Koub wrote: ↑Wed Dec 09, 2020 2:22 pm
I'm considered an expert in my field, and I'm always amazed - and a bit annoyed - to see so many people who have no experience of my core business and who are convinced they know better than I do in my expertise field.
You're making the same erroneous assumption speedrunners make. That the only expertise that matters is purely about keyboarding.
It most absolutely is not! Yes, keyboarding is critical in the end, but the math of order flow and type of construction is most important.
However, keyboarders will always win out in the end, because everytime a new idea / order flow is introduced, they will copy it and execute very quickly, probably faster than the person who came up with the idea. But did they come up with the original idea around optimization? No, they just copied the idea, but executed it much faster.
Let me give a few examples: the miner feed into boilers, the double long inserters. Those were introduced a long time ago by some forgotten player (Phoenix came up with a lot I think or at least stole them cleverly, kudos to him).
But beyond the keyboarding, as far as I'm concerned,
relative to them, I am the expert at construction flow. That said, there are definitely factorio folks who have come and gone which are I bow down before, and are still around (call out to Dave). And there are very likely lurkers around here sniggering at my naive attempts to LARP JIT scheduling expertise.
But the speed runners, by and large, have no clue as to what they are doing. Trust me, I've asked them what they are doing and what their alg for optimization is. Do you think any of them have read up on JIT optimization techniques and algorithms? Please. They are just doing it all by trial and error. The GOTLAP folks are close, but they should focus on bots and not trains.
However, let me be very clear - I would never deign to tell a speed runner the best way to lay out their short cut keys or how to stroke their fingers across the keyboard. I truly suck at that, no kidding. They are also much better at creating factories that fall to keyboarding easily. That is one important creative skill here that I don't focus on, though sometimes think about.
But they have very little understanding of what they are doing when it comes to over all optimization, that is very obvious to anyone who looks at what they do. They have no concept of the construction flow search space, the maxima/minima problems, and how to characterize them. I know this. I've take the the time to ask them all this question in discord chat.
This all said - I hope it's obvious though that I and others stand on the shoulders of giants. I steal ideas just as aggressively as anyone else (though I call out my victims as much as I can). But that's a very good thing, and something we should all do. And let folks LARP a bit of pride in it, is not a terrible thing. It's give and take. It's how we will eventually create the perfect game, which I think is a pretty fun community achievement.
And it is a community achievement, which will come from a mix of skills - math, keyboarding, creative factory building. It will not be any particular individual that will be responsible for it all, as much as they think they are the "WR" holder.
I should say that I don't mean to tarnish the runners too negatively. There are some really great folks, like Nefrums, who frankly has likely brought in massive revenue for Factorio via his soft people skills. His videos and speed running PDF and streaming are extremely popular and you can tell everyone is rooting for him. He inspires engagement in the game. I often wonder if these types of folks have some kind of rev sharing deal. They should!