Original Post — Direct link

Alternate Title: u/Imbryill ranting about his favorite game getting ruined for several paragraphs.

So. GGG. You have unequivocally pissed me off. Your trophy for that achievement will come in the mail shortly.

What follows is a breakdown of the most recent Developer Manifesto and my specific problems with it.

In short, we're concerned by how deterministic some Harvest Crafts are and how easily players can craft near-perfect items.

Deterministic, yes. Ability to craft near-perfect items? Not by a long shot for most players.

[Our Initial Plan for Harvest Crafting]

Players easily filled gaps in their builds while levelling, and made many, many mirror-worthy items

If many items are "mirror worthy", they no longer "mirror worthy". "Mirror worthy" - as far as the community is concerned- defines a tier of item that is very hard to near-impossible to make (if not completely impossible). It is also defined in the context of the league as well, and is ever shifting.

[Analysis of Integration into the Core Game]With Harvest integrated into the core game with 3.13.0, players still made ridiculous items. Even the crafts we made quite rare felt pretty common when the entire community was pooling them together and using them on the right items.

...

The result of both of these factors was that players had access to basically unlimited medium-power crafting and had to RNG-hunt the best crafts which they could then store for later.

Players also expressed frustration that the most effective way to get the best items in Path of Exile was to join a discord channel and try to trade for these incredibly crucial crafts.

So make the crafts the player base needs more common but weaker? Clamp the tier of crafts to at most T2?

[Path of Exile's Item Philosophy

This sentiment was summed up by a member of our design team who recently said "We don't want to take away the feeling of closing your eyes and Exalting an item, scared to see whether you ruined it or not."

The Infamous phrase. If this is the design philosophy of the game, why have currency to modify items in the first place? Whether you like it or not, you opened pandora's box. You need to introduce another way for Harvest to be implemented into the core game entirely as the current system is not flexible enough to provide the vision you want. Yet more currency is the way to go it seems, and hell you could even sell a tab for it.

[Upcoming Changes in Path of Exile {Pi}]-Some mods that had overly-deterministic behaviour have been removed. These include all annulment mods (other than the ones that remove a mod that isn't of a specific type before adding one of that type), and all type-specific divine mods.

- Crafts that add mods of specific types (like Physical Modifiers, for example) to items can now only be applied to non-influenced items, except for the existing mod that applies an influenced mod to an influenced item.

And you go and make Harvest practically useless. Good job. Now nobody is going to interact with Harvest, specifically because it will not affect the endgame items at all anymore (due to the majority of them being influenced). The solution i would've proposed is to just remove the tags from ALL influence mods, therefore making them completely untargetable by harvest as far as adding mods is concerned.

- Previously, every seed in a patch granted an instance of that seed's craft. Now, only some of the seeds do (so you're getting far fewer of the crafts that were overwhelming people with their quantity). Higher-tier seeds are closer to the 1:1 ratio from before.

- The chance of encountering a portal to the Sacred Grove in a map has been increased by 60%.

This only shifts the problem, as it will likely generate the same amount of crafts as (if not more than) currently. Shifting the window to the higher tier though is a nice thought.

As I alluded to before, the way I see harvest becoming more usable to the general playerbase is to extend the amount of storage the player has for seeds and making trading crafts easier. Trading for crafts is going to happen no matter what and there will be no way of stopping it short of killing trade entirely. Harvest has made item progression clearer and more understandable (and less scary) to the playerbase as a whole. Modifying harvest this way will only lead to an elite few actually playing the game the way you intend it while the rest of us just grind mobs to get the coin needed to buy the gear we want anyway. If you want trade to be impactful, increase the power the players have in crafting their own items.

It's called "Crafting" after all, not "Gambling". It's getting to the point where Vegas has better odds than Path of Exile's RNG.

External link →
almost 4 years ago - /u/Bex_GGG - Direct link

I understand being upset about the nerfs but please be aware that this line "So. GGG. You have unequivocally pissed me off. Your trophy for that achievement will come in the mail shortly." reads as an explicit threat.