Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

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Koub
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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by Koub »

[Koub] Merged the new difficulty curve topic into the slightly older one
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Lav
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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by Lav »

Personally, I found that the tedium of oil processing and blue science eases up considerably when you have a clear plan of factory expansion, a collection of premade blueprints, and possibly a mod that improves early game construction speed (bots from the start, nanobots etc). Lots of experience behind your factorio toolbelt and general knowledge of where to find various tools like resource flow planners (and why they're useful) also helps immensely.

The problem is, a new player does not have any of that.

That's something I feel many experienced players simply don't understand.

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by Hellatze »

Lav wrote:Personally, I found that the tedium of oil processing and blue science eases up considerably when you have a clear plan of factory expansion, a collection of premade blueprints, and possibly a mod that improves early game construction speed (bots from the start, nanobots etc). Lots of experience behind your factorio toolbelt and general knowledge of where to find various tools like resource flow planners (and why they're useful) also helps immensely.

The problem is, a new player does not have any of that.

That's something that I feel many experienced players simply don't understand.
Or new player play with mod ?

Since mod are 80 % feature of this mage and 400 % more harder than vanilla

(Not mod that makes this game easy. I am talking about (bob,angel,pyn coal mod)
Last edited by Hellatze on Mon Oct 23, 2017 6:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by Zavian »

Lots of mods just make small Quality if life tweaks. So whilst some mods make the game harder, many don't.

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by Hellatze »

Zavian wrote:Lots of mods just make small Quality if life tweaks. So whilst some mods make the game harder, many don't.
Read my edit

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by Lav »

Hellatze wrote:Or new player play with mod ?

Since mod are 80 % feature of this mage and 400 % more harder than vanilla

(Nit mod that makes this game easy. I am talking about (bob,angel,pyn coal mod)
I'm not taking mods into account when talking about new players - they rarely use mods, and those that do I assume already know what they're doing. :-)

Besides, I'm talking about a very specific problem in the vanilla gameplay. Mods are not relevant to this and if they have similar issues, well, it's their authors' and players' problem. :twisted:

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by reallyLost »

I think the explanation is really simple actually. The game loses the most players at about the point where the average spaghetti factory hits its production limit. Then people realize that to make any more progress they will need to redesign everything for a much larger scale. Prior to that point scale doesn't matter much. That is a significant switch in gameplay focus. Anytime a game has a sharp change in gameplay at such a late stage you're bound to lose interest from some percentage of your players.

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by Jap2.0 »

reallyLost wrote:I think the explanation is really simple actually. The game loses the most players at about the point where the average spaghetti factory hits its production limit. Then people realize that to make any more progress they will need to redesign everything for a much larger scale. Prior to that point scale doesn't matter much. That is a significant switch in gameplay focus. Anytime a game has a sharp change in gameplay at such a late stage you're bound to lose interest from some percentage of your players.
You can builda big factory on spaghetti. That was back in the days of 0.14, but still, I launched quite a few rockets in that.
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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by reallyLost »

Jap2.0 wrote:You can builda big factory on spaghetti. That was back in the days of 0.14, but still, I launched quite a few rockets in that.
Of course you can, which is why I said the average spaghetti factory. Which of course also means the average of all players, not just the vets who post here regularly.

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by ross »

quineotio wrote:I don't like oil. Up until that point the complexity of the factory increases somewhat linearly, but at oil I have to build a LOT of stuff to get anything of value, and then because it's a large operation with lots of buildings it can be tricky to nicely integrate the products into the rest of the factory. Also, you kinda have to build your oil production near an oil field, or set up barrels, or a train. The fact that you need to pump water to it complicates things further. It just takes so long and so much effort to get anything useful out of it.
Just put all oil products on your bus like everything else

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by Escadin »

This is such a non-issue. Why does it keep getting bumped?

I'd wager the vast majority of games only takes like 1/3 of it's buyers through a decent attempt and even less through a worthy playthrough. Just check a number of games on my steam achievement list and they all shared the same or even worse results. Typically, the more difficult or demanding a game the less people will bother.
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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by quineotio »

ross wrote:
quineotio wrote:I don't like oil. Up until that point the complexity of the factory increases somewhat linearly, but at oil I have to build a LOT of stuff to get anything of value, and then because it's a large operation with lots of buildings it can be tricky to nicely integrate the products into the rest of the factory. Also, you kinda have to build your oil production near an oil field, or set up barrels, or a train. The fact that you need to pump water to it complicates things further. It just takes so long and so much effort to get anything useful out of it.
Just put all oil products on your bus like everything else
Making a bus is a fairly advanced concept. And it's a huge undertaking. Early game bots would help, but if you don't know you'll need hundreds of thousands of green circuits, and lots of red circuits, and then combine them with acid to make blue circuits, then use the blue circuits en masse to make several things, you aren't going to be able to plan around a bus style factory. And even if everyone already understood the game perfectly from the beginning, it doesn't change the fact that getting oil integrated into your factory is a massive timesink with a long time until you get anything out of it. To me, it always feels like I hit a wall at that point, where I've done all the available research and I'm just building.

I don't mind that the first factory you build will likely become inadequate. It's cool when you figure out how to scale things into the late game. It's also cool how you get to see the results of the things you make - where they work well and where they break. It's fun optimizing the factory for best resource flow, and adding new production. But then you hit blue science and it feels like everything gets out of control - you need steel and plastic. And you don't have bots yet... If there was more info about production - maybe a production calculator, it might make it easier on players to figure out what they're doing.

How does a green circuit get made? You can picture it in your head, and see the production process clearly on the screen, with the miners, smelters, lines of resources, automation machines, output of circuits. And each step of the way you get a more advanced product. How does a plastic bar get made? How much oil is each pump-jack pumping? How fast is the flow through the pipes? How much of the flow are the refineries using? You can't really see, like you can with belts and inserters pulling stuff of a belt. How much are the refineries outputting? You can't really see. How much surplus liquid is there? Can't easily see. The current production tab isn't that useful, especially as liquids aren't produced and used evenly, but in bursts, and also that the oil production will be permanently backup up until you have outputs for all the liquids, so you don't even get to see the oil area running properly until the entire thing is set up. At the moment there's such a long gap between starting to build the oil area, and having an understanding of how it's going to perform, and it's not straightforward to control once you've got it going.

Slightly related, an idea for a new building would be a fluid exchange, a 3x3 building with 3 pipe inputs on each side. You can connect up to 3 types of oil and then output the oil on another side of the machine. Would help organize those tangled areas where you've just got too many pipes and undergrounds and it's a mess.

A new recipe might be something that mixes light and heavy oil to create a new early game product (rubber?), to give you something to do with the waste oils earlier.
Escadin wrote:This is such a non-issue. Why does it keep getting bumped?

I'd wager the vast majority of games only takes like 1/3 of it's buyers through a decent attempt and even less through a worthy playthrough. Just check a number of games on my steam achievement list and they all shared the same or even worse results. Typically, the more difficult or demanding a game the less people will bother.
The point isn't only that players stop playing, it's that there is a perception that players are leaving because a certain part of the game isn't fun, namely setting up oil production.

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

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reallyLost wrote:
Jap2.0 wrote:You can builda big factory on spaghetti. That was back in the days of 0.14, but still, I launched quite a few rockets in that.
Of course you can, which is why I said the average spaghetti factory. Which of course also means the average of all players, not just the vets who post here regularly.
I launched my first rocket from a spaghetti factory covered by a single, massive, unoptimized bot network. I was far from a vet at the time.

I agree that the step from green to blue science is too large. I think the problem though is that the step from red to green is too small. Expand that gap, you shorten the green/blue one.

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by Hellatze »

maybe player declining because dev rarely update their games.

when you make the first rocket. its over.

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by Koub »

Hellatze wrote:maybe player declining because dev rarely update their games.
Nonsense
I know you have a grudge against Factorio, the only thing I don't understand is : why are you still here ?
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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by MeduSalem »

Koub wrote:I know you have a grudge against Factorio, the only thing I don't understand is : why are you still here ?
Easy answer
But apart from that... Hellatze has at least one point... Once you are through with Launching a Rocket there is not really much left to do other than setting virtual goals for yourself, which some people may not really find that engaging on long term. Maybe he should just play something else in the meantime and let Factorio be for a while.

If I wouldn't be playing other games or enjoying other things while waiting for new updates I'd probably have stopped playing Factorio as well and moved on to something else because after several hundreds of hours of setting your own goals the creativity just fades away. The game gave me every satisfaction possible, so there is just not really much left to do other than continue playing with mods and even they will get boring at one point or another.

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by Zavian »

Unless you change things up*, most Factorio factories/playthroughs tend to feel the same, and the game does feel repetitive.

Ways to change things up include different player objectives for a playthrough, different starting conditions and mods. Personally I find that even changing starting condition/player objectives isn't enough of a change for me these days.

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by HurkWurk »

oil needs to be addressed, as well as the gap between blue and yellow factories.
the big issue is that they compound against each other.

you need yellow factories to make refineries. but you need oil to make yellow.

one you get oil, you are once again left with a new situation. you produce something (lots of light oil) with no real use yet. not to mention the amount of it is quite high.

what i would propose is that a new "6 slot" assembly machine be made available at the same time that engines are, and that engines be made a pre-requisite for both oil processing and the new factory. in this way you have discovered a 6 slot factory capable of building refineries before you are making them.

then i would add a new basic recipie for petroleum only. using both water and oil to make, but resulting only in petrol at a similar rate to the current basic processing.
otherwise a oil tutorial on making storage tanks + solid fuel chemical factories, then running said solid fuel into steam engines....

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by Zavian »

Well you can handcraft refineries. So technically you don't need yellow assemblers to make them.

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Re: Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

Post by SirSmuggler »

Zavian wrote:Well you can handcraft refineries. So technically you don't need yellow assemblers to make them.
This. And unless you are going for a megafactory (most new players don't), you don't need that many of them. Seems kind of pointless to set up autocrafting of an item you will not use more then a hand full of. It's proboly kind of a blasphemy to say that in this forum, but for me atleast it is true.

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