Difficulty curve and how to keep players till end game

[Sicnarf]

Was looking at the steam achievement stats for this game and noticed a few things.
Eco unfriendly -> Research oil processing -> 37.4%
Mass production 1 -> Produce 10k electronic circuits. -> 34.6%

This means 62.6% of players never get as far as blue science (or never open the game) they give up on the game before they hit that point. I figure it is not that bad that about 35% of the people who play the game get to the more complex parts of the game. There will always be players for whom a game just does not click and they move on and I don't think their is anything that can be done about that(Pretty sure some of the early steam fraud contributed to this number as well). Please note that 34.6% of people produce a lot of green circuits so I figure they are enjoying themselves and are fairly committed to the game.

Circuit veteran 1 -> Produce 1.0k advanced circuits per hour. -> 25%
This achievement only takes 3 L2 Red circuit assemblers to get so it's not exactly difficult when you get oil up and running. Yet of all the players that get past the basic red green science about 30% of the remaining players quit out once oil hits. I get why this happens, oil is not easy. You have to do some maths or go online and start doing some research to see how to set it up. Also the first thing you have to do with oil is make enough Science 3 to get advanced oil processing to help get rid of Light/Heavy which is not obvious from in game help menus.

You've got a package -> Supply the player by logistic robot. -> 18.4%
Automated construction -> Construct 100 machines using robots. -> 16.1%
Automated cleanup -> Deconstruct 100 objects with the construction robots. -> 16.0%
I liked using belts and never switched to full bots, but I still built some bots just to try them out, yet somewhere between oil and bots 50% of players drop out of the game.

Only 8.5% of players ever launch a rocket. This one does not bother me so much, I played for a long time and had lots of fun but never saw the point of launching a rocket. The point of the game for me was building a lovely messy base. 0.15 has changed that of course.

The point here is between hitting oil and getting bots almost half of active players quit out. I think the learning curve or maybe the lack of in game info on how to get it all working right causes players to just hit a wall and decide the difficulty is not worth the effort. Judging by the achievements only about 11% of people go deep on this wonderful game. I know it's obvious now but when I first saw Requester/provider chests/logistic slots in the tech tree and I no idea how powerful/useful they were from the research tool tips until I actually used them.

So my question is, 25% of people get a little past oil at least, but less than half of them of them get to the late game parts. How do we make it easier for them to stick around and really discover what this game has to offer?

Notes: I'm not suggesting we dumb down the game. I was thinking more in game help, tutorials, tool tips that sort of things. I really enjoy this game and I would really like to spread the joy.

One idea is having the tool tips in science have a little animation and a decent explanation/scroll of text that explains how this tech will help you and suggestions of other techs that would make it even more useful. For example Power armor, solar panels and personal roboport, seeing a little demonstration of how useful they are together would have focused my first play through mid game research.

[Nova]

The developers are working on a better campaign which should solve this problem by having more explanation, especially about complex stuff like oil processing. The introduction of "mini tutorials" is also a step forward to better explaining the game for players. In the moment there are only train tutorials, but in the future there also will be other stuff like oil refinery and nuclear energy.

So yes, you are right - oil is not easy for new and "casual" players, but I would suggest to wait until we got more mini tutorials and a fleshed out campaign.

[iceman_1212]

Many people play with mods, which end up disabling Steam achievements. Not sure how representative these figures are as a whole.

[quinor]

Many people don't play with steam (like I do).

[Daid]

I think those stats are actually pretty good!

Compare them to these:
http://steamcommunity.com/stats/CaveStory/achievements/
CaveStory is a pretty short game. And it has a lot of "progress" achievements. From which you can see quite a bit about how most gamers act on steam.

• The first achievement "Pea shooter", you get in the first minute of the game, after the first area. Which means only 77% of the people that own the game actually played it at all! Something important to consider for all statistics. Not everyone that owns the game ever starts it up.
• "Wanna Fight?" is the first boss. Pretty much after the first cave section. 5 minutes into the game I guess. 50% of the people remaining at this point.
• "Evil to the Core", 15% of the people actually finish the game. Which takes some time, but isn't that long compared to playing Factorio. Compared to the rocket effort, this is easy stuff.
• "Hate Made Flesh", suprisingly, 3.4% of the people finish the "Special ending", which I didn't and is fucking difficult and requires some true effort.

I think this is just natural to lose many players early on, but then end up with a dedicated core group of players, that actually play and promote your game a lot.

Also note that I lauched my first rocket without bots, as I didn't understand how those worked. The lack of a proper tutorial on a lot of details and the campaign that is only explaining 15% of the game, as well as having the odd (stupid IMHO) fighting mission in between doesn't help naturally. But even without that considered, I think these numbers are quite good.

[terror_gnom]

I have 920h on steam and 0 achievements in steam (although I did all of them)... I think quite a lot of players do have at least some qol mods active so they dont earn them

[Sicnarf]

I have 920h on steam and 0 achievements in steam (although I did all of them)... I think quite a lot of players do have at least some qol mods active so they dont earn them

Wow, I used some mods after a few games. But I always like to get to grips with a Vanilla game before I decide what I like to change about it.

I do feel some of the techs in the game should really be pushed harder especially personal roboport since it takes away a lot of manual slog. Advanced oil processing should also be really pushed as well considering how useless heavy and light oil are at that point in the game. I would even be open to having basic oil processing not producing anything but Petroleum (No change in amount) as I feel like it would make oil easier to get into for newbies. More experienced people will just be grabbing Advanced Oil processing straight away anyway. I think the train tutorial should just consist of building a 2 lane T junction and setting up loading and unloading, if you need more throughput than that then you are most definitely motivated enough to do the research on it.

[MiniHerc]

Many people play with mods, which end up disabling Steam achievements. Not sure how representative these figures are as a whole.

This. I've only played vanilla for maybe 30 hours total. Started off with perhaps 12 hours vanilla, then I dived into crazy modded. Went back to vanilla for ~15 hours for the no time for chitchat / lazy bastard / steam etc achieves then back to modded. Got almost 400 hours now and 90% of that is bobs / bobs plus angels craziness.

[terror_gnom]

Wow, I used some mods after a few games. But I always like to get to grips with a Vanilla game before I decide what I like to change about it.

Yeah, I played Vanilla the first ~50-100h, but back then there were no achievements They got introduced in .13 if I recall correctly.
And today I´m just unable to play without FARL, Longreach and untill .15 picker and logistic manager

[Ingolifs]

High attrition rates - low numbers of players making it to endgame content - is common to all games.

Half life 2 episode 2 - 6 hour campaign. From memory, 50-60% of players made it to the end.
Gears of War 2 - 12 hour campaign. Completion was something like 30-40%.

My first go at Factorio had me launch at around the 70 hour mark. I suspect many others are similar. Completing Factorio requires a substantial amount of player time and concentration. It's a very hard thing to do over a month of Sunday evenings.

People are busy. In between work, commuting, education, kids, other social events, hobbies or computer games, there is little time or energy to wrestle with (for example) train signalling and the stubborn 'no path' error. They bought the game because it looked fun, and in between playing it and watching youtube videos they've seen most of the content. Maybe when their professional or personal lives have quieted down a bit, they'll have another go at the game.

The point is, unless there is a major cliff in the total play time that indicates frustration with a specific segment of gameplay, don't worry (overly much) about attrition rates in gaming time. It's not the fault of the game, but of the free time of the player, and unless you lobby government for Universal basic Income or something, that's not going to change no matter how good the game is.

[purdueme91]

My 2 cents, some of the achievements don't pop in Steam either when you earn them in game. Steam doesn't show that I completed circuit veteran 2 and 3, the blue circuit equivalents, getting killed by train, surviving the 500 hp blow and others that I earned in vanilla. So there has to be some of that factored in there. I'm currently playing outside of Steam so re-earning most of them (working on lazy bastard with Bob's mods currently).

I think the campaign will help when fleshed out because some people don't want to start out in sandbox mode. It will help some people when the objective is to re-power an overrun base, build X number of turrets, power the rocket silo and launch the satellite. I have confidence that the dev's will make a compelling campaign with a background story (maybe like SpaceX with launching multiple rockets to build a spaceship to return home). Even if they don't, they still have made a top selling game on Steam that is one of the highest rated games available.

[Matthias_Wlkp]

For me, the difficulty ramps up significantly when I start to make blue science. I find debugging oil challenging, to say the least. The next steep curve is when you start running out of raw materials and try to introduce trains... It's really hard if your base was not designed around that. Rebuilding is painful...

I spend last 30-40 hours trying to design a decent Science Complex and half of that time I spent in calculating sheet to figure out the size of the damn thing (I hate the "huge main bus" design type).

I guess if you are OK with a "river" of materials sitting in the middle of your base, that makes it somewhat easier - just tap whatever you are looking for. It would be nice if Factorio had an easy to use base planner or designer that would speed up the process, that you could easily turn into a blueprint. The closest thing to that is probably Creative Mod?

[ross]

You have to do some maths or go online and start doing some research to see how to set it up.

no you don't

Also the first thing you have to do with oil is make enough Science 3 to get advanced oil processing to help get rid of Light/Heavy which is not obvious from in game help menus.

nope

[Koub]

Aw man, that discussion ended 5 months ago.

[quineotio]

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.

On top of that, it's quite difficult to calculate ratios, to the point where I don't - I just build chemical plants until things seem to be working ok. Then it'll stop working randomly and I'll have to go back and try to use whatever resource has built up, which inevitably ends up making the oil setup a mess. I've abandoned multiple factories at blue science so it doesn't surprise me that people quit there.

I think there needs to be some simpler items you can craft from oil - perhaps even the crude oil. This would give you some benefit without having to build and entire oil production facility. Perhaps oil could be used to increase the speed of belts? Or if horticulture ever gets put into the game the oil could be used for fertilizer?

Another idea would be to have an oil burner that just burns off the light and heavy oil, but creates a lot of pollution. Or a way of pumping it onto the ground and spoiling the ground so you can't build on it. Or into the water - maybe it turns the fish into mutants?

And I think there needs to be an easier way to figure out ratios - like a screen that shows you how much of each resource is being used by each type of production, and perhaps a timer that tells you how long it'll take for your tanks to fill up, and which resource will fill up first and a way to see the percent of your storage currently being used by each resource. I realize there's the production tab, but it's difficult to get detailed information from it. Maybe you could have a flow control building where you can set how the oil flows to different chemical plants, and tells you the output rate of products. Perhaps pumps could be used for flow control? Basically you'd set up the refineries and chemical plants then control the whole thing with one screen. You could add the ability to program things to happen, like when the light oil gets full, turn on the chemical plants that make it into petroleum until the tanks are empty. I realize you can do this sort of thing with logic and circuits, but about that complexity...

Just a couple of thoughts.

[Cribbit]

The whole point of the game is its complexity. The challenges around efficiently setting up complex production like oil is where the game gets real.

[Lav]

The whole point of the game is its complexity. The challenges around efficiently setting up complex production like oil is where the game gets real.

You seem to have completely missed the point that quineotio was trying to make. It's not complexity that's the issue, but the duration. Period when oil processing and it's dependent industries are being set up is unreasonably long and lacks any intermediate rewards for the player.

[Alien_Squasher]

So bit of a confession: I have been playing since 0.14 and never made it past a basic slow blue science factory legitimately, and I want to find a way to make the process of building up more enjoyable.... which is why I posted things concerning the development of new game aspects such as time acceleration. I don't know, I love this game, I just get stuck and it gets tedious. Any advice on how to remedy this?....

[Patashu]

If you get fed up by having to wait, maybe grab the Creative Mode mod and plan out some bases that you'd make if you had no time or resource limitations, and then think about how you'd bootstrap up to them in a normal game?

[Zavian]

First ask yourself why you stop playing? Are you bored with building your base? or do you just not want to expand mining/smelting/whatever? If you find building smelter lines to be boring then I'd suggest either researching construction and logistics robots asap or using one of the many mods that add personal construction bots from the start of the game. Construction and logistics robots are only red + green science in 0.15 so if you have blue science then you already have everything you need to research them. As was stated in the timewarp thread, if you are standing around waiting for research to finish, then you can always either start building things you know you will want shortly, or expand your production of things you need more of, like whatever is the bottleneck in your science production.