Friday Facts #375 - Quality

[khalismur]

Also not too impressed with the proposal of quality.

Many posters complained that it was about RNG, but it really is not, in the same way that Kovarex enrichment isn't. Sure, obtaining individual pieces of U235 or higher quality items is indeed based on chance, but integrated over a long time, it boils down to just scaling the recycling capacity in the same way Kovarex works. While having large cells for high-quality items will be fun to build from what you've shown so far, I think you could have instead come up with more complex, interesting, and productive recipes for the same products, maybe using a few new resources too to justify the increased efficiency (in a similar way to how oil processing progresses). That way, we could still achieve horizontal and vertical progression in a more creative way.

Instead, what if going to space with the new expansion would unlock new materials that could be sent back to Navius to be used not only in new space-related items but also in new recipes for more efficient production of old resources? That would be both horizontal and vertical progression as well.

And lastly, I agree that the named for the quality tiers absolutely should be changed from generic "epic", "legendary", etc

[Locane]

I'm sorry Kovarex but I have to agree with the other dissenters here - I don't think this feels very good from what I have felt the "spirit of the game" to be. Ultimately you get to define what that is, though, since it's your game, we're just playing it.

To me, Factorio is about how well you can put together a logical set of steps to accomplish a task, not about whether you have paid enough time and materials to the RNG gods to give you the same stuff that doesn't look different but functions differently. That feels more like a loot box.

I do agree that I would like to see the dynamic between horizontal and vertical scaling continue past where it stops right now, but I don't think the way to do that is by changing how we value almost every item in the game.

What I DO Like

I love the idea of extending the horizontal / vertical scaling portion of the game.

I like the idea of there being more "realism" in a factory - after all, machines make mistakes, wear out, need maintenance, have problems... etc.

I like the idea of a 4th module that does something sideways to the main game.

Why I Think This Isn't Resonating with People More

It feels like we've just taken one of the most engaging aspects of the game, the tiered upgrade system, and trivialized it down to some RNG modules that amount to colored dots, visually, and that doesn't feel very satisfying.

Consider - we could implement the Furnace tiers and have it be functionally identical (if we disregard size), with your Quality system. A regular furnace would be nothing, a Steel Uncommon, and an Electric Rare. We could just put colored dots on the original Furnace art and ship it, call it a day, job done.

But we don't do that. We have different recipes and different art for the tiers of furnaces. Why?

Because it's much more satisfying, as a player, to have researched and worked for an upgrade to a critical component of your base, and see those shiny new furnaces replace the old ones that were less efficient and more polluting. If we had a series of stone furnaces with dots on them, that is much less rewarding to play with and have worked for.

I don't think Factorio has a whole lot of RNG problems to work out - the Uranium processing getting U-235 is the only example I can think of off the top of my head, and that *feels* more justified because it's temporary until you set up your Namesake Kovarex Enrichment process which produces it reliably.

Most Importantly...

Please remember that if you design a game to have a "better" or "perfect" tier to achieve, no matter how well you balance around it, players will want to achieve that and de-value everything else.

Anything else will feel like varying degrees of Losing.

Players will also act like it on the forums and in their interactions with each other, as a result of this design. We will eventually see messages and posts from players denigrating each others' creations because they aren't 'Legendary' tier. "Sure that works great, but why isn't it Legendary?" is a pretty shitty thing to hear, and honestly, to feel internally while you are base building.

The fact that it exists at all is a thumb on the scale of the player psyche - it does not matter whether you've cleverly designed it to be "optional" - when it is the proposed level of integrated in to the game, it's a BIG deal, not just some random side recipe a person could have fun with if they wanted.

How I Would Do It

I would reverse the design - I would put the RNG in the processes instead of the items.

I would borrow a page from Space Exploration's book and make all assemblers (or building producers) of lower tiers have a pain-in-the-ass chance of producing Scrap instead of the item they intended. I would leave the player's manual crafting alone. I would make this scrap somewhat useful and recyclable, but it would ultimately be a tax on the resources being gathered.

You could implement the RNG mechanic in the recycling of the scrap. When a chunk is processed, depending on what it came from, maybe it produces an iron plate, or a copper wire, or both. Maybe better tiers of recyclers can sometimes produce rare metals they collect over the thousands of piece of scrap they process.

I would expand the vertical / horizontal upgrade gameplay with new recipes. The higher tiers of buildings (Assembler 1 -> 2 -> 3 etc) require better ingredients, and therefore produce their items more reliably, the same way the game is designed now. Steel gears instead of Iron gears. Advanced circuits instead of basic circuits. Incremental improvement, same as real life.

This *feels* a lot more realistic and more in what I believe to be is the spirit of the game - a scrappy made-for-a-purpose factory to accomplish a task that has an almost never ending list of sub tasks; just like a large programming project IRL.

A little bit of eventually reliably solved frustration is ok at first. It gives players something to work towards, as you already know from your Bot balancing post where Cliff Explosives were mentioned to be moving to a higher tier of tech, but it has to be more rewarding and reliable to get out of than what you're implementing here with Quality Modules.


I love Factorio, the same as everyone else here on the forums does. I wouldn't be spending the time and energy to think about and write out posts like this if I didn't, so I hope you don't come away with the impression that I'm just disparaging your art. I'm not. The game is fantastic, and even if this were to be implemented as proposed, it wouldn't be the end of the game for me or I'm sure anyone, but we can always improve.

[Theisen]

Looks like very few people like this idea. The consensus on steam is no one likes this idea.

[MEOWMI]

My first thought is that you should think about the naming quite carefully. The way the quality tiers are currently named, "epic", "legendary", sound like something out of medieval fantasy. I get that an important part of it is to communicate what it means, but I strongly feel like there are much better ways to name these.

[pichutarius]

Instead of recycling the lower-quality items, can I take them in a muffalo caravan to sell to another tribe?

Seems like no one got the reference haha

Now i wan assembly machine to have high mood so they got creativity inspiration.

[TheBuzzSaw]

This means, that I had to do many VERY complicated merges into the branch during 1.0 and 1.1 development, as many things were different in the branch, so almost anything that touched internal IDs, GUI, or tests, was almost guaranteed to have a merge conflict. I believe that fellow programmers will sympathize with my pain.

Code: Select all

git revert head

[Silba]

Seems like an april fools joke, the naming is absolutely cringe, generic gacha mmo scheme complete with rng mechanics?
factories dont even work like this especially not factorio factories.... sure binning and tolerances exist in real life, but that is not even close to what this is.

I hope this isn't the start of the end for factorio.

thankfully the moddig scene is huge so cringe things like this dont actually matter for non casual players

[yblondinca]

One potential way to mitigate one of the larger complaints seen here (the names) could be to just add a gameplay option to rename the different levels of quality. That way an unsatisfied player could easily give them whichever name that makes them happy. Though I'm sure that a mod could probably easily do this as well.

Given that this feature is one of the most mature ones in the new expansion, I imagine that most of these suggestions, change requests, or table flip responses are unlikely to have any impact on the development/testing/release of the expansion anyways. I trust in Wube and am excited to try whatever you put together for us to continue to enjoy your beautiful game.

[ControlNet]

Good job, I like this idea. The challenge of expanding the factory design to a new quality dimension is fun for me.

I see there are many discussions and debates about that. I don't agree with the idea saying it's about RNG and factories should be deterministic everywhere. Firstly, in a mass-production factory, the expectation of the number produced is deterministic. With the large number of productions, the variance of how much the items are produced is very small based on the law of large numbers. In space exploration mod, there are a lot of recipes containing probabilities such as recycling junk data cards, but it still runs well.

As for the naming, I also don't like this RPG style. The names should be revised.

[Rainbro]

First off, the devs need to convince me of that idea being a great one.
Factorio is about constructing stuff, and setting up reliable factories by engineering on them for days. not about lootboxes. not about a medieval fantasy rpg stuff. Just me, a few dozen cups of tea and an n by m square with premade I/Os for which i have to find a solution.

But since i'm an OG to that game, sure, i'll test anything happily as the other's would too.

Anyhow, i propose these names for the 5-level quality system:
"Functional, Robust, Reimagined, Perfected, Overengineered"

[Z01C]

RNG is fine since it's only random at small scale and at large scale the statistics turn randomness into proportions, just like for nuclear.

My concern is with the intermediate quality levels. Normal quality is fun, Legendary quality is fun, but the inbetween qualities feel like they'd be a chore/nuisance to get out of the way as quickly as possible. The fact that there is a "trap" that must be circumvented ("Later, especially once you unlock recycling, it can be a HUGE trap to try to get too high quality of too many things too early.") is due to a human condition trying to skip over the boring bits, and alarm bells should be ringing that the development is on the wrong path in this regard.

Obviously the names will have to change, they are so terrible it almost feels like The Queen's Duck in Battle Chess.

[DaDrunkCow]

I think quality should be a standalone mod/dlc as it doesn't fit the theme of Space Age and is quite game-changing. I think this would appease the players who dislike quality and allow others to try quality in Vanilla Factorio.

[Tricorius]

RNG is fine since it's only random at small scale and at large scale the statistics turn randomness into proportions, just like for nuclear.

Exactly. At first, and for a very short time it’s random. Over time this becomes probabilistic. It’s a nice addition to pure determinism. I hate beacons. So I don’t use them. I don’t whine on the forums about them.

And, over time, you can feed the proper quality intermediates into things to make it more deterministic.

Obviously the names will have to change, they are so terrible it almost feels like The Queen's Duck in Battle Chess.

Naw. Heaven forbid that Factorio is ever … yanno … fun. I’m sure they will be strings in a data file somewhere. And easily changeable. As people love to throw out at me in the past … there’s a mod for that.

[nadarith]

With some people proposing more fitting naming schemes, but honestly most of them still sound like dungeon rarity names with a more 'modern' coat of paint, how about referencing one of the (i believe) inspirations of factorio? minecraft mekanism mod has tiers for its machines, and they go like this:
Basic, Advanced, Elite and Ultimate

sounds pretty fitting to me, just add something between the last 2 (like Superior)

alternatively you can go full industrial-style with grades like (in no particular order) low-grade, high-grade, military-grade, industrial-grade, aerospace-grade, laboratory-grade etc.

or the safest options: Rough/Low, Basic/Normal/Standard, Fine/High, Very Fine/Very High, Super Fine/Ultra High etc.

they don't need to sound like looter-shooter rarity names at all

[shmooooo]

I want to like it. I really do.

I thought it over in my head and looked at it from multiple angles. I do agree that this will make the development pathways more interesting and give the player many more options.

But I still ended up making this forum account to say that this feature just does. not. fit.

It's very, very hard to articulate why this particular implementation of a quality system (and I do believe there might well be implementations of this idea that "fit" better) feels so out of place in Factorio, but I will endeavor anyway:

"The artist knows that he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

I think Factorio has such a cult following because its core mechanics (not necessarily the content, e.g. mods build on top of those mechanics) have achieved a high "aesthetic density" with the lower possible "aesthetic surface area". The immersive feeling one gets playing the game, the pace of progression, the power ramp, the cognitively-consistent nature of solving local production puzzles and global logistic puzzles, the satisfaction one gets watching the flow of items grow and the angles of belts straighten -- it has a strong sense of tight-knit unity.

The RNG-based quality system runs over this sense of aesthetic unity like a bulldozer. It adds a direction and sense of optimization that conflicts very fundamentally with the core "dopamine pathways" that make the base game "click" so well. Why? I think, I conjecture, I intuit that it is this: The pervasive RNG. Once you introduce the RNG, you turn off the optimizing brain and turn on the lootbox brain. The lootbox brain and the optimizing, problem solving brain are separate little subsystems of your mind, separate dopamine pathways, separate ways of seeking pleasure from a gaming experience, and they do not like each other. One or the other will dominate the gaming experience, and the game will lose its sense of aesthetic unity.

Even not using the feature is not enough, unless it's a map setting. Because your lootbox brain never turns off, it will always be asking you why aren't you using the lootbox mechanic and it will be a distraction. Satisfying gaming experiences can never truly depend on voluntarily avoiding certain features unless done as a unique challenge.

[The Phoenixian]

I'm definitely in the camp that the names need some work.

Much of the basic points been said already, but I do feel like I have something to add to the discussion in that it feels like the naming convention might be well served by looting machining tolerances or computer chip production for jargon, since those are both fields of manufacturing that deal heavily in part quality.

It's iffy how well machining tolerance terminology and "millimeter tolerance" or "nanometer precision" would work for say, a better power pole as opposed to electronics or turbines and engines compared to a more "generic factory quality" naming convention, but renaming conventions to a precision module that produced ever more finely manufactured grades of part at least translates to the intended system of progression pretty well. Up to and including needing technologic breakthroughs to hit the highest levels of quality.

[Roxor128]

The idea is fine. I'll probably end up forgetting all about it, like I do with beacons and modules.

HOWEVER, I absolutely HATE the names! They sound like some crappy mobile game. They've got to go.

Come up with some other scale. Standard, Improved, Good, Excellent, Perfect. Something like that.

Oh, and looking forward to the recycler! Now I can finally get rid of my old boilers when I abandon coal power for solar!

[codestothestars]

I just want to say this an interesting new feature that I'm looking forward to trying out. Any time a machine's speed or efficiency changes, it makes me rethink how I am using it, so getting opportunities to tweak individual objects in this way clearly can open up some new, creative avenues of thinking and possibly even new problems to solve (e.g. a faster assembler is harder to keep satisfied). Having only just learned of this feature, I don't know exactly how or even if I will use it, but it intrigues me in part because it sounds different, and I am interested in features that change up the main Factorio experience. Sometimes I do actually wish the game was a bit less predictable, and experimenting with RNG mechanics is one method that may break up the routine a bit.

I find comparisons to gacha and lootboxes to be ludicrous, as those systems exist to extract money from you as you play, an incentive that obviously is not present here. At worst it will be one of those features that I don't engage with because it doesn't appeal to me personally, and the game already has a few of those. And I'm sorry to people who disagree but seriously, if you dislike this feature so much, you really just need to not use it. I already don't find every feature in the game fun, so I don't use them all. Factorio is a game that you are meant to configure so it works the way you like! And if you really cannot ignore it, I have no doubt someone will make a mod that renders the feature meaningless.

I do agree that the names for the quality levels should be different and maybe more "technical" sounding, or at least not remind me so much of World of Warcraft.

[thermomug]

It would be more intuitive if the first tier of quality just had no symbol/dot at all, meaning "no particular quality". The dots can be viewed rather as badges this way. Also there is no need to explain/argue why the dots of Q1 items are not visible in the world and why the symbols you're seeing in the world start with the two-dotted ones.
Also, it is easier to apply the known tier2color scheme from factorio, assuming we don't get further tiers of belts. It could then look something like this:

factorio-fff-quality.png (34.62 KiB) Viewed 3213 times

[FalseTetrabyte]

All I get from the "Quality" update notice here is that someone somewhere is dissatisfied with making it to end game and finding out that there's not more to it than what it is.

I'm unique in that I enjoy making hybrid bases with 100,000 bots that all work just fine without any of the proposed changes. I'm not out here building fractal designs into my bases (no, that's Abstergent, he's got some PHENOMENAL builds though) but I do scale up production in ways that make my bases look like GPUs and I think that's pretty neat.

As for this... I was considering begging and pleading for someone to get me a copy of the expansion because, you know... ::Curry SPACE.jpg is used here::

Oh well. I guess I'll go see what Coffee Stain is up to these days.