Personally, I agree with the constructive criticism regarding the naming of the tiers seeming out of place for a game like Factorio. There's been a good few suggestions in here already for alternative names, so I won't give my own. However I do think the naming is a little silly too, so it would be neat if there was a (hidden?) checkbox in settings to revert the names to the RPG ones just for funsies
(Maybe the same setting also renames science packs to kool-aid?)
Mechanically, I'm a huge fan of this change. I like the input/output loops when dealing with uranium processing and Kovarex enrichment, and now I get to make more loops! With filter splitters!
I'm excited for additional "vertical growth," and to me the Quality mechanic seems like a really clever way to create additional tiers of machines without repeating what various overhaul mods do, such as Bob's and 5Dim's. (Nothing against those mods, I enjoy them!)
The addition of The Recycler is very welcome, perhaps I won't have such a need to dump garbage into an iron chest and unleash projectiles to delete it. Although, there's still all that pesky wood. I don't imagine I can "recycle" wood into some air and water...
Also, are those machines
loading onto the belts directly? Curious
This clearly isn't anything like "lootboxes" because of one obvious factor: the lack of scarcity. Any actual gambling system requires some form of scarcity to make rewards meaningful and valuable, I mean just think of how boring a casino would be if you always won the jackpot on the third pull of the lever on the slots machine.
I'll elaborate a little more by also talking about how I personally think a few users in this thread are
too upset about the RNG system: I get it, RNG sucks, and it's especially annoying when you're, say, farming for something for hours and failing to get it despite the fact that it's a 10% drop rate and you've tried 40 times. So sure, be upset about RNG, but I see this system as having a key advantage over the standard types of RNG a lot of gamers think about from genres like RPGs: you have control over the pace! What I mean by that is that even if you're particularly unlucky with your dice rolls in Factorio, you can counteract that by just scaling up. Copy-paste more assembly lines, and watch the busy bees (with their improved pathfinding from FFF374!) replace the spooky ghosts with solid metal. If it turns out your raw resources, intermediates or logistics can't keep up, you scale those up too. Those things happen to be what the gameplay of Factorio is all about! It's not like when you're trying to get a Nargacuga Tailspear in MHR where you have to repeat a boss fight every time your imaginary dice roll low, each attempt taking a set amount of time that (although you can rush) isn't very adjustable.
I'm also seeing a lot of back and forth about "it's optional", "no it's not optional", but I don't see this system as entirely black or white, either. You get to use the Quality system as much as you like, it's not necessary to go all the way toward Legendary for every single assembler, inserter, and drill. You can sprinkle some Uncommon power poles here, a couple Epic turrets there, and maybe you'll set something up for a single Legendary portable fusion reactor to stick into your favorite octopod companion's equipment grid.
I'm excited, there's still around fifty more FFFs to go, and although this one already made me question what month it was when I first started reading it, there's still the actual April Fool's to come