Friday Facts #375 - Quality

[Straugh]

It would be nice to see the quality concept start with resources.

It makes more sense if we have a purity concept at the raw material to help drive quality. This would position some resource patches to be more favorable than others. Blend this in with what a mod like B&A with resource refinement to help extract the better quality resources which can then be used to potentially make the better quality machine. The purity of a patch also encourages planet exploration, especially if there is some aspect of the terrain that explains the purity where it is harder to get to it. Maybe the patches produce their own pollution. Maybe they produce toxic side effects that damage the miners.

Machines aren't 100% reliable. That means that the factory should produce machines that fail. They should degrade in efficiency over time - especially if they require lubricant. We can have different lubricant efficiencies as well that are required to maintain the quality bar. The machines are also not consistent when refining resources. The better quality the machine is, the more consistent it is, and the longer it will take before it fails.

Better quality machines also support double and triple layer belt outputs. This drives us to want to find ways to make them. Of course this also means we need new belt types.

[Etag]

Regarding some points I've read here, I think many have misunderstood the concept.

You maybe right but i think FFF was also too short to realy explain such a complex feature.

I have two questions though, seeing the green circuit build there seem to be recipes specific for the qualities? As in Q2 wire + Q2 iron => Q2 circuit (or better).

Yes, that's exactly how it works, and the "(or better)" part only applies if the assembler has quality modules itself.

So basically if you succeed producing only "Legendary" copper plate and "Legendary" iron plate, it means every thing using these plates will be legendary ? But how do you produce these legendary plates ? Can we put quality modules into electric furnace ? It seems quality of tools are not related to quality of products which is for me an industrial non-sens but anyway. So you only can produce these plates by accident as your ore has no quality.

I think we will indeed build a very very big mall dedicated to produce legendary building/equipment, but it seems mass producing high quality intermediate products outside of this mall is not very usefull which is sad.

I was thinking about the quality gameplay as dedicating a part of the factory to R&D work in order to :
1 - Create few better quality tools (starting with furnace) for
2 - Mass produce better quality plates which will be used to
3 - Mass produce quality tools used for
4.1 - Improve existing R&D department to reach the next level of quality (only if you provide better quality materials to your R&D)
4.2 - Overhall Accelerate the speed of your factory by replace low quality buildings with better one.

But it is not possible as furnace quality is not related to plate quality

But i maybe the mod cummunity will be able to do this with the new API ^^

[Droneboat]

This definitely won't be an "Optional" feature because you won't get the best buildings and items, so you will have to use it, but then instead of just building your base to launch a rocket or going to space, you will focus on rushing best Quality modules to put in every building you can to get to legendary tier as soon as you can while dealing with 5 tiers of items and buildings everywhere.
And to understand how bad it will be, all you need to do is to imagine wanting to build a 2x2 nuclear power plant. It would be difficult to calculate how many buildings you need if they are different tiers, so you will have to get same tier buildings and that will take time and resources, especially to get legendary tier.

[Builder_K]

Do you even play the game? Kovarex enrichment process has zero rng. It's not like quality at all.

From https://wiki.factorio.com/Kovarex_enrichment_process:
"This is currently the only probability-based crafting recipe in the game."

[Loewchen]

From https://wiki.factorio.com/Kovarex_enrichment_process:
"This is currently the only probability-based crafting recipe in the game."

It is talking about Uranium processing while explaining the purpose of Kovarex enrichment.

[factomight]

• "Feels like Kovarex everywhere" <- definitely.

A Kovarex-like process for the majority of all ingame items is a horrible idea. What are you guys thinking?

Do you even play the game? Kovarex enrichment process has zero rng. It's not like quality at all.

The reference is not about the rng aspect of uranium enrichment but about repeating a looped production cycle until the desired outcome. It will be trivial to set up and automate with one solution viable for most ingame items and be nothing more than a monstrous grindfest and boring time sink.

[Tricorius]

So basically if you succeed producing only "Legendary" copper plate and "Legendary" iron plate, it means every thing using these plates will be legendary ? But how do you produce these legendary plates ? Can we put quality modules into electric furnace ? It seems quality of tools are not related to quality of products which is for me an industrial non-sens but anyway. So you only can produce these plates by accident as your ore has no quality.

Yes! Exactly. Most people are reacting viscerally and not thinking this through.

It is as simple or as complex as you want it to be. Which is actually pretty brilliant.

On one end you have “don’t unlock it and play as if it doesn’t exist”. On the other you have “loop all the garbage things to legendary quality”.

But I think most people will fall somewhere in the middle.

For instance, my priorities for my quality loops would probably be something like:
- quality modules
- inputs for quality modules
- production modules
- inputs for production modules
- personal equipment grids
- inputs for personal equipment grids
- high priority, small scale items (stuff for space platform? or optimizing for quality for my initial small scale mining operations for a new planet? who the eff knows what comes in the next 49 FFFs?)
- high quality rocket fuel
- etc..

You’ll build up these loops over time. You can increase probability at least three ways:
- higher quality quality modules
- higher quality inputs
- higher quality outputs

So, over time, I expect a dual bus system, regular base bus for high-speed, high quantity crafting and a “quality” bus which is the highest common denominator I can pump out at the moment. Your goal is to get that bus up to fully legendary inputs and outputs. It will go into your HUB which crafts all your important stuff (personal equipment, personal bots, personal military gear, Spidertrons, whatever)…

You’ll optimize the crap out of that.

For example, I would put all of my best stuff there. My best plates, intermediates … everything.

My best recycler would go there.

I’m assuming your base recycler gives back 25% so a legendary recycler would give back 37.5% (25/100*1.5 and could further be boosted by legendary productivity modules to give back even more). OR, you could put legendary quality modules in it and get fewer items back but have mixed quality items you can filter back into your quality bus.

And this is just one new structure. You can tweak many aspects of this subsystem.

Your inputs for your quality bus would be impacted as early as possible. You fill up a legendary electric furnace with legendary quality modules to maximize your output of legendary plates over time. Can you break down the other plates back into ore and loop it back in? Maybe. Maybe not. You can still send them forward the just won’t help as much in the forward processes. But it still helps your probability considerably (over just sending basic plates and intermediates down the line).

Seriously peeps. Think bigger. This opens up the game for all you min/maxers in ways you haven’t ever dreamed.

AND, again. This is the 3rd of like 50-something FFFs.

[IronCartographer]

Thinking about this some more I wonder if it would have been better received if it only affected a few items in the official game, with potential future additions via mods and the modding API.

Toward the end of this video they go through the bonuses per-entity and discount the benefit in so many cases- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNkWK1t2pDk

Having fewer items affected would have mitigated complaints about it being "the same refinement loop everywhere" since it would be in fewer places, while keeping it meaningful when available.

I also appreciate some of the suggestions about quality being achieved through different means per-recipe, with more flavor rather than the same refinement loop everywhere. Or if it had been a guaranteed upgrade in quality for each craft but with an insane slowdown (like 1000% longer craft times) for the lowest tier modules and a more modest slowdown with the best ones. Probably not relevant at this point though.

Still, please consider multiplayer interaction in light of the polarizing nature of this system. Making quality not just optional per-map but actually per-player (allowing each player to choose when to engage with it individually and also leave it behind as desired) in terms of UI would help a lot. It's not enough to say "if you don't like it, don't use it" when there are more considerations and ways to ease people into the availability of the feature.

If the quality module tech forces the quality UI onto everyone in a map once it's researched then that tech (and avoiding clicking it accidentally) will feel to some people like the anxiety of avoiding pipe contamination before pipe flushing was added. I actually built walls between pipes when I I couldn't rely on undergrounds for the safety. Quality doesn't bother me too much but I want it to be easily contained to specific places and times--even in maps where it's already researched and in use. Including the filter/request UIs of friends who want nothing to do with the system, when working on parts of the factory that don't use it.

[YotaXP]

Looks like very few people like this idea. The consensus on steam is no one likes this idea.

When anything new is introduced (in a game or anywhere in live) it is really the people who disagree with or dislike the new thing who speak out most. The people who see the FFF and go "Oh, okay that's interesting I guess" or "Wow that's sweet! I can't wait" aren't likely to come onto the forums and say so.

This.

I'm not entirely sold on this feature yet myself, but I trust these game devs. They've gone through the fire and produced a stellar product. I'm very much looking forward to future FFFs that develop this idea more.

[Kewlhotrod]

lol pft long time since iv gave input, very mixed opinions of everyone but everyone has lost the point of it? the concept to build tall doesn't exist yet in factorio and I don't know if this was the right way to go about it .. prehaps a rethink? -

[morsk]

Still, please consider multiplayer interaction in light of the polarizing nature of this system. Making quality not just optional per-map but actually per-player (allowing each player to choose when to engage with it individually and also leave it behind as desired) in terms of UI would help a lot. It's not enough to say "if you don't like it, don't use it" when there are more considerations and ways to ease people into the availability of the feature.

People aren't really going to freak out and view quality as "contamination". They are overreacting. It isn't going to happen. Even in the worst case, it would be better to destroy one community than have developers pay the opportunity cost of supporting people who are that difficult, but again, I don't think any of this will happen.

[Yoshifizzle]

Also why dont you just do it like a real facotries? Just make some switch in factories what kind of quality would you like to produce that change speed of production or maybe number of input materials. Do you think that real facotories produce product quality at random scale? Absolutely stupid!
Also some product in real production can be "upgraded" into better quality even after it was made (not all and not always of course) so why dont you do this?

Person who works in real factory here (solar panels). Quality/performance is absolutely variable part-to-part and we heavily lean on statistics to understand the distribution of performance for the parts we make each day. It is impossible to make every single part the exact same with the same performance/quality due to random variables outside of our control. Although that is the never-ending quest of all the manufacturing and R&D teams here to better understand what variables influences final performance/quality of our product and control those variables so they are no longer random. In reality, we see that our solar panels perform with a roughly Gaussian distribution in most metrics such as panel efficiency.

If the developers wanted to mirror real life more closely, they would make each quality tier of assembly move the mean of the Gaussian distribution to higher quality outputs; i.e. uncommon quality assembler makes mostly uncommon products with some normal/rare mixed in and less epic and even less legendary, whereas a rare assembler would make mostly rare products with some uncommon/epic and less normal/legendary.

I agree with all the comments about the names of the quality tiers needs to be changed.

[IronCartographer]

People aren't really going to freak out and view quality as "contamination". They are overreacting. It isn't going to happen. Even in the worst case, it would be better to destroy one community than have developers pay the opportunity cost of supporting people who are that difficult, but again, I don't think any of this will happen.

Why do you think the devs have emphasized so much the optional nature of the system? Why do you think it already hides the UI elements in the base 2.0 binary, and only reveals them once quality is researched in the expansion? It would make sense to get the most out of the care already taken, given how close it is.

[TaxiService]

5. In big numbers, the quality is basically statistics, but in small numbers the random aspect can be quite fun in a different way. Especially for personal armors and equipment, we always ended up having an assembling machine with the best quality modules in the center of the factory dedicated for people trying to gamble for the best possible equipment for their personal use. The excitement of getting directly a rare power armor from common ingredients when you are super lucky is the same as getting BAR-BAR-BAR in the slot machine, or the wanted item in the pay-to-win lootbox mechanics. But in Factorio you don't have to take another mortgage on your house to enjoy this aspect of the game!

reading this paragraph was genuinely disgusting.

[Splitframe]

Still, please consider multiplayer interaction in light of the polarizing nature of this system. Making quality not just optional per-map but actually per-player (allowing each player to choose when to engage with it individually and also leave it behind as desired) in terms of UI would help a lot.

This is literally not possible to achieve without having the quality disabled player missing crucial information and wondering why there are three stacks of iron that just won't stack, or why this splitter only ejects to one side. It can only work with being on/off per map. And no amount of mental gymnastics solutions will change that. Just disable it completely via a mod and/or have everyone agree beforehand to not do quality.

[Peevester]

I'm in favor of anything that gives the game some vertical expansion - I love the hell out of Kovarexing, and the refining and re-refining to get higher quality items seems like it will involve the same kind of interesting production setups. I can see, for example, this providing some utility to "build once" recipes like the power suits - you could set up a continuous recycling line to create better gear over time instead of just making one and never touching it again. And de-sushiing the recovered materials and integrating them back into production would be a fun puzzle.

On the other hand, production of higher-quality items has to be strictly limited to where there's quality modules. Not even a low percentage on regular manufacturing, or you're going to break stacking (we can already see that higher quality doesn't stack with lower). Suddenly your train cars will never be full, or your capacity-limited boxes will stop working and you'll have to fall back to circuits (though that's not a bad idea anyway). The technologies enabling the modules need to be at the end of a tree with nothing depending on them too, so you can simply ignore quality until or if you decide to mess with it.

My concern is that the higher-qualities can easily creep into the main part of the factory if they accidentially end up in storage or provider chests, and they're going to be total hell to find, and potentially block a lot of things not built to take them into account.

I have a feeling this is mostly a megabase-only feature, and will never be that useful in playing through a normal end-of-game objective. Similar to how you can launch a rocket without ever using a beacon, and if that's all you are aiming for, you probably SHOULD avoid beaconing because you hardly need it until you're making gigantic quantities of stuff.

[maniak1349]

Will this feature affect mods in some sort of automatic mode? Or will it be the modders job to implement quality for each and every item the have added?

[BrainlessTeddy]

Yeah but no the "it's optional" argument doesn't really work. I dislike many modern games because of season/battle passes, cosmetics, loot boxes etc. even tho I have barely bought anything in game. So yes they are optional but they can still ruin a game and the experience. Of course the developers decide what to do with their game and there will be lot's of people still enjoying vanilla or the other aspects of the expansion. But the "downside" of involving the community into the development process is that the community is to a certain extend part of the development team. So if the team faces serious backlash when introducing a feature even if it's entirely optional, well you invited the community into the development process so you need to deal with the fact that they will take the chance to change the game to their liking. And tying into your second argument, yes the devs have actually already changed features and sprites *cough* beacon redesign *cough* because of the backlash from the community so if there's enough people threatening to not buy the expansion or just showing their disapproval of a feature they basicly have two options work with the community or take the risk of sticking to their plans.

I do not understand the comparison to season/battle passes, cosmetics, loot boxes at all.. The one thing about these mechanics is that you usually have to pay real money for them - which is understandably annoying and not fun. Games are made specifically not to interfere with the "real" world and its problems.
I understand that this features "feels" like mainstream gaming to some. While it is true, I really don't think it is something bad per-se. Maybe people are just gatekeeping factorio as a non-mainstream type of game or something...
Considering the involvement of community into the development process: yes, you are totally correct. I just think it is better to provide an elaborated argument on WHY you don't like a feature or HOW It can be improved rather than just "I won't buy it" (which is still better feedback than none)

I see what you mean the comparason might lack a bit. But what I was trying to get across is that just disliking a single even optional feature can mean that the whole product is worse for you. And yes just saying I won't buy and not providing any critizisim sucks too. But in my defense I gave more critizism in my other comments. That one was just a response.

[morsk]

Why do you think the devs have emphasized so much the optional nature of the system? Why do you think it already hides the UI elements in the base 2.0 binary, and only reveals them once quality is researched in the expansion? It would make sense to get the most out of the care already taken, given how close it is.

Who knows; they once wrote "Removing logistic bots from the game" intending it as an emotional roller coaster, ending in not actually removing logistic bots from the game. I can't tell if they gave this FFF the April Fools tone accidentally, or to troll. To me it's just a method of getting upgraded buildings without spamming the recipe list like mods do.

[BrainlessTeddy]

Man, what a difference a community makes. XD

I've read through the responses on Steam, and here and in the forums, and it's crazy how night and day it is.

Here on the forums it's mostly "This is interesting", "Here's how I think this could be improved", "I'm not excited about this but I think it could be better".

Meanwhile over on Steam it's "This is awful, how dare you ruin the game", "I want a refund if you implement this", "why do the devs suck so much OMG?!"

XD

Personally my first thought, which I haven't seen anyone else mention, is that this system reminds me of how processors are made IRL. Which makes me wonder if the system maybe shouldn't be reversed: Instead of just creating a base item and sometimes getting higher quality ones, what if you selected a "target quality" and then had a chance, depending on modules, for the crafting to fail or produce lower quality items?

That would almost exactly mirror how processor production works IRL and I think feel slightly less RNG for the player.

Ok that sounds a lot better already tbh. Then the recycler would make more sense in my opinion. Recycling everything because you are waiting for that one higher quality item seems tedious but just recycling the one failed item feels a lot less tedious and actually reasonable. And you can implement this feature from the very beginning with every item having a failure rate but it's very low on basic items. Later you can recycle all the collected broken items and then you make a recycling mall for the more complex items that fail more often. And maybe for some items you barely need all that much like spidertrons or personal gear you can have the highest tier with a huge failure rate.

Yeah, just some ideas on how you could improve the system explained in this FFF. But it definitely needs more work