Factorio Forums

TL;DR

The Tips and Tricks menu explaining quality probabilities should be updated so that quality is not misunderstood.

What?

The quality probability tip uses 4 normal tier 3 quality modules, which gives a quality chance of 10%, reflected in the image below. Each subsequent chance for a higher rarity is 10% of the previous one (1%, .1%, .01%), which leads a player to believe that whatever quality chance you have for the machine is rolled again and again for each subsequent level of rarity. In actuality, this only happens the first time; if you have 4 Epic tier 3 modules, reaching a quality of 18.8%, this only determines the likelihood of upgrading to the next tier, while each tier after remains 10% of the previous chance. This should be amended either by explaining this rule of quality more in depth, or by choosing an example in the tips and tricks menu that does not use 4 normal tier 3 quality modules, so that the players can see the 10% quality cap behavior.

Why?

This would help stop players from being confused and make the quality mechanic easier to understand.

+1

The example is very misleading

I agree. To me the table reads like the probability distribution (minus the chance to stay at the current tier) of the tier upgrades, so what is the chance that I get the item. And seeing the table I thought they changed the quality probabilities so I did some testing ingame only to find out that I misunderstood the table, and I still dont get the table.
With a 10% quality chance you have a 10% chance to get items better than tier 1, but the table suggests that you have a 10% change to get Tier 2 and then some extra chance to get even better tiers. I would have expected the first row to be 9%, 0.9%, 0.09%, 0.01% so it sums to 10%.