Rseding91 wrote:Saying the current system is annoying and or inflexible is simply a lie.
According to what you say, your own colleague Twinsen must also be a "liar", because in
this post, he himself stated that the crafting interface was intentionally being made "annoying". Here is a quote of the relevant paragraph from Twinsen's post:
Twinsen wrote:We had many discussions about improving the crafting queue, including special shortcut to queue to front. After long thoughts I have strong feelings against improving the crafting queue like this, for an important reason: it won't force you to automate. If you were able to queue to front many players will act as walking assembling machines, constantly crafting things, since it would be an efficient way to play. I very often see new players spend many minutes crafting green science packs, sometimes even waiting there until their hand crafting is finished. Adding queue to front will only aggravate this problem. By making it annoying the way it is now, it forces new players to think "if only there was a way to do this easier...".
I am not saying that Factorio's crafting interface is bad, especially when you compare it to that of other games. However, it can be
annoying and inflexible in the situation described by the OP (original poster), where you queue up lots of items and then have to clear the entire queue, whenever you need an item urgently.
I agree that the player should not be encouraged to have a very long crafting queue, but should rather be encouraged to automate. My only point is that the player should not be encouraged to automate by deliberately making the crafting interface
annoying and inflexible.
As I have already pointed out, there are other ways to discourage hand-crafting. For example, in
this post from one year ago, I suggested that the player should be required to stand still for some time to unpack his hand-crafting equipment, and remain standing still while doing the actual hand-crafting. If the player moves, he must spend several seconds standing still again unpacking his equipment before he can continue hand-crafting. This solution would be annoying for the player, but it would be annoying in an understandable way, especially if an animation is being played in which the player unpacks his hand-crafting equipment and uses it afterwards. In contrast to that, the current implementation of the crafting interface is annoying in a non-understandable, frustrating way, in my opinion.
In conclusion, I agree with Twinsen that hand-crafting should be annoying (or at least cumbersome). I just think that this annoyance should be designed differently, so that it fits better with the game.