Quality levels completely break factory

[quineotio]

But that's functioning as intended.
.....
This mechanic is supposed to be hard.

In that post I was focusing on the disconnect between perception and reality, not on the difficulty itself. It's ok if something is difficult if it's introduced correctly. The problem with quality is that the complexity is hidden and out of step with the other tech you get at the time, and with the tools you have to deal with it. And so this explains some of the complaints people have.

I can make a similar argument about Gleba, but for a different reason - the difficulty is front loaded. There are a lot of things to learn at once, but after that initial learning cliff it's fine. The difference between Gleba and quality is that with Gleba the difficulty is more obvious. But I think both could be introduced better. For Gleba, it would be easier if some of the concepts were introduced on Nauvis - such as the ag tower, and seeds.

With quality, it would be a lot easier if rare was a separate research.

I don't understand what you're trying to say about gambling, it doesn't seem relevant.

[mmmPI]

I don't understand what you're trying to say about gambling, it doesn't seem relevant.

It's not relevant and is incorrect, it look like for the sake of using the word gambling because it was mentionned earlier, even though what defines gambling as risk and an addiction is what you bet and in factorio there's no money, only free infinite ressource and your time so really the parralel is just about the randomness, which is better described when using the law of large numbers as you did in your more recent post.

But there's a valid challenge there: what if you take away the language of stats or optimization, can you get the point of view to translate into gambling because that's all we're given as a prompt?

From the perspective of "gambling", if my goal is to teach gambling. I want to teach the subject. I don't want to teach a particular game.

4) Yes. Gambling and optimization both contain a logical phenomenon called a paradox. From a gamblers perspective a paradox is that they are doing something that is exciting, but not satisfying or enjoyable. And their addictive behavior is being driven, at a certain point, by emotions that are more at home to the horror and war movies I like and not the hang out and chill minecraft experience you seem to want.
I am not worried about you as a human being if you hate gambling, I'm just wondering why you thought it would be something kind.

I think we can draw the parralel with a LLM that takes its output as input a bit too much.

[XT-248]

I am writing this post as succinctly as humanly possible. So I have to keep quotation blocks to a minimum and keep most responses limited to two paragraphs. The sole exception is the list, and it is already fairly short.

... let's give this one last good try:

What do you mean when you say:

meaningful criticism

Quoting only two words left out some nuance.

Meaningful criticism, also known as constructive criticism, is feedback that targets a specific problem or issue and offers actionable feedback. In this instance, that means the feedback is for the game's mechanics and how to improve them.

Meaning, can you succinctly bring up your issues with quality (and spoilage and maybe gleba as a whole) one last time? In a manner that is falsifiable and that incorporates some of the counter-points already brought up in this thread?
Ideally I would like to see your latest Gleba factory and maybe some other factory where you are actually using quality, too. I am genuinely interested.

I am going to break it into three distinct groups: quality, spoilage as in the mechanics itself, and some specifics to the Gleba world itself. This is not an exhaustive list, given the falsifiability condition and the goal of keeping this post as short as possible.

Quality:

• Lack of onboard experience for quality.
• Quality as a mechanic can create an individualized "success or famine" experience where some people struggle, and others don't.

Spoilage:

• There is a limited onboard experience through the tech tree, but everything is upfront all at once. No room to experiment or learn.
• Evidence of both success and failure disappears so quickly, giving designers little feedback, with a potential for no data at all.
• The best approach to craft the most "science value" from Gleba Science packs, with the least amount of fruit needed, having no competing alternative production strategy currently.
• Time delta from spoilage for most spoiling items has little to no impact on the final product's freshness. The sole exception is Gleba Science packs, which start at 100% freshness and lose science value over time. At higher quality tiers, the decrease in science value from time becomes much more noticeable.

Gleba:

• Gleba has poor visibility due to a heavy visual clutter aesthetic when it comes to finding areas to grow fruit and has minor cosmetic impact. The minimap search function partially mitigates this issue. I am seeing a lot of new people who don't even know this search function exists.

As you can see, I don't have much feedback or strong feelings about Gleba. I will come back to this point later in my response. My feedback is more about how quality and spoilage, together or separately, are experienced in the game than about the Gleba world itself.

gave you good solution to that problem.

What solution was offered? I am going to take a guess. Monitoring? The problem already happened, and it was a one-time flunk. I don't have a "before" save game to set up monitoring and to reproduce it a second time. I can only work with what I do have, which is a save game after it happened.

If I do set up monitoring, it can create a lot of noisy data and false positives and false negatives from running several hours-long sessions to recapture that specific one-time flunk.

The first time you land on the planet everything spoils essentially immediately. I don't know how else you want to be onboarded?

Once again, going back to the old basic oil processing vs. current basic oil processing example from earlier. Small exposure to one part of making a functional spoilage design, then building on prior successes and moving to the next step until the Gleba Science pack arrives at a lab. Since the oil example is not doing its job well. So I am going with a different example: starting a new freeplay game.

A player starts a new freeplay game and opens up the tech tree. They see two immediate goals: craft 50 iron plates and craft 10 copper plates. This encourages new players to build a starter smelt array. After smelting successfully, they gain access to power infrastructure and machines that run on power. Then they can start to automate instead of handcrafting. Repeat and rinse until they launch a rocket.

General quality-system issues (apply to any quality science/production, any planet):

I am seeing a couple of things I didn't mention that came from someone else, indicate would be a problem, or need a response from me.

As you seem to only have an issue with quality on Gleba by admission, I am confused why you also brought up all of these other things, that are related to how quality functions fundamentally.
I don't think you ever conceded that you don't like the quality mechanic itself, but looking at all the points you brought up it looks to me like you don't like both quality and Gleba, but maybe quality itself might be a bigger issue for you (albeit, maybe gleba evokes a stronger emotional reaction, despite quality maybe being the core problem).

I've been seeing a troubling trend lately on the internet: people deciding how others feel about things while knowing absolutely nothing about others and how they actually feel. That said, I do feel that there is room for improvement in all three subjects: spoilage, quality, and Gleba. Mixing spoilage and quality together causes unresolved issues from both mechanics to occur at the same time. I don't dislike this because that is how it works in the game right now.

Gleba is just a world and doesn't evoke any strong feelings in me. Everybody knows that I am the only person who truly knows how I feel about anything. Someone made a poor guess and was wrong; it happens.

[Hurkyl]

For reference, the Gleba tech tree triggers are, grouped by depth:

• Mine an iron rock and a copper rock
• Mine a jellynut tree and a yumako tree
• Make nutrients: 10 for the biochamber tech, 500 to unlock the soil branch
• Make a biochamber
• Craft bioflux: 1 for the bacteria tech, 25 for the rest of the basic bioflux products
• Craft 100 bioflux to unlock science

and everything else requires actual research.

[mmmPI]

Meaningful criticism, also known as constructive criticism, is feedback that targets a specific problem or issue and offers actionable feedback. In this instance, that means the feedback is for the game's mechanics and how to improve them.

You should have asked the AI to define actionnable too, because saying " i don't like gleba" isn't actionnable feedback, and it being repeated doesn't constitute as such any contructive feedback, that's like 90% of what you've been posting on that unrelated thread, unfortunatly apart from a suggestion that seem irrationnal, after claiming you got the basic rapidly, you suggested to make wood spoilable, which only seem to be made for easing the part that doesn't need to be ? the basic ... That's like adding a pre-introduction when you explained you couldn't use beacon or quality due to their complexity and cost, your suggestion appear disconnected to any of the observation you made about your experience of the game.

How making wood spoilable would help someone like you use quality on Gleba ? or understand the utility of quality beacons ?

To me it appears there is no actionnable feedback, it's noise and false positive about the actual negative feedback that exist for the game , which is less than 3% review on steam, and there's like nothing about quality or Gleba...

[worph]

This is not an exhaustive list, given the falsifiability condition and the goal of keeping this post as short as possible.

Quality:

• Lack of onboard experience for quality.
• Quality as a mechanic can create an individualized "success or famine" experience where some people struggle, and others don't.

Spoilage:

• There is a limited onboard experience through the tech tree, but everything is upfront all at once. No room to experiment or learn.
• Evidence of both success and failure disappears so quickly, giving designers little feedback, with a potential for no data at all.
• The best approach to craft the most "science value" from Gleba Science packs, with the least amount of fruit needed, having no competing alternative production strategy currently.
• Time delta from spoilage for most spoiling items has little to no impact on the final product's freshness. The sole exception is Gleba Science packs, which start at 100% freshness and lose science value over time. At higher quality tiers, the decrease in science value from time becomes much more noticeable.

Gleba:

• Gleba has poor visibility due to a heavy visual clutter aesthetic when it comes to finding areas to grow fruit and has minor cosmetic impact. The minimap search function partially mitigates this issue. I am seeing a lot of new people who don't even know this search function exists.

• Spoilage onboarding: As both Hurkyl and myself have pointed out: There is onboarding. There are trigger techs. By engaging with those, players will inevitably get to experience spoilage; immediately. And they will keep experiencing it after that.
• Quality onboarding: I can see a miniscule argument for this, but I don't think it's required at all. Many mechanics in the game, especially in space age are much more complex and you are just expected to figure it out. OP highlighted this quite well: once he put quality modules in, he immediately saw things change. That MAY be irritating at first, but it's very noticeable. And players can literally opt-in and out in a dozen different ways: Disable it entirely, only use it on endproducts, only use it on certain planets, only use it after beating the game, don't research it at all, remove all modules for a short period etc. etc. It's clearly not meant as a mechanic specifically for beginners (doesn't mean beginners are forbidden from using it). Dumbing down or restricting an end-game mechanic is not the way to go in my opinion.
• Time delta: Simply not true. Fresh bioflux is very valueable for shipping throughout the solar system. Also agricultural science are not the exception, they are THE goal here.
• Quality science: Is a different argument. Quality science being non-optimal has nothing to do with factories breaking or spoilage/quality being bad. There have been different threads about this and they are valid. But arguing that quality (and spoilage) break factories because quality science is not perfectly efficient is... interesting.
• The rest is nitpicking about graphics and ignoring feedback already presented. Can the graphics be improved and are the monitoring solutions somewhat advanced circuitry? Yes. Does it break factories in the current version? No.

I would still love to see some of your factories.

To me it appears there is no actionnable feedback, it's noise and false positive

I agree that the feedback essentially is not actionable, but I disagree with you about TX-248 being a willfully bad actor in here (as insinuated earlier). I wonder if this is less deliberate bad faith and more a pattern they struggle to recognize or control themselves.