mmmPI wrote: Sat Sep 26, 2026 11:07 pm
I believe that is still unrelated to quality though ^^
You are right.
Entertain one thought for a second though: If you struggle with the core gameplay loop, you will struggle more with quality.
It's actually kind of eye opening for me. Some players can play factorio for thousands of hours, copy and paste trainstations, smeltstacks, science blueprints and never really improve as a player. Some people play chess or league for 1000s of games and are still at the elo floor. I would argue similar people will analogously struggle with factorio, with one exception: They don't notice.
But when they try advanced features, such as quality or designing something for Gleba themsevles without using other peoples blueprints they crash into a wall (paradoxically blueprints are less enticing on Gleba, because for someone like that foreign blueprints are hard-to-impossible to trouble shoot).
It makes sense that for many people Gleba and/or quality are dissuasive, some out of preference which is whatever, some for lack of skill. But being told "gid gud" by someone on the forums goes diametrically against what the game is telling them:
"I am producing 1milion green circuits on nauvis" or "I have played for 3000 hours" or "I have been to the shattered planet with someone elses blueprints". To a certain demographic of the playerbase there might be a huge congnitive dissonance between how good they think they are versus how well they actually understand the game. And at the core of this lies the "problem" that the game can be deceiving.
So maybe the cry for more onboarding is maybe useful in some sense, but different from what those people might think how it should look like.
One example for illustrative purposes - I don't necessarily think this should be in the game like this:
Agricultural science is unlocked via a triggertech that requires the player to craft 100 bioflux. This could be changed to say: ".. in a single biochamber, without anything spoiling in between".
And from this line of thinking, I am sure, something can be learned about quality.
Epic/Legendary quality could be combined with a an additional trigger tech, on top of the research itself - again, just for illustration:
"Before being allowed to research epic quality the game could require you to process 200 rare items in a recycler" (not great, because then you would need Fulgora to get epic, too. Currently one only needs to go to Gleba)
or
"Before being allowed to research epic quality the game could require you to craft 100 rare recipes" (so actually craft something at rare quality, not just using quality modules at the end of the line to skim some upleveled furnaces/asteroid collectors/turrets/etc.)
For an advanced player this is merely a small distraction, but for a beginner this might provide enough motivation to interact with those mechanics with more care and in a more focused manner.
In my personal opinion, there is not much to be done, but clearly some people could use some more guidance/would benefit from the game telling them: "You have not mastered certain aspects of this game, here are is a rough pointer how to improve".