Please, DO NOT remove space casino

[LongShot338]

I posit that the number of people who react with "But how are we supposed to get quality items?!?!?!" is fairly solid evidence the existence of space casino is harming the game.

No one is saying that. It's doesn't even make sense that anyone would say that, reprocessing doesn't work for several items. Anyone one that has worked with quality knows that. The argument against the change is that upcycling is boring. With casinos you still have to build upcycling, you just also get to build a ship that saves you from having to brute force basic stuff.
The people that want the change are willing to put in thousands of hours. Normal people with hundreds are completely unwilling to grind that much for some better but unnecessary late game items, I can already one shot a large pentapod. I beat 1.0 once and I'm done with aquilo on 2.0. I'm going after quality just for the hell of it and will make a run for the shattered planet. If it was all upcycling I wouldve just moved on to modulus, shapez, or any number of new factory games. This change is for the diehard megabasers, not the average player.

[LongShot338]

I also do want space casinos removed. I get to build a cool ship and shift late game resource extraction to space. I have no desire to pursue quality through other means. I already have to brute force and upcycle planet specific items, how is making me do it for basic items fun or a different challenge?
A reasonable compromise might be reducing the modules to one. Another compromise might be a pop up saying that legendary achievements will be disabled if I drop a quality module into a crusher and give the option to abort. I don't mod. I'm not going to mod. I also shouldn't have to mod just because I thinking building a space ship that refines astroids into high quality ore is more fun the building more brute force upcycle loops.

[Leex2k]

No one is saying that. It's doesn't even make sense that anyone would say that, reprocessing doesn't work for several items. Anyone one that has worked with quality knows that. The argument against the change is that upcycling is boring. With casinos you still have to build upcycling, you just also get to build a ship that saves you from having to brute force basic stuff.
The people that want the change are willing to put in thousands of hours. Normal people with hundreds are completely unwilling to grind that much for some better but unnecessary late game items, I can already one shot a large pentapod. I beat 1.0 once and I'm done with aquilo on 2.0. I'm going after quality just for the hell of it and will make a run for the shattered planet. If it was all upcycling I wouldve just moved on to modulus, shapez, or any number of new factory games. This change is for the diehard megabasers, not the average player.

If you think upcycling is boring and recycling is exciting, then continue to do recycling. You can still build a platform and create a space casino. No one has expressed that the overarching approach of a space casino should be removed because someone is having too much fun with it. That's just as asinine an accusation to throw as saying space casino players are "mad because they can't exploit anymore".. Neither need to be true to make a decision about game balance.
The decision to prevent quality modules in asteroid reprocessing specifically is clearly because the return is way, way too high for what is intended with recycling for quality.
Like, is it maybe more a matter of disliking the look of recyclers instead of crushers?

[MRI-One]

You can still do a space casino with the basic crushing recipes, at 300% productivity research they also return 80% of their input chunks. Yes, it is annoying to have to redesign your ship around needing to deal with the extra junk, but it is doable. The only issue is that you need level 30 crushing research to get it fully back, and that is significantly more expensive than level 13/15 you need for perfect LDS/blue circuit loops. If crushing research would give 12.5% bonus per level instead, so level 24 would suffice, it would be much better balanced.

I doubt kovarex much cares about balance beyond 100h of normal game play, and I think the change is mostly because the loop is already fully viable at zero research level, and provides good output even with rare quality 2 modules, which you can then soon upgrade. So the problem was not that it is too powerful in the end, but too easy to spin up.

[radical_larry]

The decision to prevent quality modules in asteroid reprocessing specifically is clearly because the return is way, way too high for what is intended with recycling for quality.

Are you sure about that?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... id=0#gid=0
Here's a chart with some data. Compare this to https://dfamonteiro.com/posts/factorio- ... recycling/
With legendary modules in both setups, the intended(tm) way of using something like EM plants + recyclers yields almost 4 times as many legendary resources per common input resource compared to a space casino. Cryoplants are more than 7 times as good.
EM plants also quickly become 100% efficient after some blue chip prod research. Removing quality modules from the reprocessing recipe means that you need to research ALL 40 levels of asteroid productivity to get that 2% legendary chunk conversion rate back, which was already pretty low compared to this standard method.
They didn't slightly nerf space casinos, they effectively removed them from the game in any capacity. Now it is strictly better to grind stuff on planets into higher quality materials at any point in the game.
I will keep believing this nerf is a knee-jerk reaction driven by people being mad about space casinos existing until someone comes forth with some numbers on how they are overpowered in any way compared to other methods in game. All I've read is that people feel like they're overpowered because they see everyone using them. Even more confusing is how the devs started believing this crowd of people when they should know better.

[quineotio]

I'm in a straight betwixt two, but I feel like it's a "speak now or forever hold your peace" type situation.

In the world generally we're seeing a disconnect between governments and citizens. There's a feeling that governments are not listening to people and don't understand the problems that ordinary citizens face. And this disconnect is inflamed by the information imbalance between the rulemakers and the ruled. The people who make the rules generally have far more information and know much more about the constraints that governments are under, and are subject to considerations that don't occur to most people.

But the ordinary person has to actually live in the reality that is created by the rulemakers. They are the ones who are most directly effected by any laws that are put in place by the government. And thus they have insights that the rulemakers cannot ever have, even though they may lack the ability to properly express themselves, or may make errors when making suggestions based on their limited knowledge of how government actually works.

You can apply the same logic to game design. Developers know far more about the inner workings of a game than the players. But players have collectively poured FAR more hours into the game than the developers. And after a game has been out for a while, individual players may have played the game for longer than any of the developers, especially if you consider that much of the playtime of a developer happens before the game is released and is therefore not experience of the released game.

And it's often the case that seemingly good ideas turn out to be bad ideas once put into practice. And sometimes a developer doesn't actually understand the game they're making - they think they're making one thing but then players take it in a completely different direction - sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. Expectations =/= reality.

There are players who have played through the entire of SA multiple times with different rulesets, different approaches, different planet orders etc. They don't necessarily understand how the systems work from a technical standpoint, but I don't doubt that some people have played more SA than the developers since it's been released. Which doesn't mean their ideas are better, but how much would you have to pay a playtester to get this feedback?

As an artist, there's always a balance between doing something for yourself and doing something for your audience. Listening too much to players can be detrimental, because many (if not most) players don't have a good grasp of the big picture, are not experienced, are selfish, shortsighted, or have some other shortcoming. Listening to the majority doesn't work either, because the average opinion is rarely the best.

But being entirely selfish is disrespectful, and ignoring feedback means ignoring insights from people who may have more experience than you, and perhaps have a valuable perspective that can make your game better. So how should a developer consider their role once a game has been released? It has to be a balance, surely. There are problems with being too extreme in any direction - with being too dictatorial or too laissez-faire.

I acknowledge that when an audience grows, it becomes harder to have a back and forth conversation, because the number of people in the audience is far greater than the number of developers. And every word and action from the developer can be analyzed, misinterpreted and taken out of context. So you can find yourself in an endless spiral of trying to explain and justify decisions and never please everybody. But if you communicate too little that also leads to problems - people feel disrespected. And what's the point in leaving feedback if you don't get a response - you've just killed an important step in the feedback loop.

I acknowledge that a lot of the feedback you get to your FFF posts is cringe worthy. Maybe you think this about my feedback. But it has to be acknowledged that poor feedback is in part your fault. You have to educate/train your audience, both in the justifications for particular decisions and in the type of feedback that is valuable. It's supposed to be a feedback LOOP.

For example, I might make suggestion "X" and a developer might say, "suggestion X would cause the following problems". I can then say, "I didn't think about that, but how about if it was implemented in this way instead"? And so on. But if there's no feedback from the developer the suggestion just sits as, "this is a bad suggestion by someone who doesn't understand". A general attitude I've seen from Wube is dismissive, with comments such as, "people reported bugs that were actually features" and "*scoff* why would we do it that when when you can just use this undocumented feature" etc.

Factorio is a game with a million undocumented features, which is a blessing and a curse. It's a complex game. Without the community it would be very difficult to learn how to play it. I understand that we, the players, are also disrespectful - especially in the light of the large amount of hard work (and it's mostly good work) the developers do, but you have to acknowledge that players generally are an emotional bunch when it comes to feedback. But it's not our job - we don't get paid. If you don't cultivate good feedback, people won't bother.

It also has to be acknowledged that a single disliked feature/change can sour a person's experience with the entire game, no matter how much good work has been done in other areas.

The space casino conversation is one example of what I consider to be poor communication from Wube. There was a post on discord a while ago from one of the developers which then provoked a conversation, partially on reddit but also on these (official) forums. Why was there no official communication when this happened? Why were people left out of the loop? You knew people were talking about it. And why are developers talking about game design stuff on discord and not on the official forums, where everyone can see? It comes across as nepotism - some people are worthy and others aren't.

I understand that if you've found people who you enjoy communicating with, who provide good feedback and are friendly, it's easier to just talk to them and ignore the "rabble". But there's also the idea that ideas need to be tried in the furnace of the public discourse. You need people with no stake in maintaining a personal relationship/access to tell you what they really think. You've kinda ruined the youtube factorio community by creating a conflict of interests - inviting some to the beta and giving some early 2.1 access. There used to be speculation and discussion, but now there's just positivity and "I can't say any more". Lame.

Another point is that there's a difference between engineers and community managers. These are two different roles. Engineers are good at communicating engineering ideas, which is why the technical FFF are so good. But public relations is a completely different skillset. The same can be said of management and engineering. And game design and engineering. It makes sense that an engineer would response with "no" or "won't implement" or some other blunt thing, but it comes across as rude to the general public. Wube definitely come across as a bunch of engineers, for better and worse. It's a well engineered game. Something to consider moving forward.

SA has a lot of good things in it, and there are a lot of admirable design choices. But far out, there are some things that are really perplexing to me. From my perspective, SA could be twice as good with a relatively small amount of work, and the only explanation that I can come to to explain why things are the way they are is because the developers at Wube want to enforce particular playstyles and deny others. And I don't understand the logic.

I understand the concept of unbalanced things negating other things, but this concept can be taken too far. I won't give an exhaustive list, but a few examples to explain what I mean.

Space casinos have been deemed to be too powerful, but stacking thrusters is in the game. This is clearly not intentional.

Belt weaving to collect promethium chunks to bypass the spoil time on biter eggs is clearly not the intended way of making promethium science, and stacking underground belts is just weird to begin with.

But using ablative platform designs with mines is not intended and it was quickly removed. What's the logic?

To be clear, I'm not advocating that strategies that people enjoy be removed. Why should I care? I am free to play in whatever way I find fun. Except that in certain cases I'm NOT free to play in whatever way I find fun, because for some reason it's not the intended way. In other posts I have given examples, and I can again if asked. But long story short, I don't care if it's intended or not, I only care if it's fun.

Space casinos are to OP? Well... some people play the game entirely by importing blueprints made by other players. Doesn't this "just make any other approaches... obsolete"? Some people give up at blue science because they find it too difficult. Some people give up at Gleba. But something that you can only do after finishing the game is too strong? I don't understand the priorities. I've made suggestions how to improve the difficulty cliff at Gleba btw, I can repeat those suggestions if you ask.

A point I want to make is that once a game has been released, it doesn't belong solely to you any more. It is now a shared thing between you and the world. I don't like the attitude that some ways are intended and some ways are not. You are providing a tool that can be enjoyed in many different ways, and I don't understand the harm in facilitating other people's enjoyment, even if that comes at the expense of your personal preferences. It's like telling a chef to not cook steaks well done because you personally like them medium rare. Why do you care?

You have the option to create a specific "intended experience" if you so desire. You've already taken steps in this direction by restricting achievements to certain settings. But it doesn't cost you anything to open up the game in a less restricted sandbox mode. You've spent a lot of time facilitating mods, so the idea that people enjoy the game in different ways is not new. But while mods are good to have, having to rely on third party add-ons is not ideal. I don't expect every mod to become an official option, but I think there could be more choice than there currently is, especially as an alternative to removing things that people find fun.

I don't like that I feel so negative toward you, Wube, and to SA. There's so much good here - it's one of the best games of all time. But I resent the way you've handled things, and I'm frustrated by certain choices you've made which I can't rationalize in a good way.

Quality, for example. The impression I get is that is was a pet project that has a gotten a lot of negativity toward it, and that you're bitter about it, and rather than address the issue you've gone silent for 1.5 years. I might be wrong, but this is the impression. Which is a shame, because it's a good idea, and I think there are a lot of ways to improve it and make it work. Maybe you've got some things to reveal in the upcoming FFFs. But regardless, your communication could have been better (although I do understand that the feedback surrounding it has been particularly poor with a lot of misunderstanding).

But I repeat, I don't like that I feel negative, even as you're revealing a bunch of cool changes/additions in 2.1. I don't want there to be antagonism between Wube and players. If I didn't care I wouldn't say anything.

I understand that you still have some things to reveal. Maybe you have good things coming that will alleviate my concerns. But if not, I hope you change your mind about finishing development at 2.1 and spend a little time opening up the game with additional options, which I would be happy to discuss with you on the forums. The type of thing I'm talking about is removing building restrictions and allowing inserters to remove items from cargo bays (which is not OP, there are options and solutions).

[Hurkyl]

The decision to prevent quality modules in asteroid reprocessing specifically is clearly because the return is way, way too high for what is intended with recycling for quality.

Are you sure about that?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... id=0#gid=0
Here's a chart with some data. Compare this to https://dfamonteiro.com/posts/factorio- ... recycling/
With legendary modules in both setups, the intended(tm) way of using something like EM plants + recyclers yields almost 4 times as many legendary resources per common input resource compared to a space casino. Cryoplants are more than 7 times as good.
EM plants also quickly become 100% efficient after some blue chip prod research. Removing quality modules from the reprocessing recipe means that you need to research ALL 40 levels of asteroid productivity to get that 2% legendary chunk conversion rate back, which was already pretty low compared to this standard method.
They didn't slightly nerf space casinos, they effectively removed them from the game in any capacity. Now it is strictly better to grind stuff on planets into higher quality materials at any point in the game.
I will keep believing this nerf is a knee-jerk reaction driven by people being mad about space casinos existing until someone comes forth with some numbers on how they are overpowered in any way compared to other methods in game. All I've read is that people feel like they're overpowered because they see everyone using them. Even more confusing is how the devs started believing this crowd of people when they should know better.

People are pretty bad at explaining and I too am not sure what specifically they believe the problem is, but I think the allegation with merit is, if any, one or both of:

• Upcycling with asteroid reprocessing has too broad a coverage. Because you make base resource, and all of the base resources, this single loop covers everything that doesn't require specialty resources, and furthermore shoves you into "upcycle the specialty resources to be paired with the stream of legendary base materials" rather than any other paradigm.
• The asteroid production chain has too big of a multiplier on your efforts (especially with productivity research).

And, incidentally, I too am really puzzled as to why they didn't do anything about being able to exploit liquid-to-solid alternate recipes in the foundry; maybe they have some other trick up their sleeve to be revealed in a later FFF? (I can, at least, understand why it would be difficult to find a good way to nerf the blue circuit issue)

[radical_larry]

People are pretty bad at explaining and I too am not sure what specifically they believe the problem is, but I think the allegation with merit is, if any, one or both of:

• Upcycling with asteroid reprocessing has too broad a coverage. Because you make base resource, and all of the base resources, this single loop covers everything that doesn't require specialty resources, and furthermore shoves you into "upcycle the specialty resources to be paired with the stream of legendary base materials" rather than any other paradigm.
• The asteroid production chain has too big of a multiplier on your efforts (especially with productivity research).

And, incidentally, I too am really puzzled as to why they didn't do anything about being able to exploit liquid-to-solid alternate recipes in the foundry; maybe they have some other trick up their sleeve to be revealed in a later FFF? (I can, at least, understand why it would be difficult to find a good way to nerf the blue circuit issue)

You simply explained what a space casino is, you provided no actual metric by which it is better than grinding quality on planets, let alone so much better that it warrants a nerf. Instead you're talking about how everything should have been nerfed. What do you even mean by 'blue circuit issue' or 'liquid to solid exploit'? Do you want everything removed from the game that allows people to mass produce quality items?

[Hurkyl]

People are pretty bad at explaining and I too am not sure what specifically they believe the problem is, but I think the allegation with merit is, if any, one or both of:

• Upcycling with asteroid reprocessing has too broad a coverage. Because you make base resource, and all of the base resources, this single loop covers everything that doesn't require specialty resources, and furthermore shoves you into "upcycle the specialty resources to be paired with the stream of legendary base materials" rather than any other paradigm.
• The asteroid production chain has too big of a multiplier on your efforts (especially with productivity research).

And, incidentally, I too am really puzzled as to why they didn't do anything about being able to exploit liquid-to-solid alternate recipes in the foundry; maybe they have some other trick up their sleeve to be revealed in a later FFF? (I can, at least, understand why it would be difficult to find a good way to nerf the blue circuit issue)

You simply explained what a space casino is,

Huh? A space casino is a platform filled with entities to do an upcycling operation, not a list of balance allegations.

you provided no actual metric by which it is better than grinding quality on planets, let alone so much better that it warrants a nerf.

I'm saying that these are the metrics that are relevant to the allegations of imbalance. The ratio of common input to legendary output is a nice metric to consider -- one I also care about a lot -- and I agree that anyone that says asteroid reprocessing scores high in that metric is flat out wrong.

But that is not the only metric that matters to gameplay. I was trying to be informative about the other metrics people seem to be using to judge that it needs a nerf.

And I do not assert one way or another whether space casino is actually bad enough to warrant a nerf; I have to leave that judgement to the devs and more experienced players. My own knowledge is mostly at the point you bring up: observing that it does not have an excessively high output:input ratio, but I have not played with it enough to have an opinion on whether the allegations I mention do or do not have merit.

(note that there is also a discussion going on where people are not arguing "it's not powerful enough to be a balance issue" but are instead arguing "game balance is not a reason to nerf something" and that's mostly the one I'm involved in)

What do you even mean by 'blue circuit issue' or 'liquid to solid exploit'? Do you want everything removed from the game that allows people to mass produce quality items?

Er, that with research processing units have craft-recycle loops scale from 63.5% loss down to 0.00% loss per cycle? You even brought it up yourself.

And if you aren't aware, the underground pipe and low density structure recipes in the Foundry consume liquid, but you get quality solids back from recycling. Effectively, the net result is that you get to cast molten metal directly quality plates as a free side-effect of your craft-recycle loop. This is a key part of why the "LDS shuffle" is such a big issue, since that's exacerbated by also scaling to 0.00% loss per cycle issue.

[radical_larry]

But that is not the only metric that matters to gameplay. I was trying to be informative about the other metrics people seem to be using to judge that it needs a nerf.

And I do not assert one way or another whether space casino is actually bad enough to warrant a nerf; I have to leave that judgement to the devs and more experienced players. My own knowledge is mostly at the point you bring up: observing that it does not have an excessively high output:input ratio, but I have not played with it enough to have an opinion on whether the allegations I mention do or do not have merit.

Er, that with research processing units have craft-recycle loops scale from 63.5% loss down to 0.00% loss per cycle? You even brought it up yourself.

And if you aren't aware, the underground pipe and low density structure recipes in the Foundry consume liquid, but you get quality solids back from recycling. Effectively, the net result is that you get to cast molten metal directly quality plates as a free side-effect of your craft-recycle loop. This is a key part of why the "LDS shuffle" is such a big issue, since that's exacerbated by also scaling to 0.00% loss per cycle issue.

I don't see an issue with the 0% loss per cycle on blue chips, that was the intention when giving us up to 300% productivity and recyclers with 25% output. Neither do I see an issue with the LDS shuffle, fluids were always exempt from quality calculations and that was also the intention. Which is my whole point, none of these are an issue, they're an effective late game strategy for quality items. As is the space casino.
I understand that you were trying to highlight the points people have brought up on why space casinos should be removed, but what I'm saying is that these are completely subjective until someone puts some actual numbers behind them to quantify just how much better, allegedly, the space casino is. So for now you and other people simply described what the space casino does, there is no assertion as to whether it's unbalanced or not. The devs didn't provide any information on that either.
That's my whole issue with this discussion and nerf: It is simply assumed to be a fact that it is OP, no hard evidence required. Or at least it wasn't provided if it exists.

[Hurkyl]

I don't see an issue with the 0% loss per cycle on blue chips, that was the intention when giving us up to 300% productivity and recyclers with 25% output.

The 300% limit was a safeguard to prevent net positive feedback loops. I am extremely skeptical that actually achieving net neutral was intended for an unmodded game. Tolerated is plausible, but rereading FFF #375 and #376 I think it's a bad bet that they thought through fact that productivity researches could get you there when implementing the feature, unless you think they were deliberately playing dumb to avoid spoiling the possibility or to avoid highlighting the degeneracy.

Neither do I see an issue with the LDS shuffle, fluids were always exempt from quality calculations and that was also the intention.

Again I dispute that it was the intention. Note fluids are also exempt from recycling recipes; the intention, IMO, is clearly that fluids would be a total loss in craft-recycle loops*. The problem is specifically caused from the mismatch that recyclers have to work off the basic recipe even when you craft with an alternate recipe, and I think it's relatively certain that they absolutely did not intend for that, but were forced into it for technical and UX reasons. (e.g. there are all sorts of problems with items remembering how they are crafted) I am extremely skeptical they intended for you to get any significant benefit from the mismatch, let alone have a 'cast directly to legendary plates' system.

And note that the devs actually missed a net positive feedback loop from this mismatch with the Aquilo rocket fuel recipe.

*: Okay, I suppose it's also plausible that they wanted you to be able to recycle the fluid but decided otherwise due to technical or UX reasons

[radical_larry]

The 300% limit was a safeguard to prevent net positive feedback loops. I am extremely skeptical that actually achieving net neutral was intended for an unmodded game. Tolerated is plausible, but rereading FFF #375 and #376 I think it's a bad bet that they thought through fact that productivity researches could get you there when implementing the feature, unless you think they were deliberately playing dumb to avoid spoiling the possibility or to avoid highlighting the degeneracy.

An EM plant needs just 13 levels of blue chip productivity, costing 580k research, to be at its full power.
Even at a very, very modest 1000 spm that's just 10 hours of research. More realistically, a player will easily have >10k spm in the endgame without even trying, and the devs definitely knew that from their own playtesting. That leads us to the conclusion that legendary items were never intended to be some unobtanium in the late-very late game. In fact the devs must have known that these items will be just as cheap as common items with the right setup.
Nerfing a late game strategy for producing late game items, that isn't even the best option for producing said items, makes no sense whatsoever.
And whatever our opinion of LDS shuffling is, again, there is an intended way to convert common items into legendary items at a 1:1 ratio. What is the point of nerfing any of the other methods? So that everyone uses the blue chip upcycling method only? What is gained from that, in terms of fun or creative gameplay?