Friday Facts #375 - Quality

[Acciaccatura]

This looks like a really interesting addition to me. I think a lot of the complaints are happening because of it not being communicated all that well, the false comparison to MMO loot, and just some poor reading comprehension. I don't think a wall of text will solve the latter problem, but I'll have a crack at the others

By using the standard gaming loot rarity naming scheme they've made it sound like an RNG system where we grind for the best quality of each item. If you read through the details and consider how this will play you'll understand that this is nothing like that. Sure, with max qual modules you'll only have a 25% chance of a quality increase. This just means you'll have to make the assembler craft the recipe 4 times more, and the lower quality items can be moved to a production line where quality doesn't matter as much.

E.g. in my mall I am trying to make legendary solar panels. I could automate it so the lowest quality panels are taken away and used to make satellites, the medium panels are recycled to recover quality base ingredients, and the legendary panels are stored in a provider chest. I might handle different items in a different way depending on their uses and ingredients, and how many intermediate steps are involved in their crafting.

I'm not going to have a mess of different qualities that don't stack on my belts because I know how to use a splitter to sort them.

I'm not going to have different quality levels messing with my science production since I won't use quality modules outside of my mall. For science speed+productivity is still more effective by far.

I'm not going to have different qualities of assemblers all over my factory making my ratios complicated because I know to use the upgrade planner to keep them uniform.

I'm not going to have the majority of my resources devoted to rerolling the RNG because as they wrote in the FFF it's better to hold off on legendary items until later due to their expense compared to their benefits.

I'm not going to have to build hundreds of identical recycler arrays because each recipe in my mall will have different needs, with different levels being sent outside of the mall, recycled, or stored depending on the recipe.

I'm not going to have to grind for rare RNG rolls because this can all be automated.

I'm not going to be forced to interact with this system if I don't want to because the devs wrote in FFF that it's completely optional and that they've done full playthroughs of the expansion without using it at all.

We know the devs are very good at their jobs, it's why we have such a good game already. Give them a chance and actually think through how this will work instead of jumping to knee jerk conclusions

[morsk]

They should lock "quality on intermediaries" behind a tech, if it's such a trap. The FFF warns us not to do it, and a dev on Discord mentioned a tester who tried it and quit the expansion 3 days later. This is worse than bots before Advanced Oil.

Not everyone has their own tester to spend 3 days finding out something sucks, before trying it. They see something cool and trust that it's a challenge.

I was excited to try skimming Uncommons from my factory to save for power armor, but ... you would divert some Uncommon ore, then take another chance on Basic ore that smelting could make an Uncommon plate. Then take another chance on gears and steel, that smelting could make those Uncommon. You also get Rares randomly in your Uncommons, and have to separate them. So you can't divert high-quality things to a separate belt, unless you're making a mess of diverting 2x every time. Unlock Epic, and it gets worse. You will loop them all back to some starter area for sorting.

This is not sane, even for people who like complexity. Quality on intermediaries should be unlocked with the recycler.

I don't agree with completely locking it anymore, as some people are going to want to do it as a challenge, but I hope it's made clear to anyone on the fence about it that it's a big challenge.

[KuuLightwing]

By using the standard gaming loot rarity naming scheme they've made it sound like an RNG system where we grind for the best quality of each item. If you read through the details and consider how this will play you'll understand that this is nothing like that. Sure, with max qual modules you'll only have a 25% chance of a quality increase. This just means you'll have to make the assembler craft the recipe 4 times more, and the lower quality items can be moved to a production line where quality doesn't matter as much.

E.g. in my mall I am trying to make legendary solar panels. I could automate it so the lowest quality panels are taken away and used to make satellites, the medium panels are recycled to recover quality base ingredients, and the legendary panels are stored in a provider chest. I might handle different items in a different way depending on their uses and ingredients, and how many intermediate steps are involved in their crafting.

That only works for something that you are going to consume in sufficient quantity. If you are making Q5 solar panels (which is probably a bad idea to begin with), then you need to make sure that you produce and consume enough satellites to dispose of the rest. Otherwise you would have to recycle them. It's probably just not the best example that you've chosen, but at the same time, of all the things that you would actually want to have at high quality, not many of them will have any use in the rest of the factory. Assemblers aren't a part of any production chain, Inserters - only base yellow ones are, furnaces are used for production science, and only first tier of modules is used again for production science.

Not going to nitpick the rest of the points, but this I will address again.

I'm not going to be forced to interact with this system if I don't want to because the devs wrote in FFF that it's completely optional and that they've done full playthroughs of the expansion without using it at all.

We know the devs are very good at their jobs, it's why we have such a good game already. Give them a chance and actually think through how this will work instead of jumping to knee jerk conclusions

It is "completely optional" if you aim to finish the game. As they said themselves, that if you want to build big factories you will have "very good reasons to use it". Something technically being optional is not a defense of criticism of the system. If I criticize a mechanic related to belts, it's not a reasonable argument to point at a youtube video where a person completed the game without belts by abusing cargo wagons and say "belts are optional, just don't use them if you don't like them."

As for "we know devs are good so everything they will do is good" - that seems more like a belief than an argument to me, especially when used against points that discuss the merits of the system itself as it is presented. One of the devs made Space Exploration expansion by the way, and while it's certainly popular, I know for sure that it's not everyone's cup of tea, should I then judge the expansion on that basis? No, of course not. So, please, keep discussion to the system as presented.

[neltera]

the logistics of the stacking of different qualities will be too much of a nightmare to bother with it for the majority of the game for me.

if i need more stuff i often just make a production outpost of it and let the logistics be solved with smart trains. i'd have to build more stations at each outpost for different qualities and set up a recycling infrastructure on top of it, so nah ;D

i'd have preferred if quality increase was not random, would be less of a headache. thankfully this will be totally optional.

[KuuLightwing]

They should lock "quality on intermediaries" behind a tech, if it's such a trap. The FFF warns us not to do it, and a dev on Discord mentioned a tester who tried it and quit the expansion 3 days later. This is worse than bots before Advanced Oil.

Not everyone has their own tester to spend 3 days finding out something sucks, before trying it. They see something cool and trust that it's a challenge.

I was excited to try skimming Uncommons from my factory to save for power armor, but ... you would divert some Uncommon ore, then take another chance on Basic ore that smelting could make an Uncommon plate. Then take another chance on gears and steel, that smelting could make those Uncommon. You also get Rares randomly in your Uncommons, and have to separate them. So you can't divert high-quality things to a separate belt, unless you're making a mess of diverting 2x every time. Unlock Epic, and it gets worse. You will loop them all back to some starter area for sorting.

This is not sane, even for people who like complexity. Quality on intermediaries should be unlocked with the recycler.

Yea, it seems like a logistical nightmare if you try to gamble on intermediates. Even crafting something basic like even electronic circuits. If you are implementing quality from the get go starting with ores (probably a bad idea cause trains, but still)

You get randomly ores ranging between Q1-Q3. It's probably fine to process in the same production line because ore->plates is a single ingredient. As a result you get plates ranging from Q1 all the way to Q5. Same goes for copper wires. After that you should have five different assembler lines for circuits each with its own quality tier.

And now fun part - copper wires went through more quality upgrade steps, so statistically you will get higher proportion of high quality copper wires than plates, so now it's guaranteed that you'll have either surplus of iron plates of lower quality or excess of wires of high quality.

So not only you need to split your production lines for recipes with multiple ingredients, you also kinda have to pay attention to how many quality steps each production chain goes through. So you either need to equalize the number of steps with quality upgrades, or you have to throw in recyclers anyway to get rid of excess low quality items.

So if you are trying to put quality at every step - all the recipes that have some multi-stage ingredient + a more basic material on top, such as construction bot (flying frame + green circuit) is going to pretty much require to set up a recycle grinder for green circuits, cause in the end percentage of high quality robot frames would be much higher than green circuits.

[cbass]

This is a fascinating FFF, as well as the response from the community.

Factorio is a work of art that many many people have fallen in love with. Like any work of art, they love the nuances of what exists now, and how it is now. I think what is hard is that this is a significant change to the end-game of Factorio, and it's a mechanic that has been poorly implemented time and time again. There are a few things that shouldn't be forgotten when we consider the implementation of "quality" tiers into Factorio:

1. From what I understand, much of this will not be in parallel with what is Vanilla Factorio right now, this all comes after we have traversed much of the vanilla tech tree. Q2 and Q3 (Uncommon and rare) are unlocked with the first level of quality mods. The full quality functionality will come at the late-game to end-game, extending the game quite a bit and layering some very interesting dynamics onto the end-game. Yes, it is quite different from what the first part of the game is, but there will need to be strategies developed for this, just like the first part of the game. This feels like a refreshing new experience rather than a rehash of the first half of the game with more complex recipes.

2. Nothing in this game has been half-baked. This is an absolute testament to a near-perfect game. Call me a fanboy, but I have not seen a dev team pay so much attention to making such a balanced, well thought through game. Some folks have cited that "devs are good so everything will be good" - while this can be true, it isn't always. Having said that, this dev team has earned this trust, without a doubt. I think we all need to acknowledge the devs have not and will not do anything "willy nilly". Although many people are throwing flames with a gut-reaction based on existing implementations of "quality" systems in different games, everything else about Factorio has been elegantly implemented, tested and retested, balanced and corrected when necessary.

Let's not project our experiences with other games poorly implemented quality systems onto this expansion. Let's wait and see, and hope to be pleasantly surprised with a clever, well-implemented "quality" system, and trust that if it needs tuning, it will be tuned appropriately. I just hope the devs take much of this feedback with a grain of salt, as for all of us on the outside, we are just seeing a small piece of the new work of art, and are not privy to the whole thing yet.

[Chrisdasdasd]

RNG quality? What a joke. Kinda not funny though.
Hope modders will fix this abomination, I can already feel UPS tanking due to this....

[KuuLightwing]

2. Nothing in this game has been half-baked. This is an absolute testament to a near-perfect game. Call me a fanboy, but I have not seen a dev team pay so much attention to making such a balanced, well thought through game. Some folks have cited that "devs are good so everything will be good" - while this can be true, it isn't always. Having said that, this dev team has earned this trust, without a doubt. I think we all need to acknowledge the devs have not and will not do anything "willy nilly". Although many people are throwing flames with a gut-reaction based on existing implementations of "quality" systems in different games, everything else about Factorio has been elegantly implemented, tested and retested, balanced and corrected when necessary.

That depends. Factorio is a very good game, but it's not without its flaws, and saying that everything in the game is perfectly balanced would be an overstatement. In any case, I prefer to evaluate the system based on the information we had and how it was presented. I have my concerns about what's been shown, so an answer that's essentially "they surely know what they are doing" is not going to be satisfying, because it doesn't address the concerns I have, because the concerns do not come from me not trusting the devs, they come specifically from the information presented about the system.

Let's not project our experiences with other games poorly implemented quality systems onto this expansion. Let's wait and see, and hope to be pleasantly surprised with a clever, well-implemented "quality" system, and trust that if it needs tuning, it will be tuned appropriately. I just hope the devs take much of this feedback with a grain of salt, as for all of us on the outside, we are just seeing a small piece of the new work of art, and are not privy to the whole thing yet.

I'm sure there's someone who projects their bad experience in other games, but most of the people who raise concerns about it talk about this system, as it's presented in FFF, not about some other game. I barely seen any mentions of other games or other quality systems in the thread to begin with, so I don't know why do you think that it comes from projecting experiences with other systems.

[tuhe]

RNG quality? What a joke. Kinda not funny though.
Hope modders will fix this abomination, I can already feel UPS tanking due to this....

Don't get your hopes up, most of the most popular mods introduce RNG in some of the recipes..

Re. UPS:
yes, your ups will potentially suffer if you mix quality items on your bus in your megabase. But by all indications (and as noted 30 times by now...) nobody would do that, and instead build quality items in a mall and use it to upgrade the base, thereby being able to SAVE ups for the same amount of science.

(the whole science per ups argument is imo silly because any attempt at making the game more complex, and therefore in my opinion interesting, will tend to hurt the UPS simply due to having to build more stuff for the same amount of science. But I digress...)

[aka13]

Well what I certainly like is that there is life and discussion again on the forums

[gravityStar]

Every single time you want to have a quality version of an item, you *must* build a disassembler loop.

I would like to point out a disassembler loop is a brute-force method of getting quality items. Alternatives exist; you can have the main science factory create quality components as a by-product and shunt them off to a specific part of the base ready to buffer and process these components; or reversed you can have a quality processing section guide non-quality items to the science part of the base with undesirable quality levels being processed into science.

The visual clutter from indicating the level of everything is just brutal.

This is very true. I'm hoping for more visualization options for quality.

Overall, I'm looking forward to using the quality feature. There are a few interesting factory designs I can think of based on this feature.

[astroshak]

Forgive me if this was already asked, 38+ pages is a lot to read through. It the FFF states :

“This is also why we created an overall machine limit on productivity to be +300%”

Does this mean that Mining Productivity research after level 30 is useless? Since it gives miners and pumpjacks (two machines) 10% Productivity per level of research?

[orzelek]

Well what I certainly like is that there is life and discussion again on the forums

It's almost like this FF was meant to provoke this?

I agree that quality needs different naming since usual RPG terms look strange. But mechanics overall doesn't seem problematic to me.
And if I understood correctly it will be potentially useful to make your space platform better.

Forgive me if this was already asked, 38+ pages is a lot to read through. It the FFF states :

“This is also why we created an overall machine limit on productivity to be +300%”

Does this mean that Mining Productivity research after level 30 is useless? Since it gives miners and pumpjacks (two machines) 10% Productivity per level of research?

Dev's didn't answer this but I'd hope that miners are exempt from the limit.

[valneq]

Now that I had some time to think about this a bit more I have to say: I really like the proposed mechanics. It will definitely make the end game and the post game much more interesting to toy around with. Up to now I was never really interested in mega bases because the only way to grow in the end game was "horizontal", which to me is mostly boring.

Before the end game, the randomness component of quality might play a role and add some excitement. However, once you start scaling things up the Law of Large Numbers will ensure that the fluctuations around the mean will be essentially negligible. Thus everything is predictable enough to plan interesting designs. This will spice up the end game to a degree I thought was not possible within a vanilla experience.

Still, the names don't sit right with me, and I think I now understand WHY they feel so out of place. The proposed terms are descriptions of RARITY and not of QUALITY. In an RPG like Diablo, WoW, or your fav looter shooter those terms are fine because the only way to get those items is by roll of the dice with probabilities that you cannot influence (much). The only way to get rarer items is to roll more dice. One after the other. Thus a classification by RARITY makes sense.

In contrast, the topic of this FFF was QUALITY of items, not RARITY. The terms "uncommon" and "rare" do NOT describe the quality of an item. The terms "epic" and "legendary" might be descriptors of quality, but I'd argue they are too uncommon (sic!) to be used for quality. Additionally, in Factorio we can manipulate the involved randomness considerably, as well as scale horizontally. Hence, you can produce as many high quality items as you want. Furthermore, having a chest full of "rare" items is an oxymoron. Therefore it is pointless to make statements about the rarity of items in Factorio. But from the rest of the description of the FFF, we don't want to describe the rarity of items. We want to make statements about quality. Which is why we need descriptors of quality.

[KuuLightwing]

Now that I had some time to think about this a bit more I have to say: I really like the proposed mechanics. It will definitely make the end game and the post game much more interesting to toy around with. Up to now I was never really interested in mega bases because the only way to grow in the end game was "horizontal", which to me is mostly boring.

That's not true though. The game already has a system for vertical progression, and that's beacons and modules. When I'm replacing a production line of 70 machines with 6 that also consume fewer resources for the same output it absolutely is vertical growth and not horizontal. Sure it has it's limit, but so does quality.

[morsk]

I would like to point out a disassembler loop is a brute-force method of getting quality items. Alternatives exist; you can have the main science factory create quality components as a by-product and shunt them off to a specific part of the base ready to buffer and process these components; or reversed you can have a quality processing section guide non-quality items to the science part of the base with undesirable quality levels being processed into science.

I was excited to do this, but I don't think it's going to work. It is easy to shunt Uncommons and Rares elsewhere, harder to pull them back into an assembly line that knows what to do with them. There are too many combinations. It also blocks you from using Productivity. Some people say 2 Prod + 2 Quality has good properties, and I'm guessing it's similar to Crit% and Crit Damage in other games, that more of one makes the other better. But it can't be speed beaconed, and Prod is terrible without speed bonus. I wouldn't use it.

The only way I'll ship quality intermediaries is if I can get them from some other process, not the random-quality modules. If there's a more complex smelting process that creates 100% Uncommon plate, no Basics, no Rare+, that would be clean enough to integrate with other builds. I would use that.

[FuryoftheStars]

The only way I'll ship quality intermediaries is if I can get them from some other process, not the random-quality modules. If there's a more complex smelting process that creates 100% Uncommon plate, no Basics, no Rare+, that would be clean enough to integrate with other builds. I would use that.

Yeah, I've been thinking about this myself. If I get the expansion, I'll probably mod this, but I kind of feel that quality could've been handled by increasing the complexity of ore processing into plates.

Normal mining to smelter just gives you the Q1 plates.

Add in, say, an ore washing process (can just be an assembler that takes ore and water in) and this gives you Q2 ore that when smelted gives you Q2 plates.

Now add in another assembler to take washed ore and do some other, further refinement process, and this will pass through the smelters as Q3 plates.

Do it again with some other ingredient inputs to make alloys, Q4.

Etc.

Or something like that.

Would've been a good use for new resources on new planets, even....

[valneq]

The only way I'll ship quality intermediaries is if I can get them from some other process, not the random-quality modules. If there's a more complex smelting process that creates 100% Uncommon plate, no Basics, no Rare+, that would be clean enough to integrate with other builds. I would use that.

Yeah, I've been thinking about this myself. If I get the expansion, I'll probably mod this, but I kind of feel that quality could've been handled by increasing the complexity of ore processing into plates.

Normal mining to smelter just gives you the Q1 plates.

Add in, say, an ore washing process (can just be an assembler that takes ore and water in) and this gives you Q2 ore that when smelted gives you Q2 plates.

Now add in another assembler to take washed ore and do some other, further refinement process, and this will pass through the smelters as Q3 plates.

Do it again with some other ingredient inputs to make alloys, Q4.

Etc.

Or something like that.

Would've been a good use for new resources on new planets, even....

You are largely describing what mods like Angel's or Pyanodon's already do … except that in those mods the output is always the same thing, just with higher yield.

[Vector6]

Except uranium takes your entire argument behind the woodshed: the existence of kovarex proves how important determinism is to the game. The entire U-235 chain would be significantly less useful if all we got was a trashcan to clear up the system. Quality is both significantly more complex and wider ranging, but completely lacks any mechanism to put a lid on the slot machine.

Actually, Uranium and Koverex is an excellent parallel. It’s mathematically proven that over time, the standard refinement even on a small patch of uranium, is sufficient WITHOUT koverex enrichment to power all but the most crazy huge bases. And those bases usually move AWAY from nuclear back to solar (though that is due to game engine issues).

There is a very, very large proportion of bases in that midline between being able to refine uranium and being able to ignore random chance altogether. Given that they went and applied this slot machine chicanery to every single item in the game, only a vanishingly small number of factories will be large enough to ignore the randomness, so it's even less of a viable argument.

They have already said there are NEW MECHANISMS yet to be revealed that will help with quality.

Given the positive comparison to gambling in the FFF and Kovarex's comments on Reddit, anything that ameliorates the issues quality has is almost certainly going to be a response to its negative reception and not actually something prepared beforehand.

2. Nothing in this game has been half-baked. This is an absolute testament to a near-perfect game. Call me a fanboy, but I have not seen a dev team pay so much attention to making such a balanced, well thought through game. Some folks have cited that "devs are good so everything will be good" - while this can be true, it isn't always. Having said that, this dev team has earned this trust, without a doubt. I think we all need to acknowledge the devs have not and will not do anything "willy nilly". Although many people are throwing flames with a gut-reaction based on existing implementations of "quality" systems in different games, everything else about Factorio has been elegantly implemented, tested and retested, balanced and corrected when necessary.

The base game was developed very publicly for quite some time. The expansion will be launching straight to 1.0 after being developed in secret without anywhere near the level of feedback - everything should be treated with skepticism, especially for features with the sunk cost this one has.

[Anarkhos]

This is a bad idea having it just be based on randomization. I'd much rather it be based on verifiable guaranteed quality enhancements and not a chance to obtain a better item. If it took the lower tier item like a normal item + the crafting resources needed to craft that item times a multiplier = an uncommon item then that would be easily scalable and able to be rapidly expanded which feels alot more Factorio having a system that would actually fit an a factory. And with that 'refinement' system could even use higher tier items easily, such as an upgrading spidertron or train using less iron plates and more steel in general or green circuits being replaced with red circuits. Stuff like that could easily fit.

TLDR; Randomization bad in game about precise ratios in large factories. Guaranteed crafting using tiered crafting system that follows precise and potentially complex ratios good.