The second chart shows all the 2023 player downloads grouped by mod category. It confirms the cliché that people are only here for the Content and I should've prepared these chart for mod tags instead.
To me there are Qol and content, once you have a set of Quality of life mods that adress your wishes, then you don't "need"/"want" to dig further, it's only content then. But it doesn't mean i'm not interested in Qol or tweaks, just that those are somewhat exclusive or overlapping, say mods to plan your factory, or to browse receipes you are less likely to need 3 of them at the same time, or to change after you got familiar with one. Whereas you could play with different content mods, say changing 3 times, for 3 games, but all 3 games would also have the same Qol mod. That's more download for content because it changes everytime.
Occasionnaly some "content" mod makes it so that some additionnal tweaks are wished, but those are bound to be low download, when they are tweak of a content mod since only a subset of the player could be potentially interested. The "bigger" the overhaul, the more numerous and diverse the tweaks it generate. And this create a ratio of "content with high download" and its attached "tweak with limited download". Making it always in favor of the "content" mod.
Does that mean people are not interested in Qol ? I have another reserve, the download count is an average, maybe 90% of player download 1 Qol mod, and the 10% left download all the content mods. That would be "most people download tweaks or Qol". But "most downloaded" is "content". You could survey players or ask if some of them allow to have their download count public like opt-in, so you could know if there are such profile of download per user which would act similar as poor-mini pc downloading MK3 armor over and over.
This year we continued our quest of improving
discoverability
. First we added the automagical Highlights page, every week it tries to be smart about picking an interesting selection of mods. It works okay but is still in a "experimental" stage where we haven't decided where to take it next.
Well the mod portal doesn't have a good way to improve its selection because i think it doesn't have feedback on its previous recommandations. It should be possible to activate the webcam of players to see if they are enjoying the recommended mods, or to listen to their microphone, to hear if they laugh when playing maybe make a profile of different players, by spying on their computer and looking for the other game or software installed, so that an AI could recommend different mods to some players based on their profile looking similar or not to other players. Ever heard of player retention ? You could measure the time played by players of similar profile with different recommendations, so as to know which recommandation makes players plays more or are more likely to be downloaded
On the other hand, it already takes some times to get used to all the tick boxes, and it does indeed works okay when their meaning is deciphered. sorry for the dystopian ideas, i've been doing too much youtube recently and i'd hate to see a mod "factorio but easier " recommended to me, just because i downloaded one to make space exploration faster ? comon at least recommend me the one called " factorio for busy player that has limited time to chill " that's a smart algorithm !
What i 'dislike' at the moment is that sometimes several mods with the exact same image are recommended at the same time and although it would make sense because the mods can be differents the image is just the cover, it makes duplicate information on the page and for discoverability, it makes the page like a tree with similar branch, or less branch.
Sometimes i feel like it could also be nice to highlight authors, not just mods, but it's difficult to make a fair algo in such case and it being unfair is detrimental. Thinking some mods aren't updated because they are not maintained, sometimes i recommend a mod i played with, but i usually don't when i encountered a bug, i report it, after some times it becomes obvious that some authors are very active and try to advertise their creations and incorporate feedbacks and some made a mod once for themselves which everyone is free to use but that's about it sorry for the simplistic nature of the example taken as illustration that's the profile thing from marketing. I think it's a good opportunity for discovering new mods presented in a consistant format, with the same standards, that are sometimes meant to work together when browsing someone's mod and it's easily overlooked when those are not super shiny but a set of Qol and tweaks. I suppose some "players profile" could match some "modder profile", not sure how obvious this is for everyone, it took me some times to realize and it was a pleasant experience to use someone's set of tweaks for a game with thoughts put into it, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel everytime quickly before launching a game or taking long time to prepare a modpack.
Picture this: You have just configured your mod list for a new playthrough of Krastorio 2, and you start a new game. Unbeknownst to you, you accidentally enabled the Power Armor MK3 mod, which Krastorio 2 has marked as incompatible. It takes until an hour into the playthrough for you to realize that the Krastorio 2 content is missing, and now you have to throw out the save and start over from scratch.
That happened to me but it was not just 1 hour in the game so instead i cheated hahaha. Happy to hear it is adressed, because i wasn't happy at the time.
Also the fact that mods have versions, and you can have several versions downloaded but not active ?, and you can naively update the mod, and launch a game, and unbeknownst to you, the mod's version is not set to the latest. ( and a mod is then not compatible and is silently not being active... same end result ). Maybe i made a mistake, i don't want the recommandations to suggest i need mod to make the game easier, i am more tempted to click on the very big overhaul modpack but then there is this marketing thing where everytime you have to make a decision before purchasing, everytime a % of potential customer will make the decision that bring them away from the purchase. That apply to me when choosing mods, everytime there is a incompatibility i missed, or i need to reload the game, and change a setting, and reload the game there is the risk i would get distracted instead of being playing some factorio. I think it's the one of the main critics people who don't like mods do to them : the risk of technical complications, a bad experience (even from other games) can damage the will to do some discovery. ( the other being cheating/betraying the original game ).
Very happy to read this part was given some attention !
I have settled into a workflow of searching for a mod on the website and only searching for it in-game after I have found the mod I need. Wouldn't it be nice if the game had the same experience, with all of the same searching and filtering capabilities?
It would be nice but what about the pictures ? because that's mostly the kid inside me that feel like in a toy shop where i can select any mod that you are trying to convince to use some logic filter before playing the game ? Good luck with that
Really appreciating the efforts to make the search match i'm relying on that
I will use the bookmarks and anything that would make managing a long list of mods in which only a few are active for several game easier, makes me curious to see what's the rest of the bucket of laundry list, i will have to stay tuned , should we expect a 2024 roadmap ?
discoverability 