siggboy wrote:I also think if they hadn't changed it by accident, nobody would have even bothered to think about this issue.
I was thinking about it in 0.12. It seemed totally broken to me, as the thought of chaining things together rather than using star topology was nowhere on my mind's radar, plus there was the added punishment that every time I hit Q to release the wire from the entity I just clicked on, I had to re-open my inventory and select the wire again. I just never made a post about it because if I made a post about everything I think is wrong with this game, I'd do nothing else besides write posts all day.
E.g.:
1. Is it actually possible, after investing time and resources into producing productivity 3 modules, then investing more into additional energy generation to account for the additional energy usage, then investing more into additional machinery to account for the slower machine speed, to actually come out ahead at some point such that it makes sense to make the modules? The trade-off between speed and production is the sort of trade-off that should be available by default, then producing the modules could be the tech that allows one to enable the productivity without taking a hit in speed and energy consumption. The same is true of the speed 3 module, where you're far better off just building more machines, though at least that one is useful to account for the fact that it's difficult to find enough oil on the map unless you're willing to just play slower so that 0.1/s seems like a higher rate than it is.
2. Why did someone put time and effort into creating the tank only to have it be such a fragile piece of useless junk? The same goes for the personal laser defense. ...and it actually went for virtually every piece of tactile equipment in 0.12, but in 0.13 they've improved the balance a lot. It's much better now that I don't have to turret creep everything, but can instead just quickly exterminate everything with the flamethrower.
2.5. Though I must say that the enemies respawn far too much still. The spawners are far to happy to reappear close to my base, being a constant unavoidable annoyance that distracts me from actually having fun building junk. ...and even the rate at which new enemies spawn out of the spawners is too high, e.g. the lame weapons of 0.12 might have been useful if it weren't that the enemies spawn from their spawners faster than they can be killed with any of the weapons, making it utterly pointless to focus the weapons on the enemies themselves, as the spawners are the real enemies, and the little bugs that run around are simply their ammo.
3. Why is it that stone, something this planet is surely mostly made out of, is so rare? I can never find enough of it. I can only guess that some people don't build a lot of walls or something, and they decided that since they don't need a lot of stone, there won't be a lot of stone.
4. WTF is with research being the primary consumer of resources? Well, it's second to modules if you make them, but it seems like most of the game is about collecting ores to be made into science packs so that they can vanish into research. In any event, it's just a huge resource sink for seemingly no goal other than to make the game harder. I think it would make a lot more sense if research were replaced with the concept of building the means of production, e.g. when you want green circuits, you need to build a special machine to produce green circuits, and it's costly to build this machine (rather than the few bits of iron and copper machines require now) and it requires ingredients from other machines you've built the same way, e.g. you need wire from your wire production machine to build the circuit production machine. Maybe even go so far as to require that the machine to produce electronic circuits requires electronic circuits, so you either have to produce them by hand, or perhaps scavenge them from a shipwreck. Similarly, the machine that produces gears is going to need some gears, and those will have to be made by hand. Indeed, the idea that some smart scientists from another planet arrives and doesn't just already basically know how to build all of this stuff is a little weird. The problem shouldn't be researching how to build things, the problem should be building the production line from scratch. However, the machines and belts and inserters take virtually no resources compared to what's sucked up by research.
5. I already posted about how the deconstruction time is pointless and unnecessary in another thread.
6. I'm sure we'd all be better off without that bar at the bottom of the screen that holds 10 to 20 items from our inventory, but I'll not make this any longer by trying to explain why.
7. Honestly, there's a lot of junk this game inherited from Minecraft that it would be better off without.
8. Making the car drive straight is virtually impossible. Perhaps it could steer more slowly when moving at high speeds (like a real car does) so that it's easier to keep it on a straight road through my factory?
9. Getting a single inserter to fill a train with multiple items is broken due to the inserter picking up a full stack even when the cargo wagon doesn't have room for it, so it locks up with the leftover items in its hand rather than continue to fill the cargo wagon with other items. I actually posted about this one, but it seems to have been ignored.
10. It would be insanely useful if filter inserters when set to "set filters" mode would use the counts to tell the inserter how many items to pick up at once, e.g. if the count is 1 then the inserter picks up no more than 1 of that item at a time, but if it is 100 then it picks up whatever is enabled by its current stack size upgrades. This would even provide a work-around for #9 there in that the inserter could be set to never pick up more than one of any item.
I think that's enough to make my point. Just because no one was talking about it before doesn't mean it wasn't bothering anyone.
The simple fact is that this level of opposition is what I'd expect to virtually any change I might suggest. So I pick my battles. This one seemed like low-hanging fruit due to being changed back to the old behavior seemingly on a whim, and after a month of play-testing by the devs where, if they hadn't intended the new behavior, it should have been obvious to them that it was wrong. So I assumed at least some of the devs wanted the new behavior and so they'd welcome a compromise that works for everyone.
...but, whatever, I was wrong I guess. It's clearly not low-hanging fruit.
If you refuse to change game behaviour, then at least give a reason.
Yes, exactly. ...and I must say that I'm not fond of "some people won't like it" as a reason, even though I don't think that'll be a problem. I think the more important question is "is it better this way?" So is it better this way? I think it is, and I'd love to at least hear a dev say that they don't think it would be better that way, and perhaps offer a tad of insight as to why they think it would be worse.
After all, that's the problem with those web site redesigns. If it were nothing more than that some people don't like the new look, then who cares? The problem is the loss of functionality, and that the site is most definitely not better off for having had most of its code base tossed out the window because someone thought it was useless cruft. If the changes just brought new features and more options for people, no one would complain.
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