Path of Exile - Will Harvest Become Core Content?
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In about a month, Path of Exile’s current Harvest challenge league will be coming to an end. This means a new expansion and fresh league mechanics. And if you’d like to know what this will mean for the systems introduced by Harvest, you should check out this official announcement. Have a look:
There are five weeks left in Harvest which means things are starting getting closer to the launch of our 3.12 expansion in September. In the meantime, you may be wondering what the future of Harvest looks like. We're ready to share our plans!
In short, Harvest will not immediately become a core gameplay mechanic but may be reintroduced in the future.
When we designed Harvest, we wanted to experiment with a more deterministic crafting system that would enable players to access powerful items earlier in their character progression. In this sense, we feel that the crafting system has been very successful. However, at the top end of gameplay, Harvest has made it too easy to gain very powerful items that previously required a lot more work and investment to acquire. This was acceptable for a temporary challenge league but poses problems for the long-term health of Path of Exile's item economy if allowed to remain in its current state.
As such, Harvest would require a significant amount of rebalancing in order to achieve a healthy level of power for the core game. We would be reassessing the crafting mechanics to determine how many of them we're willing to keep and how much of the remaining crafting would need to be rebalanced.
The standard method of adding mechanics to core gameplay where they gain a 10% chance to appear in maps also doesn't really work for Harvest, as it would mean you would only make growth progress in your Sacred Grove every ten maps which would be dissatisfying and slow. We plan to look at an alternate method of providing access to the Harvest mechanic that isn't strictly reliant on RNG but implementing something like this will take a fair amount of time and therefore not be immediate.
The Harvest mechanic also creates some database issues in terms of the amount of data being stored. This is a non-trivial technical problem we would need to resolve before allowing it to exist long-term.
All of these changes are too time-consuming to implement immediately. We would like Harvest to be core in the future, but we are not yet sure of what that would look like. In summary, if you're enjoying Harvest in its current form, be sure to take advantage of it while you can!
