Friday Facts #375 - Quality

[Sunseille]

sup'
i don't like the names of each rarity levels. Normal, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary are too common, if you could find new names this could be very cool.

[morsk]

I agree "bad but optional" is bad marketing for anything. They should focus on how this lets us have upgraded buildings without N*M recipes, which would be too spammy and couldn't happen. The system lets us have a greater variety of upgrades than would be possible otherwise.

And yes there are N*M item types that could take inventory slots, but there will be logistic rules to send them where they belong, so this doesn't happen. With separate recipes, we would need O(N*M) logistic rules; with quality it is simpler.

If they want to use the "optional" line, they can say that putting it in a corner of a mall vs. trying to spread it around is an option. Doing it early vs. later is an option.

[MaxAstro]

Man, what a difference a community makes. XD

I've read through the responses on Steam, and here and in the forums, and it's crazy how night and day it is.

Here on the forums it's mostly "This is interesting", "Here's how I think this could be improved", "I'm not excited about this but I think it could be better".

Meanwhile over on Steam it's "This is awful, how dare you ruin the game", "I want a refund if you implement this", "why do the devs suck so much OMG?!"

XD

Personally my first thought, which I haven't seen anyone else mention, is that this system reminds me of how processors are made IRL. Which makes me wonder if the system maybe shouldn't be reversed: Instead of just creating a base item and sometimes getting higher quality ones, what if you selected a "target quality" and then had a chance, depending on modules, for the crafting to fail or produce lower quality items?

That would almost exactly mirror how processor production works IRL and I think feel slightly less RNG for the player.

[Serenity]

my suggestion for the developer is this, why not seamlessly combine the quality feature with what space travel and extraterrestrial colonisation would bring? New materials from outerspace and other planets could lead to new ingredients that once further processed with existing product will improve its quality. This way the whole quality thing will feel more natural and it is another way to lure players to explore space and control the overall pace of the game: seamless integration of the base game with a space game!

Yeah it's pretty mind boggling that this isn't the way to go. Things shouldn't be as complex as some of the big overhaul mods, but I long wanted some new raw materials. Titanium or aluminum, or something similar. Maybe require some advanced type of ore processing and/or smelting only for that. Quality can come from using gear wheels from a better metal. Not some weird new attribute.

[morsk]

Meanwhile over on Steam it's "This is awful, how dare you ruin the game", "I want a refund if you implement this", "why do the devs suck so much OMG?!"

Steam is dominated by hate-followers who try to get the first reply to a post, so they can get forum icons for being annoying on purpose. The culture is honed in the forums of unreleased games, where it's far worse than this, and spills over into everything else.

It's not only devs who get targeted. I will try to get snarky replies in early if someone makes a thread I think is stupid, and so does everyone else basically, because if we don't do it someone else will. The place is cancer.

[EvanT]

Man, what a difference a community makes. XD

And on YouTube it depends on the reviewers opinion.

The longer i think on it the more I like the concept. Especially a lot more than beacons. And modules.

[RedViper]

Man, what a difference a community makes. XD

I've read through the responses on Steam, and here and in the forums, and it's crazy how night and day it is.

Here on the forums it's mostly "This is interesting", "Here's how I think this could be improved", "I'm not excited about this but I think it could be better".

Meanwhile over on Steam it's "This is awful, how dare you ruin the game", "I want a refund if you implement this", "why do the devs suck so much OMG?!"

XD

Personally my first thought, which I haven't seen anyone else mention, is that this system reminds me of how processors are made IRL. Which makes me wonder if the system maybe shouldn't be reversed: Instead of just creating a base item and sometimes getting higher quality ones, what if you selected a "target quality" and then had a chance, depending on modules, for the crafting to fail or produce lower quality items?

That would almost exactly mirror how processor production works IRL and I think feel slightly less RNG for the player.

I've read trough this entire thread and there's plenty of people here that do not like this, so I think you're misrepresentation the situation.

[DanGio]

This fits Factorio pasta universe better :
- goodo
- neato
- perfecto
- besto
- ultimo

Sorry...

[Splitframe]

This isn't to say that the people who DO express their discontent with the new thing should be ignored, or shouldn't share their (respectfully shared) sentiment, but it is to say that the most vocal will be people who dislike the new.

I have no problem with people voicing their discontent, I just wonder about some of the underlying reasons.
Refinement and RNG has been in Factorio and in the most popular mods for ages so the reason "it's not very Factorio" doesn't really fly.
Same with "so RNG much gacha" since these things just turn to ratios with higher quantities, also qualities can be forced by providing the
right quality source products. So either it's a misunderstand of the FFF or there is another more latent source for feeling bad about the feature.
This doesn't invalidate the criticism, it just makes it harder to follow though.

Man, what a difference a community makes. XD
Meanwhile over on Steam it's "This is awful, how dare you ruin the game", "I want a refund if you implement this", "why do the devs suck so much OMG?!"

Since I happen to like the feature I hope that the disliking party is small and vocal, but the devs will have the
whole picture of responses and will probably decide based on that.

Edit: I'd also like to add that Vanilla Factorio does not try to capture realism(1 iron plate + 3 wires = circuit board ?),
this was even mentioned in a FFF if I recall correctly. There are popular mods that try to approximate more realistic
production chains, so there is an audience for that, but Vanilla Factorio tries to abstract concepts to make them fun to play. And I see the same here.

[madpav3l]

People clearly didn't read the whole thing. This entire system is optional. There's no one with a gun to your head saying you have to use it. Just don't unlock the quality modules and you play the game as if they were never there. Problem solved.

The names need changing 100%, a few suggested name sets are great but do not release this with the generic gacha tier names.

Unlikely to be treated as optional. Would YOU run your factory 100% slower knowing that there is a way to make it go brrr? In my case, I dont have any moral misgivings about cheating a system that wishes to pad out gameplay. No. As I did with the Kovarex enrichment process that produces infinite amounts of U238 so that my nuclear plants can run forever with no form of input control whatsoever, I'll mod my way to 100% legendary components DAY1. I won't see hide nor hair of greens or blues or purples.
Matter of fact, if you bother with those instead of gunning for legendaries immediately, YOU are not only wasting your fictional (ingame) AND actual (your CPU's clock cycles) resources or time, your actually spending watt-hours on no progression AT ALL. Speed Modules Lv3 on Beacons, Prod Lv3 in Assemblers. All of them will be Legendary.

You factory wont go slower because of a feature you dont use it can only go faster, the Quality is only a one way from many that can increase the production of your factory.
And yes, if I end up not liking it, I will not use it. If I do not like some aspect of a game, I just ignore it and enjoy the other parts that I do like. For example Starfield, I can make a ship in the editor or use a premade one, I do not like the editor and will not use it or the settlement system, I do not like it so will not engage with it, plain and simple.

[gravityStar]

I like this idea. Using RNG is good, this encourages the planning of interesting layouts.

My 2 cents for the naming; Crude, Fair, Good, Great, Excellent. But in the end, easily changed; "there's a mod for that".

Higher quality Lamps should illuminate a larger radius?

Cool, great feature, hope to see more!

[UristMcFarmer]

I think the quality system is a bad idea. It's a sign of 'mobilisiation' of the game, adding randomized content just to make a game take more time to complete. By adding this, you're first taking development time away from other features. Second, you're adding to maintenance time. Third, adding something that gives bonuses like this means you've got to scale out the end game to make it more difficult for those who are using the system. This both wastes more dev/planning time as you have to start running projections using multiple dimensions of production and for those of us who won't be using the system, the end game will be needlessly more difficult. Finally, I want to say THIS is NOT how factories work.

[Loewchen]

My 2 cents for the naming; Crude, Fair, Good, Great, Excellent.

I'd go with: Decent, Good, Great, Excellent, Perfect.

[flyomotive]

The idea has potential! I really like it.
But I think you should really consider changing the names... the way it's proposed here just doesn't fit Factorio.

If you keep the colors it will still evoke the familiarity from other games.
Then you can adjust the names to something like:

- "Basic, Enhanced, Refined, Precise, Ultimate" or
- "Crude/Handmade, Standardized, Refined, Optimized, Premium"

There's lots of possibilities here and you could come up with some list of terms that makes it really clear which one is the "better" one on first glance while also keeping with the style of the game and adding to its overall theme/immersion.

[Builder_K]

Just one more comment opposed to this feature.

What I fear most is managing multiple tiers of everything in every inventory. If different quality tiers don't stack, then inventory bloat will be crazy. But different-quality items do stack, then inventories will be missing information or else be too densely packed with information.


Addressing some of the common opinions:

• "Checked if this was April 1st" <- yup.

• "Feels like Kovarex everywhere" <- definitely.

• "It's completely optional, you can simply choose to play without it"
  Now this, I totally disagree with. If the best factories/setups all use the highest-quality-everything, then I will use the highest-quality-everything. Players are notoriously good at doing the least-fun thing, just because it's the most efficient. If you've ever spent an hour in an RPG sitting in one place to farm XP, you will absolutely rebuild your whole factory with a mechanic you hate.

I consider factorio to be a very elegant game, but this mechanic doesn't feel refined at all.

[morhp]

What I fear most is managing multiple tiers of everything in every inventory. If different quality tiers don't stack, then inventory bloat will be crazy.

Unless you press F while standing on a belt of a quality-booster factory section, I don't see how you would end up with tons of different quality items. Also quality is a late game feature, so you could easily robot-trash items of undesired quality automatically.

[MaxAstro]

I've read trough this entire thread and there's plenty of people here that do not like this, so I think you're misrepresentation the situation.

It's not that there aren't plenty of people who don't like it, it's that the people here who don't like it are making long posts about the specific aspects they don't like and how it could be improved, or at least making rational posts that just sum up to "I think this is a bad idea and isn't for me".

Over on Steam you literally have people proclaiming that they will never play Factorio again if this feature is implemented. XD

[Zaflis]

What I fear most is managing multiple tiers of everything in every inventory. If different quality tiers don't stack, then inventory bloat will be crazy.

Unless you press F while standing on a belt of a quality-booster factory section, I don't see how you would end up with tons of different quality items. Also quality is a late game feature, so you could easily robot-trash items of undesired quality automatically.

And since you do probably only start using quality after getting logistics bots, they can fill your inventory so you don't have to pick them from belts.

[RocketManChronicles]

It says that it will be "invisible". What I don't understand is whether I'll get the items with different stats regardless or not.

You only get higher quality items if you have quality modules in your machine.

It's a shame they wasted development time for such a "feature" but if it's really optional then all is good.

Circuit Network left the chat.

[Atraps003]

• "Feels like Kovarex everywhere" <- definitely.

A Kovarex-like process for the majority of all ingame items is a horrible idea. What are you guys thinking?

Do you even play the game? Kovarex enrichment process has zero rng. It's not like quality at all.

This is not complexity, its just a tedious resource sink and a pointless drain on UPS.

Worker robot speed 50 is an even bigger "tedious" resource sink and "pointless" ups drain.