Path of Exile

I've not thought about the whole harvest thing a lot since I didn't play that league so take the following take with that grain of salt.

In the original harvest, you collected seeds, planted them, then they spawned mobs and you killed them and you got the same crafting options as they are now, right? The seeds had various levels of rarity and the quantity was generally pretty high due to seeds dropping through the acts and then maps.

So, the roadblock to having too much crafting available to too many players was the rarity of the seeds that gave you high level/valuable crafts.


Now in ritual, the roadblock is not the rarity of seeds, but the combined rarity of getting harvest in a map and for the rarer/valuable crafts to actually drop. IF it does drop though after the stars have aligned in your favor, the craft is essentially free. It's also sellable by saving the craft into your horticraft station.

With this in mind, what's the difference between using a stored horticraft that you got lucky on and the crafting bench? Quantity (the ten storage limit) and rarity (only a few players get the valuable crafts at any one time). Fundamentally, the crafting bench and the horticraft station are the same thing: you get access to a crafting option and then click a button for your reward. The players have solved the limitations on quantity and rarity themselves by using the TFT discord to get the players that possess the valuable crafts to be able to link up with people who want them since there is no way in game to do this. If you really want to have these crafts but limit them by quantity and rarity, why not just do that via currency cost instead of adding so many extra steps and forcing the players to collude in third party apps to accomplish what should be available in game? Hell, they already had that system in place with seeds (another currency) and they ditched the currency side of it in their attempts to fix it when they should have been looking at the other aspects of harvest when it comes to a sensible limitation on the valuable crafts.


What's holding GGG back I think in this case is IMO hubris: they are unable to admit that the entire idea behind harvest was a failure, but the rewards for putting up with this tedium were what made it worth it now in Ritual. Rather than admit they were wrong and add a better/less tedious way to access the same rewards, they are getting rid of the rewards themselves and in the process giving the finger to their player base while heavily hinting that it's the players' fault for this nerf for colluding on third party apps. The fact that players are going around this intended limitation is probably what is driving the devs' actions, not players possessing these powerful crafts. There's no 'difficulty' involved with putting things behind layers and layers of RNG. Luck =/= difficulty. The top end players will still have this level of gear, so this really only changes things for the mid-to-low-mid tier players. IE: the vast majority of their player base.

We'll see if whatever they come up with for the next league is good enough to distract the playerbase from their shitty attitude. In the mean time, I have a suspicion that the backlash is having an effect, but you never know.