Friday Facts #375 - Quality

[FuryoftheStars]

No they have demanded it removed so others cannot have it.

Most people have not been demanding that it be removed.

we are laready 25 pages into a topic and only constructive criticsm that I saw here was when it came to blueprints and visibility of different quality buildings.

I feel like we're reading different threads, then, because I've seen a lot of feedback giving suggestions on how to still have a quality system, but with less randomness, etc, or alternatives to a quality system.

[pointa2b]

Just chill out and see what else is revealed over the next year. And at that point, feel free to have whatever opinions/feedback/grievance you wish.

Are you suggesting waiting for it to be finalized before pointing out unintended consequences and possibilities to address them before time runs out on the development cycle?

Let people provide feedback rather than trying to undermine efforts at constructive criticism. There are opportunities for improvement here.

Opinions are less valuable (both good and bad) when you don't understand how they fit into the larger ecosystem of content/mechanics, and how it translates into actual gameplay. Feedback would be much more valuable if we saw the full picture, but obviously thats not going to be the case for a little while longer. And we've seen balancing/changes before on stuff, when switching to new major versions in beta. Wube probably isn't disappearing into the ether on launch day, so there really isn't anything to worry about. And even if they do or reject whatever suggestions people may have, there will be a deluge of mods to adjust stuff however.

Its not about saying the opinions here don't matter, but how are they any more valid than the many people who love this mechanic. And this goes back to us not having the full picture yet. Maybe the devs will respond to some of these thoughts from people, and more communication is always better than less. But otherwise, lets just see how it all connects. I'm excited for the future of the game, and I'm fascinated to see what Wube synthesizes without constant iterative community feedback.

[Necronium]

No they have demanded it removed so others cannot have it.

Most people have not been demanding that it be removed.

we are laready 25 pages into a topic and only constructive criticsm that I saw here was when it came to blueprints and visibility of different quality buildings.

I feel like we're reading different threads, then, because I've seen a lot of feedback giving suggestions on how to still have a quality system, but with less randomness, etc, or alternatives to a quality system.

Yes we are reading different things cause I didnt see anything that would be that different from what we will get. Just put x items to get something. And if people would play Factorio they would knew that there isnt really that problem with "randomness"

[FuryoftheStars]

I feel like we're reading different threads, then, because I've seen a lot of feedback giving suggestions on how to still have a quality system, but with less randomness, etc, or alternatives to a quality system.

Yes we are reading different things cause I didnt see anything that would be that different from what we will get. Just put x items to get something.

Just because feedback/suggestions are not "that different from what we will get" does not mean they aren't constructive.

And if people would play Factorio they would new that there isnt really that problem with "randomness"

Randomness is not a problem in the current game, correct, because there's one recipe in the whole game that uses it and there's another recipe... 1 or 2 researches later?... that makes the randomness from the other just about null and void. That does not appear to be the case with the new Quality system as descibed.

[Necronium]

I feel like we're reading different threads, then, because I've seen a lot of feedback giving suggestions on how to still have a quality system, but with less randomness, etc, or alternatives to a quality system.

Yes we are reading different things cause I didnt see anything that would be that different from what we will get. Just put x items to get something.

Just because feedback/suggestions are not "that different from what we will get" does not mean they aren't constructive.

And if people would play Factorio they would new that there isnt really that problem with "randomness"

Randomness is not a problem in the current game, correct, because there's one recipe in the whole game that uses it and there's another recipe... 1 or 2 researches later?... that makes the randomness from the other just about null and void. That does not appear to be the case with the new Quality system as descibed.

Yes and there is at least one place in Factorio where you can find randomness but people arent crying about it and most of them play with it. I would suggest for looking for it. From what we saw there isnt really problem with randomness with current quality system unless someone is starting with factorio and is trying to hand feed everything. Factorio is about automation and automation doesnt care about RNG( it becomes statistic). When people are crying that there is % to some recipe most people will go and automate it and then assemblers will go brrrr cause they dont care about it.

[aka13]

So on the surface, 90% approval actually means 99.X%+ approval. This is why this thread is largely just noise for the devs.

If you insist putting up strawmans, and really are in that field, and not a 14 year old roleplaying, as it often is with patronizing figures on forums, you also know, that people with "3 Stars, meh, would not order again" don't leave reviews as wel, simply because its too tedious. Which often leads to a loop of "we do everything right, the 1-star reviews are edgecases, we have a silent satisfied minority" until there is no one left willing to order/buy the product.

Whatever it has to do with feedback on how things can be better, different, or are good as is in a factorio dlc discussion, is not really clear.

[IronCartographer]

Feedback would be much more valuable if we saw the full picture, but obviously thats not going to be the case for a little while longer. And we've seen balancing/changes before on stuff, when switching to new major versions in beta. Wube probably isn't disappearing into the ether on launch day, so there really isn't anything to worry about.

Fair points on the potential for further improvement after launch, and maybe they do have other sources of quality items. Maybe there's a loot system where you have to sort through random bits of robots found on an alien world anyway, and hey you might as well be able to turn that into improved armor.

I'm personally mostly just disappointed by quality as it is presented; it takes something which is currently novel (recirculation loops) in the game and could turn it into beating a dead horse due to how it just makes 5x as many items to sort through with superficial colors and symbols rather than immersive recipes and mechanics.

There's so much more potential here. What makes things higher quality? Can two parts be defective in a way that makes them work together better than some other "good" part might work with a "bad" part? Can a part be defective for one thing and thus be a better fit for another?

Those questions are all made impossible to answer by slapping quality tiers on intermediate ingredients at random. Save the quality for the finished products, and make the process of crafting them more inspiring.

[KuuLightwing]

we are already 25 pages into a topic and only constructive criticsm that I saw here was when it came to blueprints and visibility of different quality buildings.

People have problem with new mechanic cause they are creating problems themselves.

If you chose to ignore constructive criticism, doesn't mean that it isn't there. You are being disingenuous.

[Necronium]

we are already 25 pages into a topic and only constructive criticsm that I saw here was when it came to blueprints and visibility of different quality buildings.

People have problem with new mechanic cause they are creating problems themselves.

If you chose to ignore constructive criticism, doesn't mean that it isn't there. You are being disingenuous.

We could really say the same to this criticism that people tell it is constructive but nothing really comes out of it. Really people are creating problems and call it criticism, you are disingenuous yourself.

[FuryoftheStars]

When people are crying that there is % to some recipe most people will go and automate it and then assemblers will go brrrr cause they dont care about it.

Except, again, there's only one recipe in the game that has this and the way people deal with it is by bypassing it with the later research. And there absolutely were complaints about it when it first came out, but the devs decided to leave it in anyway. Eventually people either leave or just deal with it, correct, but that doesn't make the complaints any less valid.

[MazorNoob]

We could really say the same to this criticism that people tell it is constructive but nothing really comes out of it. Really people are creating problems and call it criticism, you are disingenuous yourself.

It's a fair point that criticism kind of leads to wall of text, so it's harder to extract the gist of it. I guess I could boil my specific criticism to this: it's a big feature that changes a lot of components, but doesn't lead to entirely new types of complexity like circuits and to lesser extent beacons did. Let's not kid ourselves, people will stamp down a bunch of item distillery blueprints and that's it. It's conductive to grinding out a bigger and more efficient factory, but does not add a new dimension to the game the way circuits did.

[KuuLightwing]

We could really say the same to this criticism that people tell it is constructive but nothing really comes out of it. Really people are creating problems and call it criticism, you are disingenuous yourself.

Making a sweeping generalization and dismissing all the arguments based on that does not help your point. You could engage in good faith with the actual arguments people provided instead, but you aren't interested in that are you?

[SeaRyanC]

Long, long, long-time player here (2016 if not earlier). I'm extremely stoked for this feature, even as someone who really doesn't enjoy most probabilistic recipes found in many mods.

The current endgame in Factorio doesn't give you a lot of room for feeling more powerful in ways that are directly palpable. The radar you built 20 minutes in is the same as the radar you have 200 hours in. Mods inevitably try to address this with boring "Mk II", "Mk III", "Mk IV" variants, which you just mechanically unlock with whatever the next tier of unobtanium is, and mindlessly upgrade once your production spins up. More annoyingly, even top-tier Spidertrons today are not really up to the task of just completely flattening large enemy bases -- this should be an achievable level of power, with sufficient investment.

Current Factorio has a really interesting mid-game where you're meaningfully constrained on e.g. Stack Inserters, and need to actually make priority decisions around which parts of your base need the upgrade and which don't. This is good, and Quality means you'll have that kind of trade-off decisionmaking much later into the endgame.

The Quality mechanic makes mall design much more interesting, gives us trade-offs deeper into the endgame, provides another resource sink beyond just infinite science, and allows for intense concentration of production in endgame bases, all of which Factorio and even modded Factorio were lacking before.

[Atraps003]

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[Tertius]

About RNG:
RNG is hated, because with it, the grind manifests itself in common MMO/RPG games. You have to grind this often this bossfight to get his legendary loot drop. Legendary drops for 0.0000001% of all players, which results in one valuable drop per year playtime.

But this is Factorio. You automate this! You automate rolling the RNG, and so RNG becomes statistics. Not the one luck event. And the "drop rate" isn't a ridiculous 0.0000001%, it's a reasonably high value. A Q1 module has 1%, 4 Q1 modules have 4%, and 4 Q3 modules have probably 4*3=12%. The probability is probably even higher, if the input also is already some higher than normal quality. That's a reasonable ratio, since you never do producing this manually.

If you still cannot stand it, imagine the assembling machine that's outputting items of higher quality is only outputting the higher quality items. Not any trash. With a ratio of 10%, it's not outputting one desired item per second, it's outputting one desired item per 10 seconds. The rate is a bit unsteady due to the RNG, but if it runs for an hour, the average will definitely be 1 per 10 seconds. The longer it runs, the more it is evened out.
Now, actually it's outputting this and in addition a bunch of lower level trash, so we get something back we can recycle! The only thing you now have to do is to remove the trash from the belt and keep the desired item. That's a perfectly fine automation job. So I don't understand the complaints.

[KuuLightwing]

The current endgame in Factorio doesn't give you a lot of room for feeling more powerful in ways that are directly palpable. The radar you built 20 minutes in is the same as the radar you have 200 hours in. Mods inevitably try to address this with boring "Mk II", "Mk III", "Mk IV" variants, which you just mechanically unlock with whatever the next tier of unobtanium is, and mindlessly upgrade once your production spins up. More annoyingly, even top-tier Spidertrons today are not really up to the task of just completely flattening large enemy bases -- this should be an achievable level of power, with sufficient investment.

Isn't this the same thing though? You basically get Mk II, Mk III and all the way to Mk V machines that just have better numbers. Except it's more like Mk 3.1, Mk 3.2 and so on because it's layered on top of existing tiers instead of expanding them. Unlike (some) mods they don't have new graphics or models, they just have an icon indicating that it's a better machine, and that's all. I just don't see how this is any better, cause at least Mk IX assembler could potentially be made with some additional features, while this system is explicitly and only about having bigger numbers.

As for tiers of unobtanium, I suppose it's a matter of personal preference, and also depends on what is the process of getting the next tier of unobtanium. It could be absolutely boring and tedious, sure, but I'm not convinced that crafting the same recipe over and over until it pops out high quality one is inherently better than that.

[FuryoftheStars]

About RNG:
[...]

If you still cannot stand it, imagine the assembling machine that's outputting items of higher quality is only outputting the higher quality items. Not any trash. With a ratio of 10%, it's not outputting one desired item per second, it's outputting one desired item per 10 seconds.

Why couldn't the system have just been designed like this then, instead of dealing with the RNG and recycling waste?

In real manufacturing, a company attempting to produce a high end product is not going to design an assembly line that only produces said high end product 10% of the time, requiring recycling of the rest.

[KuuLightwing]

Why couldn't the system have just been designed like this then, instead of dealing with the RNG and recycling waste?

In real manufacturing, a company attempting to produce a high end product is not going to design an assembly line that only produces said high end product 10% of the time, requiring recycling of the rest.

Apparently it's kinda how it works in semiconductors, and honestly I'm not entirely against the concept, I just don't like it being applied to everything in the game. Would like to see it if it was some part of production chain in the endgame.

[FuryoftheStars]

Why couldn't the system have just been designed like this then, instead of dealing with the RNG and recycling waste?

In real manufacturing, a company attempting to produce a high end product is not going to design an assembly line that only produces said high end product 10% of the time, requiring recycling of the rest.

Apparently it's kinda how it works in semiconductors, and honestly I'm not entirely against the concept, I just don't like it being applied to everything in the game. Would like to see it if it was some part of production chain in the endgame.

So I've heard. I suppose if they wanted to do it like that for circuits, then, sure, but most everything else isn't like that.

[Tertius]

About RNG:
[...]

If you still cannot stand it, imagine the assembling machine that's outputting items of higher quality is only outputting the higher quality items. Not any trash. With a ratio of 10%, it's not outputting one desired item per second, it's outputting one desired item per 10 seconds.

Why couldn't the system have just been designed like this then, instead of dealing with the RNG and recycling waste?

In real manufacturing, a company attempting to produce a high end product is not going to design an assembly line that only produces said high end product 10% of the time, requiring recycling of the rest.

Well, there is GPU and CPU manufacturing, which is among the highest technology level mankind has achieved today. There is a certain yield for CPU manufacturing. If TSMC has a yield of 80%, this means they can trash 20% of their produced CPUs, because they''re broken. As far as I know, today's GPUs and CPUs are divided in modules internally, and if one of the module is broken, not the whole CPU is broken. You can still sell it as one tier lower. Look in GPU production: the perfect AD106 chip with no broken module is sold as RTX 4070 Ti. With some (broken) modules disabled, it's sold as RTX 4070.