Friday Facts #283 - Prepare to Launch

[Tricorius]

Get a good book, read it, and come back on friday to read the next FFF. If 0.17 is out, you'll know at that moment, and chances are there will already have been a few tens or hundreds bugfixes, so it's all for the better for you.

And this is extremely solid advice. Wube are damn good at what they do, but there is bound to be a small flurry of bug fixes for some blocking bugs in the first few days.

After all, they don’t have the ability to test it on every single player’s hardware before release.

[meganothing]

Thanks, I’ll pass it on (he likes Factorio too-so he will actually be happy someone from the forums wished him a happy b-day).

Best whishes to him and I hope he likes the birthday cake made in an electric furnace

EDIT: Baah, never noticed that electric furnace might be a perfectly usable synonym for oven in english. Above joke probably sounds as unfunny to an english speaking person as the weather channel.

[invisus]

Best whishes to him and I hope he likes the birthday cake made in an electric furnace

[kerrin]

I am terribly impatient, and have been checking the forums all day, despite knowing that the earliest it would be released is tomorrow...even before I read the post from a wube developer saying pretty much that.
As a software developer, I am actually impressed at how far they have come in the past few months, even in the past week.
Aren’t wube EU based? They will almost certainly release during the day EU time.
If I were a betting man I would go 50/50 on Tuesday or Wednesday.

[5thHorseman]

Why is making the player do it in this order better than letting the player choose?

By this reasoning, everything should be in the Red/Green tier of science.

Heck why even have a green tier?

[lordaeron1]

There are people that should find themselves something to do - I mean something more interesting than continuously F5-ing the release subforum to see it the update is there.

But i have no life and want to play 0.17! I'm waiting since release of 0.16!!

The world will not stop turning if you miss the 5 first minutes - or 5 first hours, or days - of the release.

Are you really sure about that? I mean, come on. The next thing i'm waiting for is Anno 1800, and that comes two months later than expected.

Nobody loves me...

Seriously, if I were a dev, seeing the fuss about not keeping imaginary deadlines, I'd never say anything else than "you'll know when i'ts already out".

Yeah maybe. But to be honest (and to become serious now), a short little annotation in the official forum don't cost much time for the dev and most players would be completely fine with that and could understand the situation. I'm waiting for almost a year and a relevant change (for me) isn't even planned right now - not for 0.17 and not for any later version as far as known.

That's why i have to need even more patience than simply waiting for 0.17, and perhaps it will never come...

Greetings, Ronny

Well, like you I can't wait for 0.17 to be released also. sad that Anno 1800 was delayed.
I am actually playing Anno 1404 as I write this. (can't play factorio 16.x anymore done everything like 1000 times)

[Vxsote]

I'm not wanting to take a position one way or another on the debate over locking more stuff behind blue science, but thought this might offer some perspective:

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/BradWardell/ ... mortem.php

tl;dr; summary of that: meaningful choices are fun, newbie traps are not.

It is not, of course, a perfect comparison: in a real time strategy game, falling into a newbie trap means you lose. Losing sucks. In an open world game like Factorio, you don't lose, but maybe you just waste time/materials/etc.

Either way, some players who lose or waste time too often (perhaps not the ones who like to do corn mazes) will become frustrated and stop playing. But other players may become frustrated at a lack of early choices, even when some of those could be bad. So developers do need to consider how these things will affect the audience they are trying to reach, and the best answer for the game overall might not be the best answer for every individual player. I think Wube has generally been doing a good job of balancing game progression and integrating player feedback, and i'm sure that will continue.

[Mike5000]

It is not, of course, a perfect comparison: in a real time strategy game, falling into a newbie trap means you lose. Losing sucks. In an open world game like Factorio, you don't lose, but maybe you just waste time/materials/etc.

The equivalent tension in Factorio is between users who want maximum flexibility to explore different approaches and certain key developers who want users to play in a certain way e.g. belts rather than bots.

OTOH if I were a dev I'd be trying to remove beacons from vanilla because they lead to cookie cutter bases and preclude any hope of a balanced non-grindy early-to-mid game.

[Loewchen]

https://steamdb.info/app/427520/depots/

[5thHorseman]

https://steamdb.info/app/427520/depots/

I have no idea what this means. Does it mean they posted something 2 hours ago so something big may be incoming? Or they posted something 2 hours ago and there's no game so hey probably nothing coming out today?

[Kilitar]

Losing sucks.

"Loosing is fun." Toady One, Bay 12, Dwarf Fortress.

And I totally agree with him.

There is no joy in victory, if you do not know before, how multiple looses feels like. Then win finally feels like you really achieved something.

[CDarklock]

Why is making the player do it in this order better than letting the player choose?

By this reasoning, everything should be in the Red/Green tier of science.

That's not consistent with my reasoning.

Moving technology from one research tree to another requires adequate justification that it either makes things work better or makes more players happy.

Does moving everything to the red/green tier make things work better? I don't see how.

Does moving everything to the red/green tier make more players happy? Again, I don't see how.

So no, that's not what my reasoning suggests.

Similarly, should everything be moved all the way down to the red tier? I don't think so. I think requiring more complex recipes for later science packs is meaningful. I think things work better when there are multiple science packs. And I think the design of the packs, overall, forces behaviour that is generally advantageous to the player and produces positive externalities that ultimately make them happier.

Consequently, removing the upper tiers of science would make things worse and people would be less happy. So it's a terrible idea.

But moving things from the green tier to the blue tier is not a terrible idea, because it's not going to make things appreciably worse or make players especially unhappy. For most people, it will mean nothing. The jump from green science to blue science gets smaller and smaller with experience until it doesn't even register in your head anymore. The distinction is just a trivial detail. So the only players that matter in this equation are the ones to whom it does make a difference.

So what is the difference? At what point does a player say "man, I sure am glad I couldn't research that earlier!" or "man, it sure is a good thing this research needs oil products!" or something like that? When does it make their game better? When does it make them happy?

I'm not saying it doesn't, I'm saying I can't imagine when it does.

[Rinin]

It's quite strange to say: "Oh, be patient, please, what's wrong with you?" right after "Hey, I'll show you this new version you waited for a year... soon"

Really, why people became so inpatient?

[5thHorseman]

Why is making the player do it in this order better than letting the player choose?

By this reasoning, everything should be in the Red/Green tier of science.

That's not consistent with my reasoning.

Moving technology from one research tree to another requires adequate justification that it either makes things work better or makes more players happy.

Okay, then tell me: What benefit is it to the player to move sulfur processing - specifically - to a lower tier so you can unlock it before you unlock oil processing? You said you could set up your chemical plants so they're ready for later, but you've not yet unlocked those, no? And why would the player want to set up processing for something they couldn't yet process?

How does that make you happy? How is that working better? I don't see it doing either.

[TheKingOfFailure]

I'm just gonna drop a +1 for rocket silo touch ups as it should really be a magnificent complex! As I've read more shadows would be nice, spotlight(s) would be epic and to see the rocket slowly rotate as it rises would be simply beautiful!! Maybe a police siren-like red light spinning somewhere as it rises... The sky's the limit!

[CDarklock]

In an open world game like Factorio, you don't lose, but maybe you just waste time/materials/etc.

You can get into "unwinnable states" in Factorio, by simply misunderstanding what your priorities ought to be over an extended period. That's the closest thing to a loss; usually, your autosaves protect you. But if you are derping around in your base doing something silly, instead of dealing with the mounting biter evolution around you, it's easy to end up in a state where all your saves have merrily preserved the encroaching doom because you didn't know it was there.

And 0.17 is addressing some of this with the NPE campaign, so I'm really excited about that. I can't wait to see it.

I think Wube has generally been doing a good job of balancing game progression and integrating player feedback, and i'm sure that will continue.

Agreed. I'm just being another voice in that feedback, but I recognise that there are other voices, and that the voices as a whole are a tiny minority of the playerbase. Which, ultimately, is able to suggest but never decide.

[bobucles]

Does moving everything to the red/green tier make things work better? I don't see how.

So does that mean you are convinced? Because red/green tier already has most of the important tech in it. I mean after filling out the full green tier you need
- Purple potions (all ingredients from green tier)
- Blue circuits (all ingredients in green tier)
- Gold science (next step)
- Incremental upgrades
And now you're at end game. The jump from green to endgame seems pretty quick, doesn't it?

[CDarklock]

Okay, then tell me: What benefit is it to the player to move sulfur processing - specifically - to a lower tier so you can unlock it before you unlock oil processing?

That is not what I said.

Consider, say, sulfur. You research sulfur, but you don't have access to an oil field. You can't make sulfur.

Notice that I did not say oil processing. I said oil field. Of course you have oil processing, you had to research that before you could research sulfur.

Which is already a red/green research. I am not recommending a different change. This is already how it works.

Now click the little arrow and go read the post again, because you have clearly misunderstood the entire thing. That's okay, we all make mistakes.

[Light]

https://steamdb.info/app/427520/depots/

I love that the password is Sp1dertron. It took several guesses but that wasn't what I expected it to be.

Time to have some fun.

[CDarklock]

Does moving everything to the red/green tier make things work better? I don't see how.

So does that mean you are convinced?

Of what? Leaving everything where it is and not messing with it? Yes.

The jump from green to endgame seems pretty quick, doesn't it?

The only thing that isn't pretty quick is red. Literally every other research tier extends close to endgame, and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't.