Version 0.17.60

[RocketManChronicles]

Flamethrowers don't consume much oil though. There is far, far more oil in the tanks and pipes than the flamethrowers fire because the pipes will fill instantly.

Unless you are playing on a Deathworld Marathon map that has the difficulty turned up even more beyond what Deathworld defaults to. My Flamethrower Turrets are almost constantly firing; and since Light Oil has a damage buff, I am burning through Light Oil very quickly. The problem now, is that since I do not have AOP researched yet, my reserves of Light Oil are diminishing because the BOP does not supply it. Now I have to reroute Crude Oil to the Perimeter Wall until I unlock Light Oil again. Frustrating for an existing map, yes; New map, frustrating to not utilize the Flamethrower Turret to its advantage early enough.

I think this would also be a potential issue once you do unlock LO... you now have to wait for your turrets to completely empty themselves of the crude before you can pump in light due to the anti-mixing....

I know, small issue, but still.

It's not that bad, really. I have already set up a pump to pull the Crude Oil out of the Line once Light Oil is detected in a Storage Tank nearby via a Circuit Network. Similarly, the Light Oil will not pump into the feed line until the Crude Oil reaches zero in a temporary storage tank that is inline with aforementioned pump also via Circuit Network. Just a pain to go through really.

It's a shame, Light Oil and Heavy Oil had so many uses prior to Advanced Oil Processing.... and it's gone.

[FuryoftheStars]

Just a pain to go through really.

I think this is what I was meaning.

It's a shame, Light Oil and Heavy Oil had so many uses prior to Advanced Oil Processing.... and it's gone.

Agreed.

[meganothing]

The problem is now more about the measurement of success. At the moment we all have just opinions about what the change will accomplish. Facts will be available only after some time and a statistically relevant number of new users had a chance to play it. But will Wube remember to check the numbers again then? Hopefully. Maybe we have to remind them in half a year or so.

The problem with this is actual new players, or rather, naive players, will enjoy the change simply because it's easier, less effort for more reward. And that is presuming they even know there was a change involved, that oil used to be more interesting.

It takes a while to realise that an easy game is a boring one (as anyone who has played a game with cheats enabled should be able to attest to), so initial feedback from these kinds of players will of course be positive - if only due to sheer laziness alone.

I give Wube more intelligence than to assume they would ask new players if they liked BOP. There are two rather effective measurements they can take:

A) See if new players go past AOP now (for example more rocket achievements scored by new players), How many go past BOP is irrelevant

B) Look if the same number of new players complain about the difficulty spike of AOP or even BOP now that complained about BOP before.

If the number stays the same then the oil change accomplished nothing and they would have to realize that it is a GUI problem or a problem of the type of game they are doing. If the numbers change by a noticable margin they know they got something out of it.

People have said the part of oil that took the longest to 'get' is cracking.

Wube said they saw people stumped at backlogged refineries. Not saying you are wrong, but do you have access to a relevant number of new player stories or are you just recounting a few singular cases without any statistical significance? At least I guess Wube has some statistical data in the 3 digit range or above.

[BlueTemplar]

Flamethrowers don't consume much oil though. There is far, far more oil in the tanks and pipes than the flamethrowers fire because the pipes will fill instantly.

Unless you are playing on a Deathworld Marathon map that has the difficulty turned up even more beyond what Deathworld defaults to. My Flamethrower Turrets are almost constantly firing; and since Light Oil has a damage buff, I am burning through Light Oil very quickly. The problem now, is that since I do not have AOP researched yet, my reserves of Light Oil are diminishing because the BOP does not supply it. Now I have to reroute Crude Oil to the Perimeter Wall until I unlock Light Oil again. Frustrating for an existing map, yes; New map, frustrating to not utilize the Flamethrower Turret to its advantage early enough.

I think this would also be a potential issue once you do unlock LO... you now have to wait for your turrets to completely empty themselves of the crude before you can pump in light due to the anti-mixing....

I know, small issue, but still.

It's not that bad, really. I have already set up a pump to pull the Crude Oil out of the Line once Light Oil is detected in a Storage Tank nearby via a Circuit Network. Similarly, the Light Oil will not pump into the feed line until the Crude Oil reaches zero in a temporary storage tank that is inline with aforementioned pump also via Circuit Network. Just a pain to go through really.

It's a shame, Light Oil and Heavy Oil had so many uses prior to Advanced Oil Processing.... and it's gone.

Interesting, have you noticed any practical difference between Crude and Light Oil ?

It always seemed to me that considering the way the Flame Turrets fire, and the damage they do even without any upgrades, that this measly 10% bonus was not worth bothering with (considering the extra required logistics, and the risk of running out of light oil) ?

[FuryoftheStars]

A) See if new players go past AOP now (for example more rocket achievements scored by new players), How many go past BOP is irrelevant

I have a problem with the achievement metric, as outlined below.

Many players I know keep pointing to Steam achievements as the metric to show how hard oil is, and I believe you all have mentioned it once or twice. What occurred to me, though, is this: the people who have probably given the game a try and then quit are very likely not to retry after an update, or will only try after a few updates before giving up for good. What this means is that even if you find the solution, they will always be there to skew the numbers towards not getting past oil. The more people there are that are in this group (having given up on the game for good, whatever their reasons may be), the more players you need to pull in that get it and succeed to start seeing good movement in the numbers.

To demonstrate with numbers, let's say you had 100,000 players that are represented on Steam (I don't know the actual numbers, but I know they're higher, which I think will only help to drive this point further home when you consider it at the end). Steam says only 57.6% have unlocked oil, and 14.4% have finished the game. Now let's say you come up with the perfect solution and you result in a 75% increase of those that get oil to then finish the game (which may be an optimistic number). Just to get the 14.4% completing the game number to, let's say, double at 28.8%, you would need to increase your total number of players by 50%. For 100,000 people initially, this means you need an extra 50,000 new people to cause this change. If Steam is actually closer to 500,000, then you need an extra 250,000 new people. A million? 500,000. And this is assuming that 75% of people who pass oil then don't get stumped on something later and just quit again.

Point I'm trying to make there is that I do not feel as though the Steam achievement metric can be reliably used as a gauge anymore to determine how well people are getting it. The only thing that could is if you could somehow only capture new players only or something from a certain change point and then reset this after each change you make to understanding oil.

[MeduSalem]

[...]

Fun part is... I am a Veteran player and still haven't the Oil achievement and several others even though I finished the game multiple times in the past haha.

Mainly because I bought the game before it was on Steam and I have been playing the same few maps almost forever. All my main maps date way back before the oil patch yield change, hence I am still on oil patches with ridiculously low yield.

And when restarting for a new map after a new update in the recent years I usually lose my interest in the vanilla game almost immediately after a new update because the few improvements made despite the evergrowing long development cycles don't make me feel like going all the distance again and then there's also the problem of them changing the map generator every now and then so the maps kinda get messed up and when I know that a new major version is going to do that I don't even want to start over and instead go back to playing the old maps which are already so messed up I don't care anymore.

Also in the recent time I toy around with mods which usually disable achievements because Vanilla has become boring and stale about 2-3 years ago. Ever since it's just bugfixing and them redoing existing stuff for the sake of it, with little to no benefits.

Wouldn't wonder if there are also a good deal of players just like me that render the achievement percentage pretty much an unreliable information source.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, but you (we) are a negligible quantity.

One can probably get some useful information out of the achievement statistics by comparing their evolution over time with the evolution over time of the number of owners of the game.

Also, while late-game Steam achievement statistics are inevitably going to be tainted by mods, MP, non-Steam installs, etc., there are earlier ones that might still be useful :

Latest stats (for non-modded games) :
~58% of players have researched Oil Processing (but might have quit before setting it up).
~42% built (and placed?) a locomotive (would new players prefer to use one for first oil transport, or car, or just a loooooong pipe?)
~39% achieved 16.66.. advanced circuits per minute. (which need oil)
~28% got supplied by a logistic robot
~26% built 100 machines with conbots
https://steamcommunity.com/stats/427520/achievements/

[FuryoftheStars]

{...}

Yup. I have a whole whopping 7 achievements myself. I have the oil one, but not the launched rocket.

Yeah, but you (we) are a negligible quantity.

One can probably get some useful information out of the achievement statistics by comparing their evolution over time with the evolution over time of the number of owners of the game.

Also, while late-game Steam achievement statistics are inevitably going to be tainted by mods, MP, non-Steam installs, etc., there are earlier ones that might still be useful :

Latest stats (for non-modded games) :
~58% of players have researched Oil Processing (but might have quit before setting it up).
~42% built (and placed?) a locomotive (would new players prefer to use one for first oil transport, or car, or just a loooooong pipe?)
~39% achieved 16.66.. advanced circuits per minute. (which need oil)
~28% got supplied by a logistic robot
~26% built 100 machines with conbots
https://steamcommunity.com/stats/427520/achievements/

Yes, but that's kind of my point, these stats are unreliable to use to gauge a change mid-way through. If these stats are representative of say 500,000 players (which considering how many copies they've sold I feel as though may be low), then just to boost the finished game stat to double (at 28%) you'd need close to 250,000 extra new players. The chances of someone that has already dropped the game because "oil was too hard" coming back or even monitoring to know that there was an update are pretty small.

[MeduSalem]

Yeah, but you (we) are a negligible quantity.

One can probably get some useful information out of the achievement statistics by comparing their evolution over time with the evolution over time of the number of owners of the game.

Also, while late-game Steam achievement statistics are inevitably going to be tainted by mods, MP, non-Steam installs, etc., there are earlier ones that might still be useful :

Latest stats (for non-modded games) :
~58% of players have researched Oil Processing (but might have quit before setting it up).
~42% built (and placed?) a locomotive (would new players prefer to use one for first oil transport, or car, or just a loooooong pipe?)
~39% achieved 16.66.. advanced circuits per minute. (which need oil)
~28% got supplied by a logistic robot
~26% built 100 machines with conbots
https://steamcommunity.com/stats/427520/achievements/

Long pipes all the way, haha. Definitely. I was just like that back when I was a new player and I still use long pipes and transport belts when I don't feel like wasting an entire day doing the initial overhead of building trainstations and whatnot. It's just a lot faster to use long pipes to get your oil industry going.

I am willing to bet there are way more people quitting the game because they can't get into the train stuff than there are people quitting because of the initial complexity there used to be for the oil industry setup. Just look at the train related achievements:

Watch your Step... the one getting killed by a train... 20.7%. (I am going so far to say that it's almost impossible not to get hit eventually out of carelessness)
Trans-Factorio Express... a train with a path longer than 1000 tiles... 23.3%.

Almost all my friends who once tried to play Factorio gave up on it basically exactly for the train stuff once they ran out of local resources... and that despite trains not even being mandatory to win the game.

That or because relatively in comparison to other games it just takes forever to get anywhere in the game and them being used to games that can be finished within 10 hours and whatnot. Not saying that you can't finish Factorio in 10 hours, as speed runners have proven, but definitely not on your first playthrough unless you want to ruin your own experience by following guides on every step.


I am still pretty much convinced that the devs are stuck in a crusade of trying to smooth out the game for the average casual player who inevitably gives up on a game and moves on with another game entirely at some point no matter what.

[FuryoftheStars]

Watch your Step... the one getting killed by a train... 20.7%. (I am going so far to say that it's almost impossible not to get hit eventually out of carelessness)

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s one of the 7 I have...

[MeduSalem]

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s one of the 7 I have...

Me too. Despite looking out when crossing a rail or trying to avoid becoming idle on train tracks I still get killed every now and then or end up wrecking a train when fully powered up in power armor. And every time it happens I am like "omg, how did this happen... "

[BlueTemplar]

Trains got much better since 0.13, haven't they ?
Median Factorio play time is probably in the top10 games ever made at 35 hours...

----

And my point is that, taking an example :

Say you have 0.5M owners when 0.17.60 hits.
Assume for the sake of the argument that non-online-Steam uses and mods are negligible.
Assume 12.5% launched a rocket (and that there were no changes to satellite requirements to win the game?)

Assume that at a future date you have 1M owners.
Assume that now 25% launched a rocket.

Assume that the number of pre-0.17.60 game owners that did not launch a rocket before 0.17.60, but did after that, is negligible.

You can then figure out that the "post-0.17.60 owners" managed to launch the rocket 3 times more :
the first 0.5M managed 12.5%
the next 0.5M managed 12.5%*3
because 0.5M*12.5%+0.5M*12.5%*3=1M*25%

One can probably do more complex math combining multiple achievements too...
The hard part however is going to be to gauge the uncertainties properly !

[meganothing]

Many players I know keep pointing to Steam achievements as the metric to show how hard oil is, and I believe you all have mentioned it once or twice. What occurred to me, though, is this: the people who have probably given the game a try and then quit are very likely not to retry after an update, or will only try after a few updates before giving up for good. What this means is that even if you find the solution, they will always be there to skew the numbers towards not getting past oil. The more people there are that are in this group (having given up on the game for good, whatever their reasons may be), the more players you need to pull in that get it and succeed to start seeing good movement in the numbers.

Instead of comparing with all of history you would take lets say 1 month before the change and look at the number of achievements scored ONLY IN THAT INTERVAL (*). Then look at another month some time after the change got put into stable. Again only record the achievements in that interval. Compare them in relation to sold copies in the previous 2 months (depending on whatever is the typical time a new player needs to get past oil).

Now I'm not saying these numbers will be very accurate but would surely be good enough to show a significant change like if 30% more new players get it




(*) I think I don't need to mention that this is just a a substraction between the achievement numbers at the start of the interval and the end of the interval.

Wouldn't wonder if there are also a good deal of players just like me that render the achievement percentage pretty much an unreliable information source.

If you are interested in changes to new player behaviour, advanced players dropping out because of using mods make the numbers more reliable, not less.

[crambaza]

Additionally, I'm worried about the delay of bots

What delay?

Construction bots require:

[... stuff...]


It is harder to make robots than blue science, and as long as roboports require Advanced Circuits it always will be. And now with this change you literally make all the components for blue science while making construction robots.

I think one thing you are overlooking is that BEFORE this change, you could build either one first. Neither one required the other. The benefit of building Construction Robots first is that then you can use those Construction Robots to help build your blue science. That has a net benefit.

If you build blue science before bots, that doesn't help at all.

So, same stuff, but bots first = helps

AFTER this change, now I am forced to do Blue then Robots. That has a net effect of lowering my choice, lowering my agency.

[crambaza]

It will be ok. The game design is not to please extremists, like speed runners or megabasers. The majority of normal and new players will not complain and may even appreciate the changes. I now, I have played with oilchanges mod.

Speed runners will pretty surely like it since anything that simplifies speeds up play.

But I'm not sure the devs have *ANY* idea who their core audience is.

Speed runners rush bots, because bots speeds everything up. Now speed runners are adding time to their runs, because they need to do more by hand, and less by bot.

So no, this won't be a change that helps them.

[FuryoftheStars]

Instead of comparing with all of history you would take lets say 1 month before the change and look at the number of achievements scored ONLY IN THAT INTERVAL (*). Then look at another month some time after the change got put into stable. Again only record the achievements in that interval. Compare them in relation to sold copies in the previous 2 months (depending on whatever is the typical time a new player needs to get past oil).

Now I'm not saying these numbers will be very accurate but would surely good enough to show a significant change like if 30% more new players get it




(*) I think I don't need to mention that this is just a a substraction between the achievement numbers at the start of the interval and the end of the interval.

What you are saying is to make note of this percentage, wait a month, then look at the new stat? This is still comparing to all history.

[MeduSalem]

[...]

Well good, despite the outcries the change is now in the game pretty much unchanged from its initial proposal anyway.

Wether I will ever go back to play Vanilla again or not is up in the air, because I didn't have much incentive to do so before the change either. For me as a Veteran the future of the game is pretty much mods anyway.

And in the end it's also not my game but wube's.



But just for the shits and giggles of a heated discussion this may cause... just imagine if we take the above achievement progression as the standard... and now the devs come to the conclusion "man, a lot of people quit due to the difficulty rail setups impose... let's do something about rails" and then end up axing part of the rail experience, leaving it in a rather questionable state. The outcries from all the hardcore rail guys would probably be even more extreme as they are about the oil industry.

I wonder how many more axes to gameplay experiences are necessary before it eventually hits people in the face who were formerly cheering for all the previous changes other people found bad.

That's just my two cents about it.

[Yijare]

Before 17.60, he managed to get them at 1h10m, so there's a consequent difference. But he could probably manage to get them sooner in future runs... we'll see.

Speedrunning the game is a whoole different matter than the normal player.

Anti, Nefrums, rain and all the other speedsters have played the game far more often from start to launch than your avaerage normal 2k hour player.

The fact that speedrunners are delayed by this just menas one thing: the change isnt even simplifying the game. it's making it worse to play.

[MeduSalem]

If you are interested in changes to new player behaviour, advanced players dropping out because of using mods make the numbers more reliable, not less.

Sorry but that is were you are wrong. The advanced players even if they enabled mods at some point for whatever reason during their progression never drop out of the total statistics.

And if at all the number of players who will eventually enable some mod will only increase linked tightly together with the amount of new players.

So you can never get a proper statistic unless you include a way to specifically lock down when each individual player started to use mods in their achievement progression and then substract that player from the total amount of players in any subsequent achievement in the progression because of how he would otherwise falsify them.

That said what you can do though and what BlueTemplar wrote about and what I think he meant is the change from month to month, which you can measure though. There might be more people making it through to certain achievements as an directly measurable effect of the change.

[FuryoftheStars]

Trains got much better since 0.13, haven't they ?
Median Factorio play time is probably in the top10 games ever made at 35 hours...

----

And my point is that, taking an example :

Say you have 0.5M owners when 0.17.60 hits.
Assume for the sake of the argument that non-online-Steam uses and mods are negligible.
Assume 12.5% launched a rocket (and that there were no changes to satellite requirements to win the game?)

Assume that at a future date you have 1M owners.
Assume that now 25% launched a rocket.

Assume that the number of pre-0.17.60 game owners that did not launch a rocket before 0.17.60, but did after that, is negligible.

You can then figure out that the "post-0.17.60 owners" managed to launch the rocket 3 times more :
the first 0.5M managed 12.5%
the next 0.5M managed 12.5%*3
because 0.5M*12.5%+0.5M*12.5%*3=1M*25%

One can probably do more complex math combining multiple achievements too...
The hard part however is going to be to gauge the uncertainties properly !

Yes, and how long would it take to get that extra half million considering how many years this game has been out and has sold a few million in that time? More realistically, in order to properly gauge the change without waiting a year, you'd have to go for a few months at most. But in order to get that percentage to tick up by 0.1%, you'd have to have a very high rate of success, or a very high rate of sales. If the game sold another 1k copies (from Steam) in that time span, you'd need a success rate of 65% to cause a 0.1% change. If the game was managing to do 10k copies (from Steam), then it'd only need a 20% success rate.

And if the starting number of sales on Steam is higher than a half million, then that means they need higher success rates and/or sales.