I loved the seed quality system in some of the Harvest Moon games where the seeds you buy in stores are worth 1/2 star, and by using fertilizer and a seed maker, you can gradually increase the seed quality to 5 stars resulting in higher quality crops and higher profit. This system is also used in the Sims 3 where you pick the highest quality produce and plant that to gradually increase the quality of the crop. I was genuinely surprised when I found out this game doesn't use a similar system. I think the crop quality system in this game is dumbed down, making it is far too easy to make the highest quality crops right away if you're lucky. I would suggest having a system similar to the ones described above. This would prolong the gameplay as you will be working on perfecting your crops for several years, and prevent you from becoming rich too early into the game. It would also give you a great sense of accomplishment knowing after all these years your crops are flawless. This suggestion could also apply to animals, letting you breed higher quality animals that give better produce. This could be part of an optional difficulty setting.
Oh, it reminds me about Haven & Hearth game. I think, that it could be good for crops (but not such hardcore, how it is in H&H), but for animals it doesn't looks so good as long as you need a lot of time to reach 5 hearts with your beloved animal and selling it after it is quite depressing sometimes..
This add tedious busy-work. The backpack becomes useless as you end up with multiple slots wasted on one product with multiple ratings: 0-star Apple, 0.5-star Apple, 1-star Apple, 2-star Apple, 2.5-star Apple, 3-star Apple, 3.5-star Apple. The Jazz flowers already fall into this pattern which I dislike immensely. Sure, it provides 'variety' - but it's annoying without relevant purpose. 3 whole stars is a good balance.
On top of that, the average system was pretty annoying, managing a bunch of items with different stars then adding together to free space where they average out your items, making your crops losing values, it just becomes really tedious, and it gets annoying when you have to tend for different crops, different animal products, different stars, just so many nopes.
I can understand why a 5 star system wouldn't work, I wasn't saying this game had to copy that exactly, however, I don't see why you cant achieve a similar system with the current 3 stars. You already have 3 qualities for crops, but the way you get them seems too random, with your only influence being using fertilizer. The system I am suggesting will just add the same quality to seeds, allowing you to gradually increase the quality of your crops. I just think its wrong to get gold quality plants straight from the store with only the use of simple fertilizer, I would like to work for it and be proud to get my first gold crop, and be rewarded with more profit when I finally get all my crops to gold quality. For example in the first several batches, you get majority normal crops with maybe 1 or 2 silver quality if you use basic fertilizer. You then put the silver quality crop in the seed maker and make silver quality seeds which you plant. You can then work to make all your crops Gold quality.
