Friday Facts #375 - Quality

[garrotte]

Didn't expect such ordinary boring mechanics from other games. Why can't some mod do it instead? Pls just add more properties and mechanics in modules and people will do the rest in their crazy unbalanced mods for those who like it.
Need more new entities with interesting logics - for player, for enemy, for neutral objects. Just do what you did before, like you did before and keep it up.
For example, draw new enemies.

[NAD4X4]

i cant wait to play with this new mechanic and automate getting better stuff.

from what i understand the main bus/factory will be the same as it is now and all the science build's wont be producing better quality items. however, you will have a small side factory/mall where all the new higher quality intermediates will be producing and the aim will be getting legendary circuits, gears, plates etc - this will be where the recycling comes in. you will then uses those legendary ingredients to make legendary assemblers, power poles, turrets, ammo etc. as the ingredients are higher quality it should be quite easy to make a mall using them to improve your main factory with higher quality machines. its another way of improving the productivity and speed, and new layout options etc, of our builds. i dont think the main factory and bus will be a mess of different quality items as some fear. its just better 'tools' to make the main factory out of which can be calculated and predicted, just my guess/opinion.

[Pirate_Rance]

About RNG:
[...]

If you still cannot stand it, imagine the assembling machine that's outputting items of higher quality is only outputting the higher quality items. Not any trash. With a ratio of 10%, it's not outputting one desired item per second, it's outputting one desired item per 10 seconds.

Why couldn't the system have just been designed like this then, instead of dealing with the RNG and recycling waste?

In real manufacturing, a company attempting to produce a high end product is not going to design an assembly line that only produces said high end product 10% of the time, requiring recycling of the rest.

I can now with 100% certainty know you have never worked or been near manufacturing.
There is something called acceptable tolerance, this is the allowable error on a part to still be within acceptable standard.
Generally the products produced are 95 to 99% within those allowed parameters.
Of those 95 to 99% maybe up to 15% would classify as PERFECT if even that high.
Depending on the product production quota determines how allowable these parameters are. (low quota means higher precision requirements)
Of the Failed to meet tolerance very few are able to be recovered the rest are considered FACTORY WASTE. This is accounted for in the accounting of the company as allowable waste.
Thus if we wanted to use a IRL in the game all recipes should have a 5% fail rate and generate waste that needs to be recycled.

[mmmPI]

I can now with 100% certainty know you have never worked or been near manufacturing.

I can understand from that statement that statistic and interval for certainty is not something you use properly

[Pirate_Rance]

I can now with 100% certainty know you have never worked or been near manufacturing.

I can understand from that statement that statistic and interval for certainty is not something you use properly

Look up what I said.. or just not do anything and blame me for pointing out IRL information your choice

[KuuLightwing]

I can now with 100% certainty know you have never worked or been near manufacturing.
There is something called acceptable tolerance, this is the allowable error on a part to still be within acceptable standard.
Generally the products produced are 95 to 99% within those allowed parameters.
Of those 95 to 99% maybe up to 15% would classify as PERFECT if even that high.
Depending on the product production quota determines how allowable these parameters are. (low quota means higher precision requirements)
Of the Failed to meet tolerance very few are able to be recovered the rest are considered FACTORY WASTE. This is accounted for in the accounting of the company as allowable waste.
Thus if we wanted to use a IRL in the game all recipes should have a 5% fail rate and generate waste that needs to be recycled.

I mean that's not the same as having the system randomly spit out products that are suddenly 30% or even 60% better at everything.

That said, I think realism argument is not all that interesting, as Factorio only uses broad inspirations from real life, rather than trying to replicate real processes in details. It could play a certain role, so it shouldn't be discounted entirely, but I think it's not super important

Like I said earlier, I wouldn't mind this process being in the game in general as a part of some production chain, I just don't like it being broadly applied to every machine and item as an ultimate solution to producing better machines.

I think modules and beacons were a more interesting take on vertical scaling, although that system is not ideal either. I just think it was a more interesting direction.

[mmmPI]

I can now with 100% certainty know you have never worked or been near manufacturing.

I can understand from that statement that statistic and interval for certainty is not something you use properly

Look up what I said.. or just not do anything and blame me for pointing out IRL information your choice

I meant that you say "100% certainty" when it's just something you call out of nowhere , that's not how statistic works, you have no data on the thing you mention.

Your use of statistic is inapropriate that's not how you achieve 100% certainty on something. That's what i wanted to blame you for sorry if it was not clear.

[ilikegoodfood]

On a different note, the all caps yelling by the developer comes across, to me, as extremely unproffesional.

Stop posting blatant lies!
Where did this happen? Provide a link.

A mistake is not the same as a lie.

I double checked, and the person I was refering to was not, in-fact, a dev. I missread their user name. I have edited the original post.
Apologies, to everyone, but especially to the devs who I wrongly acused, for the mistake.

[Tricorius]

Ooft this was a divisive feature! For anyone around when they added bots and beacons and modules, were they equally divisive? I got this game after all those things were in place.

Hahahahahahahhahahahaha :: deep breath :: hahahahahahahahah.

You *still* occasionally hear someone say how cheaty bots are because they avoid the “belt puzzle” that is the “core of Factorio”.

I was on the opposite side when they said they were removing bots. I love my bots.

But everyone told me “a mod will put them back”.

So here y'all go. Don't like quality. I'm sure a mod will remove it. I guarantee you this feature is here to stay.

I should clarify, it was only logistics bots. Not all bots:

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-224

[shmooooo]

I think the "it's optional" defense is really weak for the following reason:

It's psychologically unsatisfying to play games where you have to consciously avoid using available features that will make the game easier but less satisfying.

Part of the thrill of problem-solving games is constantly being on the hunt for new stuff you haven't discovered yet, new tricks. If there are features you're not using it's going to flood that part of you brain with the "can we just use quality for this? can we just use quality for this?". Even challenge modes such as no solar, no bots are still defined by those features you are not using because the game is balanced around them (and frankly I consider it extremely unlikely that both the quality and no quality modes will be equally balanced and polished), and a lot of other people's solutions and ideas center on them, so you're always thinking about how to work around the limitations. There's no way to truly turn such a big feature "off" in your head.

Also, truly unpopular optional features will fragment the community. If half the players use quality and half don't, then instantly half of the content, blueprints, videos, etc., will become uninteresting to the other half.

Aesthetic and functional unity -- using all the features and having them all play together -- is an integral component of immersive gaming experiences.

Games are meant to be fun and immersive; optional features take away from that fun even when not being used.

With that said, I doubt quality will truly fragment the community. I suspect people will get used to it and life will go on; but with the feature as is, a little bit of the "magic" of the game will be lost imho.

[Necronium]

We could really say the same to this criticism that people tell it is constructive but nothing really comes out of it. Really people are creating problems and call it criticism, you are disingenuous yourself.

It's a fair point that criticism kind of leads to wall of text, so it's harder to extract the gist of it. I guess I could boil my specific criticism to this: it's a big feature that changes a lot of components, but doesn't lead to entirely new types of complexity like circuits and to lesser extent beacons did. Let's not kid ourselves, people will stamp down a bunch of item distillery blueprints and that's it. It's conductive to grinding out a bigger and more efficient factory, but does not add a new dimension to the game the way circuits did.

It isnt even that big of a feature. Novbody is selling it as that a whole new gameplay in kind of circuits, trains or anything else. It was stated that it is another resource sink that you can make fun with and get something in return and it is entierly optional to use.

[Necronium]

When people are crying that there is % to some recipe most people will go and automate it and then assemblers will go brrrr cause they dont care about it.

Except, again, there's only one recipe in the game that has this and the way people deal with it is by bypassing it with the later research. And there absolutely were complaints about it when it first came out, but the devs decided to leave it in anyway. Eventually people either leave or just deal with it, correct, but that doesn't make the complaints any less valid.

People are doing what they want but both recipes in uranium process are needed and they focusing on different things. We wanted to get more of whats Factorio already had and we got it now. Devs copied and expanded uranium processing to other items. And people will always complain about something but it doesnt meant that devs should listen to taht. We get uranium chain and it is working fine and it is optional. Now we get excatly same thing for other items but this time rather power production we can get new toys.

[mmmPI]

It's psychologically unsatisfying to play games where you have to consciously avoid using available features that will make the game easier but less satisfying.

I would like to point the "lazy bastard " achievement, or the one for not using robots as fun counter-example, where you consciously avoid using available feature as a limitation to further boost creativity. I'm not sure that apply for not researching the quality modules, but as it was mentionned earlier as example i don't think it's frustrating not to use coal-liquefaction, or not to use nuclear power, sometimes it just happen to be the case that's it's not part of the things i need to achieve my objective, or i have something else i want to use, if the quality feature takes only this much room in a game where i don't want to see it because i focus on other things it will not be psychologically unsastisfying for me.

[FuryoftheStars]

About RNG:
[...]

If you still cannot stand it, imagine the assembling machine that's outputting items of higher quality is only outputting the higher quality items. Not any trash. With a ratio of 10%, it's not outputting one desired item per second, it's outputting one desired item per 10 seconds.

Why couldn't the system have just been designed like this then, instead of dealing with the RNG and recycling waste?

In real manufacturing, a company attempting to produce a high end product is not going to design an assembly line that only produces said high end product 10% of the time, requiring recycling of the rest.

Well, there is GPU and CPU manufacturing, which is among the highest technology level mankind has achieved today. There is a certain yield for CPU manufacturing. If TSMC has a yield of 80%, this means they can trash 20% of their produced CPUs, because they''re broken. As far as I know, today's GPUs and CPUs are divided in modules internally, and if one of the module is broken, not the whole CPU is broken. You can still sell it as one tier lower. Look in GPU production: the perfect AD106 chip with no broken module is sold as RTX 4070 Ti. With some (broken) modules disabled, it's sold as RTX 4070.

Yes, though as I said, they're not going to be producing a product that they expect to rebrand and sell as a lower tier product 90% of the time. Depending on what breaks/is subpar, I can totally see them rebranding an RTX 4070 Ti as an RTX 4070. But these are likely to be a (relatively) small fraction of the RTX 4070 Tis and they will have a dedicated RTX 4070 production line as well. It doesn't make good business financial sense to target making a super high end product that only succeeds 10% of the time.

-------------------------------------

I can now with 100% certainty know you have never worked or been near manufacturing.
There is something called acceptable tolerance, this is the allowable error on a part to still be within acceptable standard.
Generally the products produced are 95 to 99% within those allowed parameters.
Of those 95 to 99% maybe up to 15% would classify as PERFECT if even that high.
Depending on the product production quota determines how allowable these parameters are. (low quota means higher precision requirements)
Of the Failed to meet tolerance very few are able to be recovered the rest are considered FACTORY WASTE. This is accounted for in the accounting of the company as allowable waste.
Thus if we wanted to use a IRL in the game all recipes should have a 5% fail rate and generate waste that needs to be recycled.

1. Most factory production processes have an advertised spec with +/- tolerances. Depending on what's being manufactured, anything that comes off the assembly line that can't be made to fit these specs they either scrap, or they rebrand and sell it as a lower grade product. They attempt to minimize this, though, as this is actually a loss of potential profits for them.

2. What you describe is the tolerances of a specific product / grade of product. This is not the same as what the devs are doing with Quality where the quality tiers go up by 30% intervals (except the last which goes up by 60%). Any real world production line that has a fault tolerance of +/- 75% (+0% "normal" to +150% "legendary") is producing a crappy low end product and just because some of them manage to hit the higher end of the tolerance doesn't make them better quality.
3. I've worked as IT for manufacturing companies for the past 14 years. While I am not neck deep in the actual manufacturing process (how they do what they actually do), I am responsible for the software that controls and tracks all of it. As such, I have always been involved to a level to know about the various products the companies produced, the grade variances of said products (<- this is where the dev's current Quality model would fall), and the spec tolerances for each grade. I've also always been involved in the processes around what to do with those things that fall outside of the specs for the same reasons (for most of these, it was immediately scrap and recycle).

All of that said, I honestly feel like you're here to argue for the sake of arguing as each time you post it's in an attempt to bash on someone and to put them down. As such, unless you have anything further to say that's actually constructive, I'm not going to bother with replying as I feel like this has been spiraling down the drain long enough.

-------------------------------------

People are doing what they want but both recipes in uranium process are needed and they focusing on different things. We wanted to get more of whats Factorio already had and we got it now. Devs copied and expanded uranium processing to other items. And people will always complain about something but it doesnt meant that devs should listen to taht. We get uranium chain and it is working fine and it is optional. Now we get excatly same thing for other items but this time rather power production we can get new toys.

The uranium related process is one small thing in the whole of the game. Quality appears to be a much larger feature than that, thus has a much larger impact.

[RTC]

2nd. How to control the Quality? If you cannot restrict upper or lower limits to quality then it may become a mess worse than sushi spagetti belt.

just don't put quality modules in places where you don't want quality items to appear.
you don't magically get random quality items everywhere, you have to actively decide "i want random quality items to be made at this machine" and put quality modules in place for anything to happen at all.

[TheBuzzSaw]

I like one suggestion I heard for the names: just use a simple numbering system with roman numerals. Tier I, Tier II, Tier III, Tier IV, and Tier V.

[Vector6]

When people are crying that there is % to some recipe most people will go and automate it and then assemblers will go brrrr cause they dont care about it.

Except, again, there's only one recipe in the game that has this and the way people deal with it is by bypassing it with the later research. And there absolutely were complaints about it when it first came out, but the devs decided to leave it in anyway. Eventually people either leave or just deal with it, correct, but that doesn't make the complaints any less valid.

People are doing what they want but both recipes in uranium process are needed and they focusing on different things. We wanted to get more of whats Factorio already had and we got it now. Devs copied and expanded uranium processing to other items. And people will always complain about something but it doesnt meant that devs should listen to taht. We get uranium chain and it is working fine and it is optional. Now we get excatly same thing for other items but this time rather power production we can get new toys.

Except uranium takes your entire argument behind the woodshed: the existence of kovarex proves how important determinism is to the game. The entire U-235 chain would be significantly less useful if all we got was a trashcan to clear up the system. Quality is both significantly more complex and wider ranging, but completely lacks any mechanism to put a lid on the slot machine.

This accomplishes nothing that researches and recipes wouldn't accomplish better.

[Picks]

Not sure if it's been brought up yet (haven't read all 28 pages yet) but do we really have to have the usual suspects of "common", "uncommon", "rare", "epic" and "legendary"? Can you not do something else - something that makes sense in a manufacturing setting? The idea of a "legendary" cog is ridiculous. What kind of legends would a cog generate, especially in a setting where there will be thousands to millions of them being made. A "perfect" cog makes more sense. "standard", "good", "great", "excellent" and "perfect" is just an example. "mastercrafted" if you want some flair. Also, kinda feels like it's time to retire the white, green, blue, purple, orange color coding.

I'll read the other 28 pages of comments now and see if it's been brought up. Also, I didn't see any mention in the blog about the devs intending to change the titles. Good news for me if they already stated it's temporary labelling they're using.

Edit; Okay, so six posts in it's adddressed. Good to know I'm on the same wavelength as others. Hope it gets addressed.

[Khagan]

Most factory production processes have an advertised spec with +/- tolerances. Depending on what's being manufactured, anything that comes off the assembly line that can't be made to fit these specs they either scrap, or they rebrand and sell it as a lower grade product.

As a specific example, basic electrical components (resistors, capacitors, etc.) are sold as a standard value with a percentage tolerance (anything from 0.1% to 20%). Obviously, lower tolerance components are sold for a higher price, but the different tolerances are usually made on the same production line and post-selected based on how close they are to the target value. A tech I knew once needed a 1% tolerance resistor for some particular job. He didn't have one, but did have a whole box of 10% tolerance ones. He figured that a random spread of 10% should contain some within the 1% window, so went through the box, measuring each resistor, to find one. There were none: the manufacturer had already done what he was hoping to do.

[Khagan]

I cannot express how much i feel a visceral sense of boredom and frustration just reading about it, knowing that if I want to make legendary robots I need to set up a recycler loop for:

• The bots
  The frames
  Electric Engines
  Normal Engines
  Gears
  Batteries
  Sulphuric acid (I doubt liquids will have qualities right?)
  Sulphur
  Steel Beams
  Red Circuits
  Green Circuits
  Iron Plates
  Plastic Bars
  Copper Cable
  Copper Plates
  and Pipes

You will only need a recycling loop at any one level of construction. If you choose to do it at a low level, so that you have top-quality basic ingredients, then everything made from those ingredients will be top-quality automatically. Conversely, if you choose to do it at the final stage (the bots themselves), then you will only need ordinary ingredients at all the previous levels.