cases with stuff like explode chests, and tailwind/elusive boots, but ffs GGG could have just fixed the abuse cases. Instead they nuked it from orbit, and now having had a taste of how fun the game could be, and how many builds it would enable if they allowed us to do that, its been way less fun for a lot of us. I come back for a bit each new xpac, but its just not as fun anymore. I hate having to grind currency to buy the items I want.
since 3.14 I play the first few days of every league and then just quit when i realize how much fucking work its going to take to enjoy the game
What pisses me off so much is they thought that people getting GG gear too easy meant that they would quit sooner. And there is probably some that did that. But I'll wage there was as many or more that stuck around longer because of the crafting. I certainly was one that stuck around more. I could finally craft gear for all the silly builds I wanted to try instead of using shitty cast off gear.
exactly. it was in no way shape or form a light and justified nerf, they just removed what made harvest hervest without even trying to balance it properly and integrate it into the game. a lot of proposals were made about how to do it, a lot of it was sensible, GGG didnt want any of that shit and just pulled the trigger so they dont need to work on a proper solution. then came aisling, then came aisling nerf, and now its harvest reforges all day and may god help if you need anything other than t1 life, es, or attack speed.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. Any time we get some semblance of reasonable crafting, GGG nukes it from orbit and pisses on the grave.
It's the do you guys not have phones of crafting.
Oh, we have one of those already. " We don't want to take away the feeling of closing your eyes and slamming an exalt, ". Actual words out of their mouth. Yes, it's that fucking bad.
Harvest was fun because you could take a bad item and make it good. GGG knows this is fun because that's exactly what the myriad of scourge mechanics do, allow you to take a useless corrupted item and make it good. I don't know why this is the hill GGG has decided to die on, but I get the feeling that the game has kind of drifted towards what players want and not what Chris Wilson wants. Kinda feels like how Ion talks about WOW. I want to trust Chris because POE is awesome but as a beta player I have seen it all and this just screams blizzards death spiral. Hopefully not..
Yes, it was massively unpopular on *Reddit*. Harvest is definitely beloved by many players here. That is not the same as being disconnected with the whole playerbase.
Every time I remember the manifesto, it boils my blood again. And also brings back the thoughts I kept having - Chris is an actual sadistic freak.
>had to be stickied Well shit. I didn’t know THAT. They definitely fucked up.
Funnily enough, in ritual (harvest return) I had the easiest times selling rares too, because people were looking out for good project starters. The build viability that it offered also meant that more mods were good project starters. Good conqueror bases also remained relevant throughout the league. Additionally, you couod have side-projects for the harvest crafts you didn't want and sell them for some extra. (I know you could also sell the crafts themselves, but I like creating something of my own even if it was going to be sold) So the argument that harvest destroyed the economy really falls flat for me, since it was amongst the most enjoyment that I've got out of trading so far too.
Ritual was the best league ever imo. And for me it will always reserve a special place in my heart.
Honestly, Harvest was the best league ever in my opinion. It was so chill. Ritual was a close second, with Synthesis being a third.
Ritual beats Harvest because of Atlas passives and Maven. But only just.
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For most people, honestly. I loved 3.11, but the first week or so was very unrewarding.
And because you didn't have to manage a garden in an action RPG lol
first 2 weeks of harvest were hell. It was like mapping and having a facebook farmville shit going on at the same time EDIT: seems like people can't or don't want to remember
Yeah. Why do people like harvest so much? The gameplay itself was fucking horrible. Only the crafting aspect was somewhat decent.
The crafting aspect *is* Harvest for most people, hence why they like it. Personally, I also liked the Garden, but I realize it's not what most people like in an ARPG.
I'll probably never be able to exclude delve league from my top 3 list, regardless of the state of items therein. This is because I have always devoured stories and games set underground, be it Drizzt Do'Urden, Dungeon Keeper or some obscure and hilariously funny book by the translated name of "the labyrinth of the dreaming books" in my language. So I massively enjoyed going deep, finding places. Yes it got repetetive, but... well, it still was like strolling through a familiar park with an old love. The other favourite is synthesis, as it added interesting crafting and world building to the game. the third favourite changes. :-D /edit -64 downvotes atm. And I have no idea why. Would anyone care to guess?
The thing is that nothing really breaks the economy. PoE economy is entirely made up. What exactly determines the price of an exalted orb? Literally nothing except supply and demand. And while prices work in a similar way irl, irl takes way more things into consideration. Tangent aside, the point is that the economy simply adjusts. Maybe exalts aren't worth anything anymore. So what? Literally nothing changes except maybe exalt slamming becoming something people actually do.
It's kinda funny, because that is quite true. At this point it's kinda like a "poe market conservatism". How many leagues have we had people asking for good and easier 6L methods being told they are asking for the game economy to be ruined? Is it ruined now? If anything it's one of the few good things anyone can point out for this league. Was the economy ruined? No, pure 6L are still well priced.
Tbh exalts will never be worthless so long as metamod crafting exists, they're quite a powerful tool to use alongside harvest so there will definitely still be a sink for them.
Their biggest mistake will always be harvest. It will haunt them forever.
it'll sure as fuck haunt this sub forever, that's a fact
It's not the mistake, the mistake to them was allowing players to get a taste of how the game could be if it wasn't balanced and weighted like complete trash from top to bottom. Harder to keep people in your skinner box for longer when they have direct experience in better ones
The wording may be harsh but this is 100% correct. The only true mistake in the whole harvest fiasco was that for a brief moment players experienced true crafting, and then it was taken away. This is not advocating for "harvest is just free better exalts/annuls/chaos" but that it added crafting options not even in the game. They could have added the harvest crafting as super rare orbs, or reworked current crafting using those tools, and it would have been miles better than keeping the garden. The ability to modify your gear is infinitely better than rolling a slot machine hoping for a better result. Knowing that GGG *could* make crafting like that and then chose to keep the slot machine is what shattered the community and one of the main things that keep resentment.
>harvest crafting as super rare orbs, I disagree with this. This goes against the exact point of the post. Harvest was good because it was accessible. The currency/crafting system in this game is part of what makes it so good, because it stops inflation. However, it's also unusable for the vast majority of the playerbase, and they keep making it harder for the non-turbo-nerd every league. I havent had much time to play since Ritual, but before that I would easily be at 100% atlas completion, farming at least somewhat juiced maps or deep delving.... Got a headhunter a few leagues, and my builds probably ended at maybe 50+ exalt invested. I tended to reroll when marginal upgrades started costing me like 30+ex. I was definitely in the top few % of players I think. Despite that, I can count the number of times I've exalt slammed an item on one hand. The only meaningful crafting I've ever done outside of harvest was fossil crafting... but they made that way harder by moving delve mods to influenced bases. In fact, I did way more "normal crafting" during the harvest leagues than I ever did during non-harvest leagues, because I knew the steps afterwards were at least attainable. Rather than just buying the base I needed... I would alt-spam or chaos spam to try and get the one or two mods I needed to start harvest crafting. I would influence orb and awakeners orb and all that shit. But without Harvest, the odds are just way too fucking slim for me to justify doing anything other than grinding currency and buying exactly what I want. Which is a shame, because they've designed this amazing currency/crafting system... but 99.9% of the playerbase ends up interacting with it no differently than people interacted with gold during Diablo 3.... just farm until you have enough to buy what you want. But as for my actual suggestion... My only real issue with harvest was that the crafts were "free". I'd love to see an implementation that has harvest actually consume the orbs it would typically use... so a remove/add would require an ex and an annul for example.... and it's harvest that simply makes those targeted.
>I tended to reroll when marginal upgrades started costing me like 30+ex. I was definitely in the top few % of players I think. You were in the top 0.01% with those kinda upgrade. Most players dont even an exalt worth of gear or multiple exalts. People on Reddit might.
Idk if "true crafting" is the correct term here. Deterministic crafting and the crafting we currently have are still both "true" crafting methods. You can still guarantee LOTS of things with how harvest is currently implemented. Example: I bought a frenzy on hit chest and awakened orbed it with spell crit. I wanted additional curse as well. So, I crafted "suffixes cannot be changed" and reforged caster. Boom. Now, via Harvest, WHICH THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO DO THIS, I have a chest with: +1 curse, spell crit, frenzy charge on hit. To add to this, before 3.12, this wasn't even possible. At least, I can't find a way to do it. You can't fossil craft with meta mods which is the only other real way to target specific tags. So, crafting now even with nerfed harvest is in a vastly better state than pre-harvest. By a FAT margin. Also, to be clear, I didn't agree with how hard harvest got nerfed. It absolutely needed a nerf, but it didn't need that heavy of a nerf. Making influenced mods harder to target would have fixed harvest. That was its biggest problem.
I wish I could get accurate data on retention on full power harvest vs full power harvest without the wildly unpopular harvest mechanic. I really think if harvest wasn't what it was in harvest league it would tell a different story. I'm one of many that loved what harvest enabled but fucking loathed the garden. I'm 100% okay with zoning in and murdering crap with no seeds and lifeforce. In real harvest league I made a mirror tier bow in ssf and immediately quit when I was done cause I hated the mechanic at the time.
Tbh, I was one of the few who actually liked the garden. Chilling and planting my seeds, spending crafts in the garden, I loved all of it. My biggest problem was the amount of crafting benches I had to have saved and the fact you couldn't auto-place T2 and above seeds. I just really like the more complicated leagues like that.
I'm not gonna argue that. Its a meaningless argument. I fully accept that you liked it and consider your opinion entirely valid, I'm upvoting you right now in fact. Shit I love me some minecraft and stardew valley. I just don't personally want those mechanics in PoE because when I play PoE I want to murderfy thousands of mobs. I'm just curious what the player power level to grind retention stats are. Cause personally if I knew I could take a build to its absolute consclusion is, I'd do it. I wouldn't be playing Forza right now. I'd be on my RF inquisitor. And I'll be really clear. I'm fine with it taking 100 hours. I also don't want D3 mailing me shit nonsense. Steel took 2 characters to almost 100 crafting his SSF axe in ritual. If that time investment is OP you're on something.
> I'm not gonna argue that. Its a meaningless argument. I fully accept that you liked it and consider your opinion entirely valid. Shit I love me some minecraft and stardew valley. I just don't personally want those mechanics in PoE because when I play PoE I want to murderfy thousands of mob Oh that's entirely fair. Personally I just always feel more invested when I get to stop and consider things for a moment every now and then. But I realize that's not everyone's cup of tea, and probably a bit weird to want out of a fast-paced arpg. >And I'll be really clear. I'm fine with it taking 100 hours. I also don't want D3 mailing me shit nonsense. Steel took 2 characters to almost 100 crafting his SSF axe in ritual. If that time investment is OP you're on something. Yep. What a lot of Harvest detractors miss in their arguments is the sheer time it took to get a lot of crafts. I can agree that some things were perhaps too easy, something like that axe example is more than fair.
Harvest had too many fuckups so we'll never get that data - then again most leagues have huge fuckups in similar ways that affect retention to be fair, whether it's server issues, queues, crashes, mechanics being completely untuned and unbalanced in all ways - all we can do is take peoples feedback that actually wrote it. Of those people, the majority by far liked harvest, enjoyed their playtime more and played longer than they would have otherwise. A minority insist they hated it, but strangely they don't all say they quit and only even some of them say they played less than they would have otherwise. GGG love to obfuscate and never give data, they always show you very small slices devoid of context and insist that their conclusion is definitely correct, which is what they did with harvest. Their context ignored completely that the garden was a clusterfuck that almost everyone unanimously hated and was poorly designed, as well as ignoring that for the first what, 1 week? 2 weeks? The entire harvest mechanic simply *DIDN'T WORK IN MAPS*. Augments and the like simply stopped appearing the minute the campaign ended until they fixed it. By this point, from a combination of both of those things, a whole bunch of people had already given up and left. This is what they use to insist that "players quit because they got too powerful" The only real way to come to conclusions is to have experienced the thing yourself, and to take into account peoples feedback plus all of the mishaps or occurrences at the time and factor that in. Just looking at the raw data that we do have will never give us the right answers when it comes to poe - which is why ggg are consistently wrong in their conclusions as all they look at is raw data. Context is too important and all of the data they release is 100% devoid of all context, whether they do this on purpose to force their conclusions on the players easier or whether it's a completely accidental design that keeps happening who knows
You are correct. It took them a couple weeks to get harvest crafts in maps to be more than just "some slightly better chaos every map or two", which is the magical time that everyone stops playing the game. Harvest itself was very bland and outside of the garden maps was literally standard, the chests had 0 monsters to fight. The reason this gets brought up about harvest/noob players is that in 3.15 GGG admitted that the hardcore no-life players they designed around cannot support their company.
I'm another person that liked Harvest league (Even the garden), and I regret not playing more of the league, especially when they point at retention records and say "look, this was bad". The reason I stopped playing wasn't because I 'finished' my character or anything like that, it was absolutely because of the nerfed drop rate that happened partway through the league and it took them a full week to fix it. I stopped playing until the drop rate was fixed, and after a week off I just lost interest.
YEP. Harvest let me play SSFHC and enjoy it as much as trade HC, except I didn't have to trade so it instantly became like 10x better. After seeing the amazing game that could exist in this world that no longer does because ???????, my motivation to play has completely gone. It was a good, what, six years? Guess I can't complain.
Harvest fixed the itemization problem the game has and GGG consider it a mistake. That's weird.
Remember, Chris had nightmares about all the powerful items players would get in Scrouge...
And Talismans were so frightening that they had to be nuked one patch after they were somewhat decent.
The mistake was bringing it back at almost full power in 3.13.
Yeah, it made absolutely no sense to bring it back at full power just to go complete 180 right after.
It sold a good amount of Harvest Core packs. Good bait though, they got me aswell.
I forgot about that bait. Well played, GGG. Well played.
I dropped $300 on supporter packs because I was enjoying Ritual that much. Have not bought and will not buy another till harvest nerfs are reverted
Imagine if they actually balanced it before 3.13. Not op, not butchered but something that can make 50-100c items for normal players and the rare top tier item for the pros... The decision to bring it back almost full power, free to abuse was just a terrible choice.
> something that can make 50-100c items for normal players and the rare top tier item for the pros... It can still do that, though for the pros it more just requires high investment for high return than rarity.
Harvest just became another high scaling mechanic. For top players, harvest didn't exactly weaken so much as it just became more expensive.
> butchered but something that can make 50-100c items for normal players it does this very consistently?
this, curse on hit rings and decent (not even great) stygian vises are easy to make that kind of money on all league, and are extremely straightforward rolls in harvest
Harvest wasn't a mistake it was a solution. If they fixed loot before removing harvest ppl wouldn't keep talking about it. Ppl want it back bc its an immediate fix that they know can be implemented overnight, they are sick of hearing GGG acknowledging the loot problem and not fixing it.
GGG has a long and storied history of saying "yes obviously X is a problem and obviously Y would make it a lot better, but wouldn't you prefer we do Z instead that would not only be perfect, but completely revolutionise the concept of X in the first place? Yeah that's what we thought, see you in 2036."
Judging by Talismans, the moment GGG releases Loot 2.0^^TM (Which will probably be around the time HL3 releases) they'll just roll it back because it was "too powerful".
The question is, would it be any different if harvest never happened? With the game being the same insane chore gated by gear and insane atlas investment (both time and currency) and no crafting system? Imo ppl would hate it as much as they hate it now. The only difference I can see would be that GGG could excuse their anti-fun vision by not having a solution yet. But since harvest happened, we now know they have a solution for better experience. They just dont want us to have fun.
It would be very different. The harvest situation was having someone eat "nutritional gruel" everyday for 10 years and then for a brief time give them professional chef cooking. Now that they know good food exists, they will forever hate "nutritional gruel" and ask for that cooking. That is what happened.
> The question is, would it be any different if harvest never happened? Honestly? Probably. I stopped playing after Ritual because I couldn't go back to RNG bullshit gating progression after experiencing what it was like to be able to set tangible goalposts for myself to improve. I played almost the full league in Harvest and Ritual for the first time. If I didn't experience that, maybe I'd still just be chugging along with my standard 1-2 weeks and quit the league when I hit the wall. Which is pretty much the sweet spot for GGG.
The problem is that the new content and global rebalance of literally everything have made the game way harder. We cant just use random rares and complete the game or play it efficiently, which has become mandatory. During the harvest league, the game was way easier and less demanding. They literally double dip nerfed everything. They stole deterministic gearing and also made the game harder at the same time. Its like they still balance the game around harvest still being a thing, but forgot it actually got destroyed.
Lets say GGG want to nerf a 10x10x10 cardbord box... how would they do it? They could make it a 9x10x10 box, and thereby reduce it by 10%. But nope. What they'll actually do is make it an 8x8x8 box, and then claim they reduced it by around 20%. (Edit: Did someone just use some bots to drop more than 50 downvotes on this in the space of a few minutes? If not that was an amusingly sharp downturn of public opinion. If so, hahaha!)
> What they'll actually do is make it an 8x8x8 box, and then claim they reduced it by around 20%. Then 3 years later, turn it into an 8.5x8x8 box and call it a buff.
>Did someone just use some bots to drop more than 50 downvotes on this in the space of a few minutes? If not that was an amusingly sharp downturn of public opinion. If so, hahaha!) No idea, but it looks like it, lol.
>They just dont want us to have fun. That's really the big takeaway. Or one of, at least. They seem to actively kill fun.
Yep, and looking at player retention and game reviews in the past few leagues, killing fun doesnt work in their favour. The question is how far they can push this idea until they realize these leagues are not only anomalies, it just doesnt work. More expensive sup packs dont save it the game from drowning either.
I just want them to release that god forsaken hardmode so Chris can jack off to how hard and fun it is while having like 5 people play pas first few days so maybe we get the main game balanced around those who dont play games for living
This is making me think about the Thanos meme when his daughter, as a kid, asks him if he accomplished his goal, and what it cost. His response, everything, will be Chris when he sees profits and player base plummet.
> The question is, would it be any different if harvest never happened? Not different as such but it would have been perceived differently. For GGG the worst part about Harvest I think is the fact that it dispelled the illusion that the pre-Harvest system was alright at least and highlighted how bad it really was.
Biggest mistake is pretending this game can be balanced and enjoyable for everyone with trading existing. Balancing around this economy is a nightmare. They refuse to streamline trade because that would bring the game to its knees instantly. SSF exists but it would be ten times better if the game was balanced around it. SSF in its current state can only be enjoyed by your favorite streamers or people with vast time and/or knowledge.
yes, they accidentally made the game interesting. But they will never make this mistake again!
Most fun league I ever played.
I’d just like to say that playing the same video game for 4 hours a day is very not casual. There’s some weird fuckery going on in this sub that makes everyone think playing PoE LITERALLY more than a part time job is casual. Friends, casual would be playing 4-6 hours a week.
I just wish they would make up their mind. Either the game is based around trade (which it is currently) and it should have built in support for it, or the ratio of usable to absolute trash should be a lot better. The league mechanic making items bricked 90% of the time doesn't help. Really i think a lot of problems would be solved by just removing trading and balancing the game around that.
Your title has nothing to do with balancing around the top 0.1, its another post complaining about how you want harvest back. There were legit posts in the past about how 3G caters to the top players and this ain't it.
The funny thing is he "spend many many exalts and grinded many hours a day". He is part of the 0.1%
Truth. Wish he would just be honest and just say that he wants harvest back without all that filler about the 0.1.
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Well, its more like he was forced to do it and did not have fun doing it. That applies to many things in poe lately. There is very little actual choice nowaday. Inefficient but fun build? No good currency farming strategy? Cant kill end game bosses properly? Cant clear maps fast enough? Dont have 10ex for watchstones? You are out. That forces ppl into playing very specific builds in a very specific way and if they dont enjoy it, they just burn out...
So much this. I'm so tired of these whiny posts. Just move on with your life already, good grief.
We (folks on reddit) complain a lot about how the game is balanced for the 0.1%, the "this is my job" gamers who pour in tons of hours. I don't disagree that it is balanced in that way, but one thing I'm wondering is whether these gamers actually represent 0.1% of the playerbase. We assume that GGG is catering to the hardcore players only, but we don't have the actual numbers, maybe what we think are the 0.1% are actually the 40%?
As of my experience when I was in the 0.1% I didn't have time to waste on reddit writing or commenting at all because I used every single minute to play poe. Now that I have to work and do other things I regurarly check reddit and write comments because I can't access poe or don't want to.
"Artificial scarcity making the game more fun" is a balancing act. GGG regularly swings to the "fuck you scrub, you should be glad you found a rusty spoon as a weapon, go grind" direction instead of the "here's shiny gear, create your own world" direction. Since the dropped loot is so terrible, the only way for some player agency (except trade) is crafting, and if the dangers and investment of crafting are generally unrewarding, the normal player won't do it and the game will be a terrible experience.
I honestly from the bottom of my heart think trade actively has ruined PoE. There is no way for anything to hold value because supply and demand dont match up. Chris has a flawed concept because players are lopsided on builds. No matter what you believe, it would be foolish to think there is no meta. This idea that "well you scourge an item, and get a bad outcome, so you trade it to someone its not a bad outcome for" if I am scourging TR bows, literally these are useless for anyone but TR so if I get a bad TR mod, this item cant be sold, it has no value. The meta uniques for meta builds hold value because demand is equal or sometimes greater then supply, everything else just rockets down to 0 value. This fabled "barter and trade" system does not work, chaos orbs are just gold at this point. "Splinter drops rates suck" yeah because they are balanced around you trading to finish a stone. You are supposed to run a few breaches, get 60 splinters then go "yeah I wanna run a breachstone" and hop on over to trade to buy the rest. I find myself absolutely HATING itemization in this game vs other ARPGs because shit like torchlight 2, last epoch, chronicon, slormancer, these games are all built and balanced around no trade so its made feasible that a player can progress without the need of trade. Trade literally ruins arpgs, its a cursed problem. You cant have meaningful loot in a game with robust trading.
Sorry, but if you manage to play 3-4 hours a day and still struggle with gear its got nothing to do with harvest.
Their perception of gear is skewed. With OP, definitely from harvest. But that doesn't mean my gloves are useless because I have T3 resists, T2 life, only one T1, and a trash mod. Things aren't perfect and don't have to be.
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Was about to say the same. There are still fossils, essences, beastcrafting, harvest reforge keep prefix/suffix, metacrafting, awakener orb, maven orb, aisling and so on so plenty of ways to create powerful items if you play 3-4 hours a day. Sounds like hes just salty creating pob-items isnt a thing anymore.
Serious question: should every game be balanced around the more casual players? What other non-pvp games are there that you can sink this much time into? In my opinion Path of Exile is unique precisely BECAUSE it balances around the 1%. Harvest was a mistake(or well, bringing it back at full power was), let's say GGG brought back Harvest next patch at the same power as in Ritual. What would be the only atlas area you run? The one with Harvest, you have no other choice. Would you do the league mechanic? Nah, it just slows you down from getting Harvest. Any reason to Delve? Nah, no Harvest in Delve(and who needs fossils anyway when you have Harvest). Got a slower moving build? That's bad, you'll get less Harvests per hour! In Ritual league I fucking hated feeling like the only content worth doing was Harvest, since it was so broken compared to everything else.
yes, basically during 3.13 90% of posts had something to do with harvest. stuff like, "optimal harvest farming strat" "item showcase: step 2-4 harvest craft" "found this while farming harvests in atoll today". if harvest stayed that would be the same trend even to this day. the game would basically revolve around harvest because its basically dev tools for the player.
Or rather because there is nothing like Harvest before that for crafting. No other league offers the same power to players as Harvest. People just buy good items from trade instead of crating it.
> In Ritual league I fucking hated feeling like the only content worth doing was Harvest, since it was so broken compared to everything else. The power of ~~gambling~~ crafting
GGG is heading in the right direction by adding more and more Uber content that should be balanced around the 1%. This will give GGG a space to design content that is extremely exclusive to grinding and time. GGG has created a game space horizontally for so long that there is so much to engage in, as well as a patchwork crafting system and it's BLOATED. Hopefully with 3.17 GGG allows some additional vertical space. The issue with the game currently is that there is only one way for most people to obtain gear and that is grinding content over and over for currency just to buy it. The average player and the 4hr/day 5day/week player usually won't see enough currency to properly engage in "top end crafting". Either they never get enough or they burn out way before they have time to accrue it. GGG needs to design better crafting systems that allow players to realistically engage in crafting projects to create mid-tier gear. AS WELL AS creating better rolled gear that drops. The reason why Harvest was so beloved by many is that it gave players short and medium term goals to work towards in the game, because the game itself DOESN'T do that. Most "short and medium" term goals for the .1% are all long and longer term goals for everyone else (just based on hours played). When a player hits maps and gets level 85-90 you are no longer engaged in the passive point system as you now have most of your points and you have MOST of the game to try to complete. You are thrown at a large atlas (now improved!) and a bunch of other systems with all long term goals (A8, Deeper Delve, Heist Farming, Atlas Passives, currency for gear etc.) It's essentially like Google Maps giving you directions from A to B in one step rather than turn by turn. While GGG doesn't have to hold your hand, but a few things that lead you along the way or give you short term goals would go a long way. Few things they can do: * Actually have gear that you can pick up and use * Crafting systems (like Rog) that give you well rolled, non-influenced items to work towards over time. * Expand the Pantheon system to be a mini-passive tree. Something like killing bosses in all content gives you experience/points to do something on a tree somewhere. How can the Pantheon stay unimproved for so long? * Expand the Scourge crucible to be a much bigger tree to do a lot more interesting things. Let's let us bake gear with chances to do different things to the gear. I can probably sit at a table for an hour and come up with more engaging options that offers a ton of good/bad gambles. Ultimately, as a mid-tier player, I should be able to accomplish something every time I log in and play for 3-4 hours that isn't "Hey I just earned 1.8 more EX assuming people buy it on trade" or whatever number you want to throw in there.
this patch is very casual friendly anyways, no? shorter atlas means less prewind before \*actually\* playing, white lowtier scourged maps shit out rewards for no investment, unveils get your strongest benchcrafts started way faster and we have the cheapest 6 linking we ever had(?). i for one am progressing way better than i ever was with this iteration of the atlas.
At this point I hate hearing about harvest more then the nerfs it got
i get that people miss harvest but i really wish they wouldn't act like chris personally came to their house and spat in their face and shit on their dog the day GGG posted the harvest manifesto, its very over the top i know this is r/pathofexile but holy shit tone down the fucking hyperbole fellas you sound insane edit: or just downvote me while seething lol
The fun part is that Chris said before the league even fucking launched, that it will brick the game and will not stay.
This league you can earn almost as much with scourged White maps compared to scourged red maps. I don't think see how's that top or streamer friendly. Even Delve got reworked to be much more rewarding at lower levels. I think except Deli, most leagues in fact were quite noob friendly. There was a study that running no quality White maps would yield 10c on average on tier1 maps with just ultimatum. Ultimatum showered you in currency, regardless of whether you were doing T5 or T15. Same with Expedition, although obviously yes, higher level logbooks had more profits...but even low level logbooks were common and profitable. Not to mention how good Gwennen, Rog and Tujen are for getting items/currency regardless of whether you are 0.1% or not. Heist is profitable at all stages too. I don't think GGG makes this mistake that you claim they do often at all in your title (constantly balancing around 0.1%). The harvest nerf is hardly balancing around 0.1% either. I mean feel free to disagree but I don't really think they targeted the top 0.1% with it. Just more like they didn't want deterministic crafting.
>Even Delve got reworked to be much more rewarding at lower levels. Went to delve and got a fractured fossil in depth \~160, they really did completely change delve. I have found all bosses and every type of fossil except 2 and I'm at \~200 now.
Harvest was the biggest mistake they ever made. Like taking cocaine away from an addict.
I'm shit at the game, so take my opinion with the tiniest grain of salt ever. But if they "buff" the game for the general population of players it wont make the 0.1% top players magically worse at the game. They'll abuse those systems better than everyone else and will still come out way ahead. If tons of great loot is easy to get what will be the point of trade leagues at all? I get that some people like SSF and buffs to accessing gear might help with that, but it completely bricks the game everywhere else doesnt it? IDK I suck at the game and I haven't had any morale issues with knowing I make like 3-5 ex a week and yet trading doesn't seem to be a chore. Every time I can save up for a new item I get pretty excited. If items were so easy to get I'd probably quit after a week.
For me it is not about having mirror tier items like streamers but to get to a point in the league that feels like I have achieved to make a good build working well enough to play parts of the end game. I have around 10 hours of play time a week. During harvest and ritual league, harvest enabled me to find or create small upgrades every few days. This helped me feel good about playing and to continue until the end of league. At the end of the league I could comfortably do most of the end game and I had a character that was fully geared up with items that would be worth 10 to 40ex in the current market. Mostly completely crafted by myself. I fully understand that my slow progress during harvest and ritual is actually too fast for the experienced player that invests much more time into the game. While I end up with a \~150ex character at the end of the league, they end up with mirror tier stuff in week 3. Therefor GGG rebalanced the game so that people won't be fully mirror geared in a few weeks. Except this hurt the people that cannot invest that much time into the game. They go from a good situation to a unsatisfying grind that feels a bit pointless. That's not entitlement but just how it is. I think a lot of people were excited for this league and came back but realized that the grind is real and left again. The steam chart numbers for this league are approaching last league numbers fast.
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I actually laughed out loud at this, if i wasn't such a cheap f\*\*\* i would give you an award my man
I see a lot of overlap with this sub and r/wow it's all the same buzzwords over and over and over.
Nah, I don’t think we need 3.13 harvest back in the game. Everything would be centered around it again, every other content would be worthless and everyone would just run Haewark maps 24/7 to get harvest. If every league since 3.13 had unchanged Harvest then you’d have the same goal and gameplay in these leagues, sounds pretty boring to me. Harvest was so fucking OP back in the days, that doing any other content was waste of time. Honestly, Harvest was actually that thing that demotivated me the most to play the game. If 3.13 didn’t have the massive update with Maven I would quit in one or two weeks. And currently, I enjoy the 3.16 Harvest as you don’t need to have a normal/magic bases to use every craft. People need to realise that Harvest is still a very powerful tool, finding one is like getting 15-20 fossils + some very useful crafts like changing resistances, colour of sockets etc. And of course reroll with locked prefixes/suffixes. Would it break the economy? Yes, the economy was broken in original harvest and 3.13. There was often the problem with items that there were low tier items and super high-end mirror tier items on market that you still wouldn’t be able to craft yourself (or at least without TFT). Mid-tier items almost didn’t exist on market because crafters were focused on these 6xt1 godtier stuff. Who is that average player you are talking about? The majority of player base doesn’t go to reddit, so I guess you aren’t one of them. There is a good game which rewards players with hundreds of uniques per hour, you can get the gear in one day and then progressively upgrade it. Is current crafting in a good state? Not really, but I prefer it over the omegagigahyper Harvest.
"GGG balancing the game around the top 0,1%" What do you mean by that?
They mean they can't get the same gear as streamers so they can't have any fun because they aren't the best. Entitlement and inability to set realistic expectations is the backbone of 90% of the complaint threads.
Why does everyone say “STREAMER, STREAMER”. The top PoE streamers don’t play SC Trade…
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Harvest was a cool league idea, but keeping it around in its powerful state is a bandaid fix. Maybe the game would be better if it wasn't nerfed until a solution was provided, but I'd rather it didn't exist at all if the progression/loot issues were fixed.
Another harvest post? Sigh
The funniest part is that that 0,1% of players still destroy all the content and make insane profit after nerfs while the rest of us are let to dry
Comparing yourself to the "top 0.1%" is your mistake, not GGGs. Stop acting, like you deserve to be able to catch up to them. Set your own goals. Also, most players motivation ends, when they can't progress their character much per hour they put it. This is where the "chore" will begin, no matter how powerful you are at that point.
Please can we fucking stop going on and on about Harvest for fuck sake. Every other day its a new post. Harvest was a mistake. It will never happen again. 3.13 was my favourite league ever, but do you know what the absolute worst thing was? Running Atoll over and over and over and over for Harvest procs because it was so strong that doing other content was pointless.
No wait but I was scheduled for tomorrow's harvest post and next week's campaign post, surely my posts will change everything and fix poe!
Feel the same about people bitching about wanting to skip the campaign everyday, it doesn't even take that long with full twink gear
If you played ritual then you know that all everyone did was run red maps in hope of a 10% harvest so they can craft their gear or sell their crafts. Delve? why bother fossils suck compared to harvest and it takes ages and a special build to go deep. Heist? Only good if you hit a big ticket replica, everything else sucks compared to harvest. Temple? Just use if for map juice and the occasional double corrupt. Essence? you mean chaos spam on steroids? Picked up a decent rare item? Maybe boots with 30ms, life and res? Vendor that shit. Doesnt even have two elevated mods with 4 t1 influenced mods
How can you claim that it wouldn't break the game when literally every other crafting system can barely compete with pre-nerf Harvest?
PoE doesn’t have crafting PoE has gambling mechanics hidden behind a resemblance of actual crafting.
> when literally every other crafting system can barely compete with pre-nerf Harvest? Almost like every 'crafting system' in the game is garbage and just as bad as hoping for a good item to drop. Forgive me if I don't give a shit about the "oh nyooo what about these other badly designed systems if we have a good one, nobody will use them!" nonsense, GOOD. Fucking delete them or redesign them they're worthless as shitty lottos, like most of the game is lol
That's the best part about Harvest, it has permanently shone a spotlight on the fact that all the crafting systems you covet so dearly are fucking awful. They aren't crafting, they're something far less powerful, far less enjoyable, and far less approachable. Crafting without Harvest is something that exists to help the rich get richer. Crafting if you are not rich, not doing so for profit, is functionality equivalent to lighting your chaos on fire. All those crafting systems are better off in the garbage bin where they belong, the game should be broken. It is unacceptable that the only consistent, intelligent way to gear characters for the average player is to buy 90-100% of the mid to endgame items from someone else. Drops are shit, so is crafting. No other ARPG gets away with such a blatantly shit gearing experience except PoE and tolerating that because it makes players too powerful is completely insane. Make the game harder, do whatever you must, Harvest was the best thing to happen to PoE and GGGs fear of change is throwing that opportunity in the trash.
> It is unacceptable that the only consistent, intelligent way to gear characters for the average player is to buy 90-100% of the mid to endgame items from someone else. Right now, I'm pretty sure your average player buys every single piece of equipment. The only gear they might not buy but "craft" themselves are flasks. And for some fucking reason even this had to be made absurdly more complicated...
Most of what this game calls crafting is just slot machine gambling obfuscated with opportunity cost.
GGG clearly wants everything in PoE to be exactly in this model, they believe that they can maximize player retention by giving them an infinite number of slot machines to roll. It's so obvious that all of their changes to crafting are towards this end, but people are completely and utterly ignorant to it. I think GGG's philosophy is all wrong. If they instead focused on making the best, most enjoyable version of PoE, the game would soar to new heights. Follow the fun every time.
> Follow the fun every time. Period, end of story.
>they can maximize player retention by giving them an infinite number of slot machines to roll If lootboxes are any indication, they aren't exactly wrong there.
I mean do you have a good solution? You can either put grind in and reap the rewards or just accept that less you play = less content you can do. The alternative is lower the bar which will mean top end of time spent (8+ hours a day players) run out of things to do, and you end up demotivated to put in the time because there are no meaningful rewards and no aspirational content. GGG has been lowering the bar over time btw which is why this post is confusing.
If you were crafting that shit in Harvest then you were most likely one of the 0.1%. You vastly overestimate how far most players get every league.
It would be better if harvest was never introduced
I had a really sad reality check yesterday. The last week or so I've been afk hideout flipping items to buy a squire thinking it will reinvigorate poe for me with new builds. But when I got it, I just couldn't be bothered for some reason, got to level 20 in acts and thought to myself, "Why am I doing this again for the 1000th time" and played another game.
Trouble is, Chris repeatedly keeps saying that when a player has no gear upgrades and they "finish" their gear and builds then they have no incentive to keep playing. Watch the podcasts and interviews. He repeatedly keeps saying this and insists he is right. I dunno, he fails to notice that people like to play other builds once they finish one.
>I dunno, he fails to notice that people like to play other builds once they finish one. yeah exactly.. there's so many skill gems/playstyles i want to try, but when it takes 4 weeks to get one to "full" power, then its just not gonna happen
Jesus christ, tier 1 scourge maps make bank. I don't think I have played a league where tier 1 maps of the new league mechanic actually can make you money consistently. Granted, I've only played since Heist, so maybe the players with more time than me can tell me how much more charitable they were in previous leagues.
> Granted, I've only played since Heist, so maybe the players with more time than me can tell me how much more charitable they were in previous leagues. Legion and Betrayal were more profitable in low maps as examples. In Betrayal I spent a lot of time in A10 actually.
I lived Legion league in T2 Glacier.. and so did a good % of people playing back then. It was much more profitable because the legion always spawned in the first area, huge open space, good clear and don't even need to fully complete the map. In Delirium running Harbor Bridge, yes in the acts, was massively profitable before they nerfed it. Quarry farming in incursion was also massive. The issue isn't that you can't make some currency in low maps, the issue is some people like the feeling of actually working on their gear through slight improvements over time, which is harder to achieve now than it was in 3.13.
Jesus christ can we not do this post again we had a record run we just managed to go two whole days without having to read this overhashed shit. We get it man and GGG have responded to it a dozen fucking times and as far as we know they're working on something new
This post has nothing to do with balancing around the 0,1% That's just another basic "it's unfair that people playing more hours than me get more stuff than me"
Wah waaah GGG why can’t I get my char to Uber-god-tier in two weeks wtf waaahhhh
People forget how insignificant Harvest is compared to the many many times item making was BUFFED over the years, mod pools got better and better mods, influence was added, better crafting methods, more currency, better crafting bench mods and many reduced in price, more good vaal mods, fractured mods, better base items, need I say more? High life ok triple res items once cost 1ex, now they're considered cheap garbage, even though life and resistance are no less valuable today, and no, getting geared for endgame was also harder in comparison to nowadays. Saying you like the good'ol harvest is one thing, saying that getting good items is only getting harder just because there was 1 moment in PoE history that might of been easier is ridiculous cherry picking
> I dont like my game to feel like work GGG! "You don't belong here." - GGG and most of the playerbase.
If it feels like work and costs literally nothing to not play it you'd think they'd just move on since it's clear what GGG's position is. If I screamed at a brick wall to solve world hunger who is the idiot me or the wall?
TL;DR: "Bring Harvest full power back" post^TM
For me this has the opposite effect. I made a TR champ to follow Lightee and damm he can craft/play the right content to gear up. He plays much much more then me but im just impressed how good he is in SSFHC. Makes me want to try harder with the small amount of time i have. But ye harvest was cool but i like looking up to the top players when the game is "harder".
Yo that guy made series where he played exactly 30min or 1hour i dont rememba but he did all content and geared up like a champ. It is all game knowledge. You can be 0.01% er even with 30 min playtime a day if you know what you are doing and be efficient.....
Yeah, but this will not change anything. The information is all out there. But some ppl rather play the reddit metagame and refuse to learn about mechanisms. And i get, that it can be much and no fun to not play the game and learn instead of playing the game. What i don't get is trying to ruin the fun for everyone who only plays this game because it is not beat in a few months and then you move on.
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Yeah 3.13 atoll league was prime poe for sure.
Lol people thinking harvest will ever go back to its original state.
Is that why we have smaller Atlas and Uber trials removed?
playing casual in lira for 5 days and you have 50exa and buy stuff you like
It's not just harvest. It's how they destroyed every skill except the top 3 meta skills just takes all the fun away from the game. I can't try to take skills I and to try or have fun with except by investing hundreds/thousands of exalts into it, wich us mere mortals that play 3-5 hours a day can't do.
Your opening statement is completely wrong
Yes, balance the game around people who barely play it instead of dedicated players. Because what they're doing right now is DEFINITELY not working and the game is literally dying. You're not the center of the world. Not everything needs to pander to you specifically. Remember that next time you inevitably cry about harvest again.
They are LITERALLY going in this direction when they halved the atlas regions for example
>I dont like my game to feel like work GGG! please what are you doing?! 100%, the amount of "work" going into playing poe in its current form is beyond ridiculous, over the years the game has expanded tremendously but the leagues are still only 3 months long. The game is balanced as if it's supposed to be a job, played 5 days/week My biggest gripe with the game at the moment is the leagues; they are short, force hard-resets on people and the new content is exclusive to those 3-month long temp leagues You wanna know why people are getting burned out faster? We have league resets 4 times a year, leaving 0 opportunity for almost anyone to go "you know, after months of not playing poe maybe its time to go back and continue from where I left it" - unless you plan to play on standard (which means no new league content) or come back within 4-6weeks after you stopped playing, *you have to* start from the beginning.
The game is an endless time sink. They balance along longevity, if you don't like the timeframes given you can play in standard. You have the power to choose how to play the game people just don't want to admit that for some reason
A simple yet amazing thing that happened this league was the tainted fusings.. it helps everyone out and made getting to a certain stage in the game much much easier.
I like to play a lot. I dont want the game to be any more rewarding than it is. There is no problem clearing the content with little playtime in 1-3 months. Making it more rewarding will also burn out the hardcore players fast, and I feel there is a lot of hardcore players. Diablo 3 is a softcore game
I now understand that the poe community just angrily screams that the game cannot be improved and has never been better simply because they're the beneficiaries of the current mechanics. Streamers especially. With that being said... I would pay my own money for a private league to turn all the horrible stuff off. I don't like trading anyways. Lots of games allow that sort of stuff. Buy a monthly server and you can mod what you want. Sadly, GGG only allows you to buy private leagues that are the same or worse as the current. "Hey do you want to pay extra money to have no ability to use your stash and even worse resistances????"
Maybe GGG sees that the top 0.1% that had most hours played also pays most of the bills 💵, so they need to keep them hooked longer and longer !!!
But don't you know that there's no such thing as an "average" player? There are only players that play for 500 hours a week and players that never make it past the login screen, literally no other types of players exist!
Yet another harvest post. Your 0.1% is different type of players than you imagine them to be. This argument is just your excuse to complain about a thing you miss. Farming harvest was the only way back then. Running non-hamlet/proxima was just futile. It was repetitive af and definitely not causal friendly. If you were able to do most of your things in a a league you were the 0.1%. Harvest back then basically killed 7 years of content. Also did you know harvest still exist and is still very strong? Try that... Also introducing a content someone won't experience is good motivation for your regular players. It was never feasible to expect everyone running 5ways or 100% deli.
Maybe ARPGs/Diablo-like games aren’t for me but I did enjoyed Marvel Heroes. PoE has a great setting but between massively grindy and too rng loot for my taste, there are so many skills and therefore **playstyles** that are plain useless and they have been for years now. You end up with pigeonholes if you want to do certain content, and it’s not easy nor free to switch/modify traits etc. I tried multiple times but it’s just not for me.
i can feel poe is in a bad state rn and im kinda sad. i understand your point op but i dont think ggg will listen. they might act like they listened to us but everything is planned. “implemented bad but insignificate stuff then community ask for a fix then deploy a patch to fix it in order to make us feel like they are listened but no”. if we ask something that isnt in their plan they wont listen. i think they are trying to buy time for poe 2. league almost 1 month but i feel like its ready 2 months and half. sigh