Friday Facts #442 - Flip, Flow, and Fresh Paint

[andystrangelove]

A slightly different angle from the efficiency debate... space casinos are just cool. They're fun to build, fun to configure, and fun to watch. I've spent a lot of my playtime simply watching my space platforms do their business, casinos included, and they're enormously satisfying.

I'd be much happier if there were a way to tweak the OP-ness without doing away with them altogether. Even a small change to the asteroid reprocessing loss rate would compound heavily at scale, bringing casinos in line with other methods without making them unviable. It would also have minimal collateral impact: the only other use for reprocessing is converting a surplus asteroid type into a scarcer one, and there you're working from an abundance anyway, so a higher loss rate doesn't hurt.

I really dislike recycling assembled items for the additional quality step. I know the math works but it feels so janky. I really hope they take another pass at this and consider if there's another way.

[Eulenberg]

I never used space casinos, and I don't really care if they remove it or not. Same goes for LDS shuffling. From what I'm reading the whole point of them isn't producing materials to build the factory. They're there to enable legendary science at a high and constant rate?

Ofc you can produce, a whole lot of buildables with casinos very easy, and little effort, compared with upcycling, and a lot of people did, but it is also the only scaleable way in the game for quality science, and that only for some science packs, by removing casinos, getting the buildables is still very easy, low effort, but more time consuming, but quality science becomes unusable for all science packs. the people who compain mostly like spend a lot of time in early-mid game building upcycle loops for everything, because they could not figure out the casino or lds themself and later feelt cheated about there time wasted. now they want it to be removed and got it removed so they can feel better being the ones who did it the "right" way at first.

[Panzerknacker]

TBH I find it a bit disturbing how backlash against space casino removal is 10 times more than when proper fluid system was replaced by something eh.. electric network in pipe? Removal of a gimmick vs a core mechanic, lmao.

Yeah, its mostly because it nerfs ppl's personal easymode gameplay.

[bobucles]

but it is also the only scaleable way in the game for quality science, and that only for some science packs,

yeah but this hits a deeper issue. Infinite quality science provides an infinite supply of everything else. Legendary items are meant to be in short supply, difficult to acquire, but science is meant to be produced and consumed in humongous quantity. These two game designs can't fit together as is, something has to give.

Perhaps the simple fix is to buff legendary science. 6x for gold quality is a pretty paltry reward, maybe it would take 30x to make players look twice?

[Eulenberg]

In regards to quality/legendary science production, there is a HUGE problem with it. Simply put, there is no possible way to have large scale quality science production, which does not also include large scale quality for every other thing.

Science comes from ordinary recipes. Quality science comes from quality ordinary items. If you want legendary science, everything going into that item must be at least an epic quality. That means you have an unlimited supply of epic steel, epic chips, epic stone and plastic, and so on. If you have all that then you have everything else a dozen times over. What would you rather have, 1000 quality science packs or 200 quality assemblers? Keep in mind that 1 stacked endgame belt is ~10000 SPM.

Science would need some kind of major change to have commodity access for science, yet still have elite access for everything else.

There only is now a problem now, because you still have more than plenty of legendary production to make all the builables for your 10M eSPM mega base, over night by ore washing or some slightly more efficient upcycle loop. But you cant ever get a production that competes with common science, if you boil the factorio endgame down it always comes to the more science end game, and figuring out what science to do on what quality levels was one of the cooler things this time compared to the classic just double the existing factory approach. now common science is the solution every science pack, since the overhead of sourcing a reliable and constant income of quality is not worth it in both space and ups aspects

[Eulenberg]

but it is also the only scaleable way in the game for quality science, and that only for some science packs,

yeah but this hits a deeper issue. Infinite quality science provides an infinite supply of everything else. Legendary items are meant to be in short supply, difficult to acquire, but science is meant to be produced and consumed in humongous quantity. These two game designs can't fit together as is, something has to give.

But legendary items are not hard to get, are not short supply when casions are removed, you might only need a bigger buffer now, for the price of removing legendary science as a viable play style as a whole. Why do science pack still have the scaling, only as a bait?

I would agree with casinos getting removed, when quality science is removed to, and is just a prestige item like legendary fusion cells. but why offer the player a possible play style when its a total pitfall and cant be sustained.
Steel is quite hard to get in quantity in the early game and still by yellow science you need quite a big iron ore stream and lots of smelters to get a full blue belt. but by the time you visit vulcanus you can make steel in masses. no one complains about this, and quality is similar. if you unlock a new quality level it should be rare and hard to get, but as you progress, there should be ways to source more of it to a point it becomes viable for your science builds. the different quality levels are misleading here, legendary the way its implemented, is no different to uncommon or rare, other than the effect being stronger. im rasing my voice here not because i fear i dont know how to get my legendary inserter beacons and modules in 2.1. Im here because without a rework of the system as a whole and the removal of casios. the 2.1 endgame will be the same as 1.x endgame. figure out how to make a full belt of common science, then copy and paste

[krozu]

I never used space casinos, and I don't really care if they remove it or not. Same goes for LDS shuffling. From what I'm reading the whole point of them isn't producing materials to build the factory. They're there to enable legendary science at a high and constant rate?

Ofc you can produce, a whole lot of buildables with casinos very easy, and little effort, compared with upcycling, and a lot of people did, but it is also the only scaleable way in the game for quality science, and that only for some science packs, by removing casinos, getting the buildables is still very easy, low effort, but more time consuming, but quality science becomes unusable for all science packs. the people who compain mostly like spend a lot of time in early-mid game building upcycle loops for everything, because they could not figure out the casino or lds themself and later feelt cheated about there time wasted. now they want it to be removed and got it removed so they can feel better being the ones who did it the "right" way at first.

The thing with that is that legendary, by nature, is meant to be a novelty. Something you get every so often. Upcycling is meant to alleviate that to some degree, at the cost of more materials. Quality and rarity go hand in hand. The devs can correct me on this, but I don't think they ever intended mass legendary science to be a thing. Not at scale anyway.

Let's say they take both LDS and the casino away, so what? You create science of a lower quality. You get lower spm. Is that really that big of a deal? I can understand why people don't want to see the number go down, but if the result of casinos and LDS was never intended, whats so bad about removing them? I see people argue that it's the only viable way to do something, something that was never intended to be done. If the argument is that the quality system as a whole is bad and should be circumvented at any cost, the discussion shouldn't be about whether or not these options should be removed or not, but about the system as a whole. If that is the argument, then defending them is nothing more than a band-aid solution. At the same time, they can keep them in and if you don't like them, don't use them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not 100% on board with the system as it is. But cranking out legendary science as your primary way of researching just seems wrong. No matter how big your factory is. That said, just because it rubs me the wrong way doesn't mean I'm right. But that goes both ways.

[bobucles]

now common science is the solution every science pack, since the overhead of sourcing a reliable and constant income of quality is not worth it in both space and ups aspects

I dunno, feedback is more effective when working with facts. The true UPS architects have found several places where uncommon science is superior, and some people also say that rare space science is superior. It's a simple function of cost versus reward. The reward is linear yet the input cost is exponential, at least in terms of resources. Legendary science is just not going to be viable under that dynamic.

Want a simple sloppy solution? Have the science value scale with the square of quality. As in, T1 = 100%, T2 = 4x, T3 = 9x, T4 = 16x, and T5(6) = 36x. Even that may not be enough, but it would be a juicy target that gets attention. Think of 1000 monkeys on 1000 typewriters, vs. an actual expert who knows how to science.

[Eulenberg]

I never used space casinos, and I don't really care if they remove it or not. Same goes for LDS shuffling. From what I'm reading the whole point of them isn't producing materials to build the factory. They're there to enable legendary science at a high and constant rate?

Ofc you can produce, a whole lot of buildables with casinos very easy, and little effort, compared with upcycling, and a lot of people did, but it is also the only scaleable way in the game for quality science, and that only for some science packs, by removing casinos, getting the buildables is still very easy, low effort, but more time consuming, but quality science becomes unusable for all science packs. the people who compain mostly like spend a lot of time in early-mid game building upcycle loops for everything, because they could not figure out the casino or lds themself and later feelt cheated about there time wasted. now they want it to be removed and got it removed so they can feel better being the ones who did it the "right" way at first.

The thing with that is that legendary, by nature, is meant to be a novelty. Something you get every so often. Upcycling is meant to alleviate that to some degree, at the cost of more materials. Quality and rarity go hand in hand. The devs can correct me on this, but I don't think they ever intended mass legendary science to be a thing. Not at scale anyway.

Let's say they take both LDS and the casino away, so what? You create science of a lower quality. You get lower spm. Is that really that big of a deal? I can understand why people don't want to see the number go down, but if the result of casinos and LDS was never intended, whats so bad about removing them? I see people argue that it's the only viable way to do something, something that was never intended to be done. If the argument is that the quality system as a whole is bad and should be circumvented at any cost, the discussion shouldn't be about whether or not these options should be removed or not, but about the system as a whole. If that is the argument, then defending them is nothing more than a band-aid solution. At the same time, they can keep them in and if you don't like them, don't use them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not 100% on board with the system as it is. But cranking out legendary science as your primary way of researching just seems wrong. No matter how big your factory is. That said, just because it rubs me the wrong way doesn't mean I'm right. But that goes both ways.

For me there 3 possible ways,
Take LDS, Casinos and Quality science scaling away and only make it count for buildable, only issue is now that its still very easy to get all the legendary stuff you need for giga bases.

Rework the quality system as a whole.

Accept that the system is fundamentally flawed and leave the band aid fix for those who what to interact with it a larger scale.

[Eulenberg]

now common science is the solution every science pack, since the overhead of sourcing a reliable and constant income of quality is not worth it in both space and ups aspects

I dunno, feedback is more effective when working with facts. The true UPS architects have found several places where uncommon science is superior, and some people also say that rare space science is superior. It's a simple function of cost versus reward. The reward is linear yet the input cost is exponential, at least in terms of resources. Legendary science is just not going to be viable under that dynamic.

Want a simple sloppy solution? Have the science value scale with the square of quality. As in, T1 = 100%, T2 = 4x, T3 = 9x, T4 = 16x, and T5(6) = 36x. Even that may not be enough, but it would be a juicy target that gets attention. Think of 1000 monkeys on 1000 typewriters, vs. an actual expert who knows how to science.

I follow the UPS scene myself, or consider myself to be part of it, in fact i would consider myself one of the driving forces behind the recent switch to linux by some members of the megabase community, being outspoken about it in krydax podcast about it, because non-blocking saves can be a game changer even for casual players and telling people personally about its advantages and that even if things are difference than they are on windows, it worth giving it a try, i also minmax'ed the improvement that mimalloc can give to ups, by trying a boat load of different setups, that other people then benchmarked, im also the only one to my knowlage who made non-blocking saving and mimalloc work at the same time.

While im not at the level of some of these people when it comes to inserter optimisation and ingame mechanics im sure i know what i talk about.
And as i said in a previous post, uncommon or even rare can be better but its only a very small gain over common compared to white science for example.
I agree that some quality scalings dont reflect the effort it takes to get these items, some items scale to much, some like science scale way to little.
As in my last post eather rework quality as a whole, remove quality from science or leave everything as is.

for those how dont know that mimalloc is, its a alternative implementation of the C/C++ memory manager (RAM allocator). you can make factorio use it instead of it "classic" malloc (memory allocator) and tweaking it to use continuous memory called large pages, instead of using fragmented ram, can improve UPS by 5-15%. think of it as in the old days before SSDs were you had to defragment your hard drive once in a whole to keep stuff smooth.

For me i mainly play modded anyways, with the expetion of first playthrough beeing a vanilla megabase, so i dont mind or feel bad modding it back in, but if you follow the path of remove smth because its to op, without presenting new alternatives or revamping the system, you must consequently remove silo chesting, fluid voiding, biter spawn blocking and sushi pipes, too. even belt weaving or what about dragon teeth abusing bad biter ai, maybe? and then we come dangerously close to removing, inseters, belts and assemblers all together, because we all know factorio is best played as a walking simulator.

I played too many games over the years to know that plain removing a "op" mechanic, without addressing it properly, is worse than leaving it in a game, thats for sure.

[bobucles]

For me i mainly play modded anyways, with the expetion of first playthrough beeing a vanilla megabase, so i dont mind or feel bad modding it back in, but if you follow the path of remove smth because its to op, without presenting new alternatives or revamping the system, you must consequently remove silo chesting, fluid voiding, biter spawn blocking and sushi pipes, too. even belt weaving or what about dragon teeth abusing bad biter ai, maybe? and then we come dangerously close to removing, inseters, belts and assemblers all together, because we all know factorio is best played as a walking simulator.

Yeah, no. slippery slopes are for kids.

Arguing that the space casino is "needed" because quality science "needs" those resources is so dishonest. You can't drop a resource flood on the rest of the game just because one piece of the game wants it. Stick with the real argument at play. People are doing the quality game, stretching to the very ends of the ecosystem, and they are discovering that quality science just isn't giving the rewards they want. The juice is not worth the squeeze, to the surprise of absolutely no one. Just a casual glance at the numbers will tell you that 6x legendary takes far more than 6x effort.

So then the kids come out crying that quality science isn't worth it, therefore we need infinite resources to fix the science. Uh. Nooooooooooo. If the science isn't worth it, fix the science to make the process worth it. It's that easy.

Factorio had this exact same problem nearly a decade ago, when players were investigating coal cracking. Coal was being liquefied and turned into solid fuel, but the game mechanics didn't support it. It didn't produce any energy profit, so there was no point in even trying. Players argued that this made perfect sense in terms of thermodynamics, and that may be true. But it didn't make sense in terms of Factorio mechanics, where players get rewarded for building factory. When they stop getting rewarded, they stop building factory (note that early gleba also has an initial punishment cycle). So coal cracking got buffed, the devs made it profitable, and now you can liquefy coal to increase the efficiency of your coal supply.

Isn't quality science suffering the exact same way? Pushing your factory into legendary production is the ultimate evolution of everything in the game, but the rewards don't match the input. Players are being punished for it. The fix is simple. Just make it worth it.

[ivan_349876]

these comments are so lame. I guess all games have these type of entitled, toxic, know-it-all players. maybe you guys should ban together and make a better game since you apparently have all the answers? How arrogant do you have to be to be talking down to the developers of one of the best games ever made. Quiet literally.

also, highly disagree with developers listening to players (too much at least). Most of the best games I've played have come from small teams creating passion projects. Something that is theirs. They make it the way they want and they have a vision. What usually happens after that is the game becomes popular, the casual masses gain influence, and the game's quality drops immensly. Developers listening too much to players is a huge problem, in my opinion, in the industry now adays, because the loudest people get their way, and all games will bend to these groups. It's a great thing that some minority groups get games created by like minded people that fill some niche, and the casual masses don't control absolutely everything. Wube should absolutely take into consideration what players want and I'm 100% sure they do, but I hope they continue to follow their own vision and not listen to a possible loud minority. What I've come to realize, in general, if you lets players decide too much, games will usually get much easier. If players decided everything we'd probably have a lot of incredibly OP abilities. So of course people want Space Casino...and because now they have to do more work to compensate.

anyway, I think these changes are great. Wube continues to be some of the best (if not the best) developers out there.

Calling people toxic in the same comment where you say Wube should disregard what the community things just because their take happens to align with yours is a bit rich, don't you think? Factorio is great because Wube listens to the community, not despite it.
As for your idea that "people who want to keep space casinos are a small, vocal minority", why can't it be the other way around? The mod to remove space casinos had a whopping 400 downloads since Space Age came out. Sure doesn't seem like there's some "silent majority" that wants it gone from the game!
And despite the strawman you've presented, no one is trying to make the game easier. That's mostly been Wube's doing with all the great QoL we've gotten along the game's development, really! But asking Wube to make the game easier is one thing, asking them not to remove one of the few engaging ways to interact with quality is another. Yes, getting high quality items will take longer, but you'll arguably have to do less work since upcycling will become the go-to method for everything. There'll be little need for anything past adjusting the same old upcycling blueprint, after all.

[Leonord]

I just created an account to post here.

I love that we are getting so crucial fixes like quality trains.

Removing space casinos is a mistake.

1) They are a very late game strategy that already requires high quality and tier quality modules to work. To set them up you need to set up all the chips and fulgora material first to make the quality modules.

2) They produce a small subset of all materials needed for late game. You get the crucial iron, coal and calcite but no steel, copper, tungsten, or anything other planetary resource also needed for legendary machines.

3) What are all the exciting gameplay alternatives? For me this was the alternative to having to build yet another upcycler or recycler like I had to do for basically all other resources in the game. I have lost count how many upcyclers I built for all the other stuff.

4) I dint get why this single very powerfull strategy gets singled out. There are way more op strategies not only for resource production where nobody bats an eye like:
Nukes make demolishers basically a non issue with one click kill.
Flamethrower turrets trivialize the entire nauvis defense to the point where you never think about biters ever again.
Pipes can neutralize nest with a single blueprint.
Resource productivy is so high basically all mines are infinite and base expansion doesnt exist anymore.

Nobody cares about those?

[Eulenberg]

For me i mainly play modded anyways, with the expetion of first playthrough beeing a vanilla megabase, so i dont mind or feel bad modding it back in, but if you follow the path of remove smth because its to op, without presenting new alternatives or revamping the system, you must consequently remove silo chesting, fluid voiding, biter spawn blocking and sushi pipes, too. even belt weaving or what about dragon teeth abusing bad biter ai, maybe? and then we come dangerously close to removing, inseters, belts and assemblers all together, because we all know factorio is best played as a walking simulator.

Yeah, no. slippery slopes are for kids.

Arguing that the space casino is "needed" because quality science "needs" those resources is so dishonest. You can't drop a resource flood on the rest of the game just because one piece of the game wants it. Stick with the real argument at play. People are doing the quality game, stretching to the very ends of the ecosystem, and they are discovering that quality science just isn't giving the rewards they want. The juice is not worth the squeeze, to the surprise of absolutely no one. Just a casual glance at the numbers will tell you that 6x legendary takes far more than 6x effort.

So then the kids come out crying that quality science isn't worth it, therefore we need infinite resources to fix the science. Uh. Nooooooooooo. If the science isn't worth it, fix the science to make the process worth it. It's that easy.

Factorio had this exact same problem nearly a decade ago, when players were investigating coal cracking. Coal was being liquefied and turned into solid fuel, but the game mechanics didn't support it. It didn't produce any energy profit, so there was no point in even trying. Players argued that this made perfect sense in terms of thermodynamics, and that may be true. But it didn't make sense in terms of Factorio mechanics, where players get rewarded for building factory. When they stop getting rewarded, they stop building factory (note that early gleba also has an initial punishment cycle). So coal cracking got buffed, the devs made it profitable, and now you can liquefy coal to increase the efficiency of your coal supply.

Isn't quality science suffering the exact same way? Pushing your factory into legendary production is the ultimate evolution of everything in the game, but the rewards don't match the input. Players are being punished for it. The fix is simple. Just make it worth it.

They dont have to be 100% worth for me personally, but at least as an alternative. But yes a massive buff to quality science or its removal is needed if casinos are gone without a overhaul of quality, im quite sure FFF 443 will be about extended mod support and especially how mods can interact with the quality mod . hopefully even some changes to the vanilla system.

[Eulenberg]

these comments are so lame. I guess all games have these type of entitled, toxic, know-it-all players. maybe you guys should ban together and make a better game since you apparently have all the answers? How arrogant do you have to be to be talking down to the developers of one of the best games ever made. Quiet literally.

also, highly disagree with developers listening to players (too much at least). Most of the best games I've played have come from small teams creating passion projects. Something that is theirs. They make it the way they want and they have a vision. What usually happens after that is the game becomes popular, the casual masses gain influence, and the game's quality drops immensly. Developers listening too much to players is a huge problem, in my opinion, in the industry now adays, because the loudest people get their way, and all games will bend to these groups. It's a great thing that some minority groups get games created by like minded people that fill some niche, and the casual masses don't control absolutely everything. Wube should absolutely take into consideration what players want and I'm 100% sure they do, but I hope they continue to follow their own vision and not listen to a possible loud minority. What I've come to realize, in general, if you lets players decide too much, games will usually get much easier. If players decided everything we'd probably have a lot of incredibly OP abilities. So of course people want Space Casino...and because now they have to do more work to compensate.

anyway, I think these changes are great. Wube continues to be some of the best (if not the best) developers out there.

Calling people toxic in the same comment where you say Wube should disregard what the community things just because their take happens to align with yours is a bit rich, don't you think? Factorio is great because Wube listens to the community, not despite it.
As for your idea that "people who want to keep space casinos are a small, vocal minority", why can't it be the other way around? The mod to remove space casinos had a whopping 400 downloads since Space Age came out. Sure doesn't seem like there's some "silent majority" that wants it gone from the game!
And despite the strawman you've presented, no one is trying to make the game easier. That's mostly been Wube's doing with all the great QoL we've gotten along the game's development, really! But asking Wube to make the game easier is one thing, asking them not to remove one of the few engaging ways to interact with quality is another. Yes, getting high quality items will take longer, but you'll arguably have to do less work since upcycling will become the go-to method for everything. There'll be little need for anything past adjusting the same old upcycling blueprint, after all.

If you look at the metric of the mod its clear that the mod got some attention when lds shuffle/casino videos trended on social media, and after that very little interest in the mod. one of the mods that will bring it back already has 70 downloads the other 30, in like 3 day so a 1/4 of the mod you stated has after 1.5 years, and that before 2.1 even released, so its save to assume the people who want it gone are a very tiny minority, and as its always the case, if humans are happy they remain silent, but the small group how screams the loudest looks like the majority. i want to see how many ppl will load the mod that brings it back once 2.1 drops, it will be exponential to the downloads of this mod, imo.
Eather you care about playing the most efficient way or you care about acknowledgement from others or self when you overcome a hurdle, p, if you care about efficiency, you should not care about archiving that is satisfying or not, you do what it takes. People who want to play the most efficient way should and care about it feeling cheaty, in reality they care about the acknowledgement they get when showing other what they archived. and since getting a base full of legendary crafters is nothing to brag about they are mad.

[NineNine]

Yes, getting high quality items will take longer, but you'll arguably have to do less work since upcycling will become the go-to method for everything. There'll be little need for anything past adjusting the same old upcycling blueprint, after all.

The "work" in creating quality items has always been about being able to create enough basic items to be able to upcycle them. I never read anything that said that upcycling was supposed to be a challenge (like figuring out spoilage on Gleba, or how to keep things defrosted on Aquilo). In fact, most of the challenge of the entire game is being able to create enough of a certain item to be able to build something else. Sure, anybody can slap down a single recycler/assembly setup for different items to make for quality. That's not difficult at all. The difficulty comes when you try to make 100x or 1000x more of each item. That's sort of the whole game. By short circuiting that with the "space casino" loophole, you're really just short-circuiting the whole point of the game, too.

If you want to make the game artificially easy, that's what mods are for. The base game should be balanced appropriately, though.

[PharonReichter]

[...]

And you and quineotio seem to absolutely refuse to even entertain the thought that game imbalance ruins fun for other people, and instead misinterpret it as a malicious attempt to hurt you.

Yes, some fun is actually ruined for me by game imbalance. Not that bad but some. Whenever I tell others of my upcycling and legendary builds in forum and Discord, I expect comments like: "No Space Casino? You dumb." or more politely: "But Space Casino is more efficient, any other builds don't matter".
So I don't publish my work but instead stay silent.
That's not positive.
Having a few viable builds is sane, having just one isn't sane.

The people who just use blueprints are left dead on the road as soon as they realize space casino is just able to produce the standard resources but no planet specific ones. They don't even get the idea what is upcycling about. This leads to frustration on their side as well on the side of the people who try to explain what it is all about and all you get in return is lack of understanding. [And funnily enough, this lack of understanding is leading to the reason of my personal criticism about quality: "lack of direction".]

Gotcha. So basically, you want to ruin everyone else's fun just so you can brag about your "awesome" designs. Sounds about what i expected from the "balance" gang.

[Bloodred217]

Ultimately to me the "space casino" issue boils down to the fact that if it's removed, then I think changes need to be made to the quality system or more alternatives to the eternal upcycler loop need to be introduced. Removing the alternative in order to force more loops is not the way to go, we already build enough loops anyway. It requires end-game tech and actual player effort to design these platforms, far beyond what is required to make more upcyclers, which you will be making anyway for other resources, like I said. I don't believe there's something particularly wrong with unlocking superior technology at the end-game, though if the numbers are truly problematic then those can be tweaked without removing the option entirely.

The game does not improve by removing options and replacing them with nothing. Personally I already find the quality system somewhat tedious to interact with, precisely because it is repetitive and lacking in both variety as well as mechanical progression after the point where you get the Recycler. It's good for the game to have options and to not be railroaded into single, intended paths only. Factorio to me is a game where you design your own systems, I don't think removing alternatives in order to force the intended solutions is the way to go, it's good if there's enough room in the design space for us to have flexibility. The "casinos" may have been unintended, but their existence for now provides some variety in a part of the game where it's currently lacking and I think their removal without any alternatives being added or mechanics being changed will be a net-negative move.

[Eulenberg]

Yes, getting high quality items will take longer, but you'll arguably have to do less work since upcycling will become the go-to method for everything. There'll be little need for anything past adjusting the same old upcycling blueprint, after all.

The "work" in creating quality items has always been about being able to create enough basic items to be able to upcycle them. I never read anything that said that upcycling was supposed to be a challenge (like figuring out spoilage on Gleba, or how to keep things defrosted on Aquilo). In fact, most of the challenge of the entire game is being able to create enough of a certain item to be able to build something else. Sure, anybody can slap down a single recycler/assembly setup for different items to make for quality. That's not difficult at all. The difficulty comes when you try to make 100x or 1000x more of each item. That's sort of the whole game. By short circuiting that with the "space casino" loophole, you're really just short-circuiting the whole point of the game, too.

If you want to make the game artificially easy, that's what mods are for. The base game should be balanced appropriately, though.

While i agree, and i think every does here even the pro-casino camp, that there have to be changes, like a 50% quality on the crusher itself (not - 50& chance, i mean all quality bonus are halved, or any sort of other nerf). removing AND presenting no new or revamped system that lets you interact with quality, is indefinitely more worse that keeping it. Also following your argumentation lava would have to be removed to. because it short circuiting all means of resource acquisition, difference is that lava was intended from the very beginning, but i also makes every single production chain that is not forced to happen on nauvis to be not worth by a mile doing on nauvis, and if the landing pad was not limited by inserters and wagons you can place around, meta would be to have a naulvis that makes nothing but power imported from aquillo to power the biolabs and if bio labs. would be not forced on nauvis we would totally abondon the planet.

If there would be an alternative or and kind of sign the devs want to improve the quality system, i guess every one would be on there edge to play 2.1, because every other thing so far in the fff is amazing. but ill get the feeling from this whole thing it a WE dont have a good idea to make it better and dont have time to revamp it, so YOU cant have fun with it kind of situation.
I want to ask the pro- remove camp, if thay actually think upcycling loops are fun, and engaging challenge for them? WE all paid in the DLC for the quality mod too. and removing its only way to interact with that is in my opinion not repetitive and boring, regardless of the challenge it presents, i feel like cheated for the mod i paid for.
If you take a look at mod-packs that make resource enhancement chains interesting, like py (i dont want quality to be like py its just a very good example of a challenging and way to get more yield/ better yield, that it fun, imo) from the same inputs, you constantly add new stuff to different steps of the process or you have to route back a left over from the penultimate back to the beginning, but recycle loops are always the same pipe pack everything that was not upgraded to the step it was made and pipe forward what got upgraded, thats boring after doing it 2-3 times but this game has 10-20 things you want to have in quality and doing it every singe time is very boring to me personally, because its always the same with a different input, but the method to solve it is always the same.

Also since you need really little of the buildables to make even the biggest 10M eSPM like i said before, its not hard or challenging, just let the buffer fill while you plan the build and if thats not enought, let it run for 3-4 hours. if you wanted to plop down a 10M eSPM yes, there is some longer time to wait, but thats not how it usually goes, atm you are also gated from ploping that factory down by needing to wait for the legendary prod3s and speed3s as well as planetary assemblers. and i know quality t2s are a thing and imo to powerful, but that it not the casinos fault. so the argument of short circuiting the game does fall flat if you think about it.

[Robosium]

Trains are unfortunately (almost) useless and quality won't save them.
Bigger acceleration and top speed is nice, but they are still inferior to belts.
Belts effectively teleport items, with a small downside of buffer capacity.
But they do not require all the setup with the stations and their management, schedules, intrusive tracks in the middle of the base, refuelling, congestion, and so on.
It is too much work for no reward.

It sounds like you're trying to build trains around your factory instead of building a factory around the trains.
Also you can rename stations and if you give two stations the same name trains can go to either one of them (can't go to both at the same time because trains can only be in one place at a time), this makes trains capable of n-to-n logistics as opposed to a belt's 1-to-1 logistical capabilities.
And you can name your train schedules so when building a new iron plate train you can just pick the schedule and boom, instant iron train, edits in one train also apply to all others with the same schedule.
Since trains deliver large bursts of supplies instead of a constant stream like belts you also wanna buffer the resources, so instead of directly train to belt you go train to buffer to belt or in reverse for loading trains, you'll also wanna buffer trains in waiting bays, so they can arrive before they're needed.
For refueling set up some refueling stations and use interrupts to have trains go refuel whenever they're low on fuel or use bots to transport fuel to every station
Congestion only really happens if you mess up with signals or if you try to have more than 1 train on a bi-directional track.
Tracks and trains are general purpose infrastructure that will be used to transport many different resources and will remain useful even after the original reasons they were built are gone. Compare it to belts where once either end of the line is gone the belt loses it's purpose.