Quality levels completely break factory

[NineNine]

In the original game, major systems were changed over time. The way science was made changed - no more collection of alien stuff when killing bases and different recipes. Things were tweaked. Factories broke and needed to be redesigned. And this made the game better.

But the game wasn't live. The era you're referring to was just beta testing. Major design reworking is fine when you're still putting the thing together. But once you go live, once you have a proper release, you can't just go break everyone's base on a whim.

Nobody's base was broken unless they updated Factorio to a new version while they were playing an existing game (which is a bad idea for the reason you stated). If you choose to break your game, that's on you. Factorio doesn't force anybody to change versions.

[Alfonse215]

In the original game, major systems were changed over time. The way science was made changed - no more collection of alien stuff when killing bases and different recipes. Things were tweaked. Factories broke and needed to be redesigned. And this made the game better.

But the game wasn't live. The era you're referring to was just beta testing. Major design reworking is fine when you're still putting the thing together. But once you go live, once you have a proper release, you can't just go break everyone's base on a whim.

Nobody's base was broken unless they updated Factorio to a new version while they were playing an existing game (which is a bad idea for the reason you stated). If you choose to break your game, that's on you. Factorio doesn't force anybody to change versions.

You're basically saying that you should never expect a Factorio update to preserve your save. That your current run is entirely ephemeral and it's going to constantly be destroyed and remade. And the only way to avoid that is to stick with a particular version, eschewing any bug fixes or features added to the new ones. And you must do so in perpetuity so long as you want to keep that base around.

This is the fundamental difference between "early access" and "release". Early access builds are expected to be constantly changing. The developers and playerbases both understand this and players expect it. With a release build, there is an expectation of stability, that periodic updates are not going to just break your base.

I can't think of other released games where minor updates are expected to overhaul large parts of the game to the point where you have to restart or retool vast parts of your base. MMO expansions may encourage you to make new characters, but you can just use your old one. Even Terraria expansions, which often add content that requires new world generation, still keeps your old worlds functional. You may not be able to access new content, but the old world is still there.

Even Space Age did not overhaul the early vanilla game or its intermediates and production structures. It made very targeted changes, but they didn't change anything that they didn't really need to.

[NineNine]

In the original game, major systems were changed over time. The way science was made changed - no more collection of alien stuff when killing bases and different recipes. Things were tweaked. Factories broke and needed to be redesigned. And this made the game better.

But the game wasn't live. The era you're referring to was just beta testing. Major design reworking is fine when you're still putting the thing together. But once you go live, once you have a proper release, you can't just go break everyone's base on a whim.

Nobody's base was broken unless they updated Factorio to a new version while they were playing an existing game (which is a bad idea for the reason you stated). If you choose to break your game, that's on you. Factorio doesn't force anybody to change versions.

You're basically saying that you should never expect a Factorio update to preserve your save. That your current run is entirely ephemeral and it's going to constantly be destroyed and remade. And the only way to avoid that is to stick with a particular version, eschewing any bug fixes or features added to the new ones. And you must do so in perpetuity so long as you want to keep that base around.

Yes, so what?

What are you suggesting as an alternative? To never update the game, ever? Or, do force everybody to update with each update, and the developers can write code to update everybody's factories? I'm trying to understand what, exactly the problem is. Factorio is not an MMO.

[quineotio]

2.1 breaks some factories.