Factorio Forums

I came from that post: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 137#p25137

And repeat:

What I stumbled upon was the word efficiency. It was mixed up with productivity. That happens often...

And there is another word, which is not so good: effectivity.

Now one point when I added it to the wiki (https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... tle=Module): it is in my opinion "efficiency" not "effectivity".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness
http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threa ... evant-word

And this (lol): http://de.urbandictionary.com/define.ph ... ffectivity


And as said some month before: in German productivity means something very different and efficiency is better described as effectivity, because there are different types of efficiency.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Produktivit%C3%A4t
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effektivit%C3%A4t
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effizienz

For English speakers this might sound not very important, but indeed it is a problem., cause I'm nearly sure, this is also for other languages the case.

My suggestion is to change the glossary here. But I've no idea how.

Hah, yeah, this gets tricky real fast.

Whenever I used "efficiency", I was talking about "the extent to which time, effort or cost is well used for the intended task or purpose, quantitatively determined by the ratio of output to input".

"Productivity" is better in the context of this game, given that the module itself is called a productivity module, and given that we have got an efficiency module that deals with energy efficiency. The tricky part being, of course, that all the modules are "efficiency" modules - time efficiency, raw material efficiency and energy efficiency, respectively. Now, time efficiency is easy - it's quite hard to misunderstand "speed module". The other two are more tricky.

As for "effectivity", you're on the right track, definitely. Some of the devs are czechs (so am I), and that's a "czechism" - in czech, the proper word is "efektivita" (probably related to the similar german word, Effektivität), which leads to the simplistic translation to "effectivity". Now, I don't think it's entirely wrong (going by the usual parallels, it literally means "the ability to exert an effect"), but it definitely isn't the best name.

I moved the above post from the former thread to this!

Effectivity is just no proper English. I think we need some English speakers here, which understands the problem...

I think renaming efficiency modules into power saving modules would help a lot.

Then we can name the other one either productity or effieciency or whatever you like module without confusion what it actually does.

Effectivity is about getting an effect, regardless of the cost. Shooting a group of mosquitoes with a nuke is very effective (the mosquitoes are guaranteed to be dead), but it is not very efficient (nukes are very expensive, and you blow up the entire city too)

Efficiency is doing the same with less. But here you always have to take into account what you are optimising.
Swatting said mosquitoes with a rolled up news paper is more resource efficient, but may not be more time-efficient, since you might miss a dozen times before finally hitting them. Some might also escape, meaning the method is less effective.

Now lets look at those modules:

• The speed module is more time-efficient, but less power (and thus pollution) efficient. However, the name is fine, since noone would mistake what it does.
• The productivity module increases the raw-material efficiency, but decreases the time, power and pollution efficiency. Technically well named (Wikipedia), but some people might mistake productivity with the amount produced per second.
• The Effectivity module is actually a pure electrical-efficiency module, it decreases power consumption without any additional costs. It is, however, NOT increasing the effectivity of the factory, since the output of the factory does not change at all in any way! So this module is badly named.

Renaming them to "speed efficiency", "resource efficiency" and "power efficiency" might be clearer.

DrNoid wrote: Renaming them to "speed efficiency", "resource efficiency" and "power efficiency" might be clearer.

These are good names and very easy and clear to understand!

DrNoid wrote:some people might mistake productivity with the amount produced per second.

I did! That was me. Only for a second mind, until I noticed the rather significant speed penalty on those modules, but it's the first impression that's important if you want to keep things intuitive and memorable.

I had thought that simply "efficiency" might be an adequate rename for effectivity, but hadn't considered that automatically associating that word with electrical efficiency is a personal bias due to my schooling (electronic engineering). To cover all bases, expanding the names per your suggestion is probably the safest route.

DrNoid wrote: Renaming them to "speed efficiency", "resource efficiency" and "power efficiency" might be clearer.

my humble propositions:

1.) "energy (saving) module"
This one should be self-explaining
(german: Energiesparmodul)

2.) "speed (increasing) module"
same here
(german: (Produktions)beschleunigungsmodul)

3.) "yield (increasing) module"
The module increases energy demand and production time, so nether "efficiency" nor "productivity" are valid therms
(german: Ertragsmodul?)