So a little talk about space casino nerf.
To me this reminded of a post in the 2.0 FF about the jonny, the jimmy, and on last name.
basicly the one that whant the perfecly balance game, the one that don't care has long has it's fun, and the one that want the fastest and most efficient way to reach mega-base.
Of those 3 type the casino nerf only appeal to the one that want balance. Even to them it's not a aceptable change, quality is still far to be balance because of productivity recipe.
To the one who want to megabase quiclky it's a annoyance because it make reaching mega base building slower and more tedious.
To the one who want fun to play with it's a extremly bad change, because you deprive them of the most fun late game quality mecanic and of one of the few interesting platform build.
In terms of proportion this change make more people angry than it make people happy. A good exemple of this is the aparition of a mod to revert the change before it even happen (in the 24 h that follow the annoucement of the casino nerf).
I don't think forcing people to use a mod is more acceptable to tell people ignore a mecanic if it's doesn't feel balanced.
So lets try to compare the different quality method, there 6 big way to make legendary item.
The 1 first wich is the early game way is the upcicle the finish product. it's mostly use early and mid game for things like personal armor and personal equipement. ant later for space platform building.
It's the only early game way, the most tedious to expand to a large number of item. It'st fun it entirelly serve its purpose as the early game solution and doesn't collide with the 5 other methods.
The 2 method is asteroid casino its a late game solution and the funiest (for most people) of the late game solution. it's one of the best method to make lengendary of everithing but not the best.
the 3 method : recycling prod recipe like lsd and blue circuit is more poweful both in number of legendary from common material (1 common -> 1 lengendary). and cheaper/ easier to set up. (producing 100 legendary copper plate per second need less building and module with lds recicle that with space casino).
even if you combine space casino with LDS shuflle it doesn't beat pure prod recycle.
in term of pure performance asteroid recincling has the same performance than plate recling. It became better only thanks to the fact than asteroid get a few productivity boost while beeing transform to plate. Even this calculation is flawed because it consider 1asteroid == 1ore.
It's way easier to obtain a full stack belt of ore than it is to obtain a not stacked belt of asteroid. It's even worse if you consider plate because of fondry recipe.
Taking this into account recicling gear or chest to obtain legendary is a more efficient option that pure casino.
If you don't combine it with LDS shuffle, casino is one of the worst method to get legendary.
Its only sell point is that its the funiest and one that allow to produced the biggest number of producted with 1 set up while recycling plate take 1 build for every ore.
The 3 method is recicling prod recipe. it's the beast in both production and ease of building. Since it's fast to build and powerful it'st use by those who want to skip quality.
The 4 method is gleba way. Its a less porwerful version of casino. it's fun (but less than casino) so less people use it.
The 5 way is fulgora way. It's fun but only for a small part of people. The main reason to why it'st not use by a lot of people.
The 6 way is upclicling for ore, it's the most tedious and less fun, the main reason it's not really use. If it was fun, more peopele will use it.
In the end you see that all method are use by a least a small part of people. And the number of user of a method is more tied to how fun a method is than to it's reall power.
So about the nerf :
It doesn't fix the balance since LSD and prod recipe are still present.
It only a nerf to space casino since you can replace asteroid crusher by recycler. The biggest problem here is that a build with recycler is less fun and closer to most other build than with crusher.
in a recycler build you don't need to play with 3 different item. You cans just convert every asteroid to 1 type. upcycle it to legendary and transform the legendary asteroid of 1 type to the other type. making a compact recycler build is more trivial than with crusher, only 1 input output to consider, so less belt for a bigger building, so less opportunity to plane a build than is not a copy past of another set up.
And the nerf isn't even that big with legendary quality, it's diminish the fun without retablishing the balance.
Honestly when a nerf upest the majority of a community and doesn't even retablish balanced, nobody and up linking it. The guy wanting balance cry that the nerf isn't enough, and the guy that lost it's fun toy cry that the game became less fun. (and the guy that don't like quality won't end up liking quality).
If a nerf was needed, augmenting the loss of the recycle recipe to for example 25% or 30% loss would do the same job while being more fun.
The only good point about this is that factorio is easy and open enough to modding so that this nerf can be revert by a mod :
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/bring-back-space-casino.