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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   2337 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 6, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm starting to think factorio space age suffers from the same gamey mechanics problems that make modded Minecraft unappealing for me.
Everything goes quadratic, everything before a particular weird meta becomes instantly obsolete the second you hit an arbitrary point on a tech beeline.

Like the correct way to make Legendary Concrete is a rube Goldberg system of turning stone into basic furnaces and recycling them back into stone with quality modules and filtering. Then taking all the non-legendary concrete, painting stripes on it, then erasing the stripes in an infinite loop to farm a 1% drop rate of the highest tier concrete. It's a game mechanic totally disconnected from both reality and the internal rules established at the start of the game.

The same sort of thing turned me off Minecraft too. You get invited to a group server and play for a bit, and then someone goes:

"you're mining?? in Minecraft?! You utter fool! You complete moron! The correct meta is to use your first quadlebonic extractor to make a fairy farm, then grind the faries into ruby dust to be catalyzed with magic tomes from Beecraft (obviously automated with the bibliotek autocasting lectern), producing infinite materials on demand from Greg's Quantum Replicator! Didn't you read the pinned reddit link on the modpack discord?!

I don't know, it just ends up seeming so arbitrary that there's no real joy in thinking your way through it, like one of the old point and click adventure games with the nonsense puzzles.

Maybe I'm just a stick in the mud, but this is the reason I always preferred the vanilla experience in games. It's like all the mods are just cheat mode but with an extra long and frustrating to type console command. And space age feels like a mod.

everything before a particular weird meta becomes instantly obsolete the second you hit an arbitrary point on a tech beeline.

And ? Even if you know the meta it takes effort to put it into practice. And what use is 'meta' in a non-competitive game ?

erasing the stripes in an infinite loop to farm a 1% drop rate of the highest tier concrete

You can't erase the stripes. Yeah, you get a free 10% extra quality boost by being able to turn it into strips, which makes concrete easier to boost in quality than other stuff.

But even there, what is the point of of 'correct' ? With infinite energy, not much limited space.., it's much easier to just slap down so-so designs than to spend 8 hours squeezing 10% more efficiency out of an existing ones..

PVP Factorio could be pretty interesting, afaik,basically no one ever played it and it was never balanced for it, however the 2d map doesn't seem conducive to it, and Space Age with the silly spaceships that can't even come close to each other is definitely even less suited for it.

Yay! Factorio Friday thread again!

Love the game, and love the expansion even more.

A few secrets to enjoying the game and avoiding optimizing away the fun:

  1. Try to avoid deleting old stuff that worked. Let it stay there as an example of how far you've come. You'll also have a minimum output even if your latest build breaks for some reason.
  2. Avoid saving complicated blueprints, and absolutely avoid using other people's blueprints. Copy and paste is fine in the moment.
  3. Embrace the restrictions, treat them as harder limits than they actually are. For example avoid logistics drones on aquilo. Keep belts moving and other things moving on space platforms.
  4. Build in the moment. Let the needs of the factory dictate your build. Let spaghetti happen. Only you will understand your spaghetti. Embrace the simple challenge of weaving belts in and out of the existing factory.
  5. Build to last. Paradoxical with the last point, I know. Don't allow a breakdown in one part of your factory to clogg up the rest of it. This is important on Gleba. As long as inputs are available and output are needed each part of the factory should work. Make it a habit and you won't need to delete stuff.
  6. Switch it up. Go kill some enemies sometimes. Go build mining outposts. Go build factories planetside. Go build space platforms. This will help avoid the relentless optimization that will otherwise take hold. You don't need an insane ammo output factory, just a small one that will cover you and fill up a chest that you can occasionally empty out for cathartic bug killing.

Build in the moment. Let the needs of the factory dictate your build. Let spaghetti happen. Only you will understand your spaghetti. Embrace the simple challenge of weaving belts in and out of the existing factory.

Maybe you'll have more 'fun' but the headaches involved mean you will want to keep spaces for transit.

There's something that kind of bugs me about players who optimize for optimization with any game they play.

The game, as a piece of software, is basically just a program that is running from a start state to an end state, and the player's inputs are the one factor that determines how long, or even if it gets there. Yes, this is an obtuse oversimplificaiton. I apologize, computer science is not my forte.

Back in the day the end state was often a literal "YOU WIN" splash page before restarting from the beginning.

So by 'playing' the game, you're 'helping' the program reach a given end state. All well and dandy. But when you attempt to optimize your play to push towards that end-state as quickly as possible, you're suborning all of your other goals to that of simply 'completing' the program. The program at that point, I'd argue, no longer exists to 'serve' you, you are choosing to serve the program.

Yes, its all just math at the end of the day, and by creating a certain sequence of inputs you can make the number or the line go up more quickly pursuant to that math, and perhaps that is satisfying in its own right.

But damn, it strikes me as inverting the 'purpose' of playing games. Yes you 'win' when a given end-state is reached, but supposedly the process of reaching that end state should be fun, and/or challenging, and/or educational, and/or induce certain emotional states, and/or 'entertain' you and your friends. In fact, if the process of reaching the end state is enjoyable enough, it should be a tad dissappointing when you actually reach it!

The end state is not supposed to be the point? Unless you're in a very strictly defined 'competition' where the stakes are such that you absolutely MUST reach the end state that favors you as the 'winner' to continue.

Like, yeah, a Chess tournament is not really about 'the friends we made along the way.' Its about finding who is the absolute best at chess, which REQUIRES everyone play optimally for victory.

BUT MOST GAMES AREN'T ABOUT FINDING THE BEST POSSIBLE PLAYER! Its about helping your brain release the happy-juice or to learn something or to maybe even to kill some time... which implies that you want the game to LAST LONGER, not shorter!

At any rate, 'optimal' play, in my book, should be defined largely by what the player thinks their goals are, not inherently what the math/logic of the game itself demands to reach a point defined by the game. Its fair to say that if you do the latter, you're not playing the game, the game is playing YOU!

And yes, I realize I've called out the entire concept of "speed-running* when I say that. These are the guys who go to obscene effort to find ever bug, exploit, and corner-case possible to force the game to run from the start-state to the end-state without going through all the steps in between, and thus skipping the 'process' entirely. And they pride themselves on thus becoming so engrained with the program that they can make it run to completion in obscenely short times, by programming themselves to create the best possible set of inputs so as to achieve the endstate. Not because of their own particular goals.

It's all Progress Quest under the covers

James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games will make you think very differently about video games ... to the point that you may stop playing them.

This also sort of touches on the memes about "Open-World" vs. "Linear" games.

The joke is that open world games still ultimately railroad you to the same place, it just lets you wander around whatever winding path you like to end up there. The 'choice' of open world games is just when to move on to the next chapter in the story, but the story will still unfold in the same order.

And while I do think there's a distinction between a very cinematic linear game like Uncharted and, say Fallout: New Vegas or Baldur's Gate 3, there's something to the argument that a game can never do anything that wasn't programmed in, and whether it directly railroads the player to its end or it merely places boundaries on player actions and patiently waits for them to get there, the 'choices' presented by the game aren't actually producing new, surprising outcomes.

Wasn't the idea behind No Man's Sky that it was open-beyond-open in that it was procedurally generated. The game would actually shift and expand its world in a pseudo-random way based off of player actions?

IIRC, it was too successful at this and players never go to do ... anything. There was a lot of wandering around planets and zipping around space without much contact. In order to generate meaningful action, you have to have some sort of fixed and directing game mechanic. Help me out of I'm remembering this wrong.

P.S. something something we accidentally proved the existence of God through experimental video game design.

No Man's Sky got a TON of flack at launch because its procedural generation was actually far too limited and there was no interaction between players, despite implications or promises made by the publisher.

But then it improved in fits and starts over the next couple years to actually deliver on or exceed most of those promises, and now its a shining example of reputation rehabilitation. So the procedural generation is indeed impressive by any fair standard, now.

And they've released a lot of new content and upgrades to the game over the years.

Yet I think it is still running into the limits of what you can actually do with procedural generation. Only some subset of those generations will seem 'unique' and even fewer will be 'interesting' so the thrill of discovery is going to run out eventually, even if planet X-9-1-3-C-7-J is technically very different from planet X-9-1-3-C-7-Q, you won't feel like there's much difference if you can see how the lego pieces were rearranged to make each one.

I think the disappointment arises because any sort of full deterministic universe probably won't be like the Star Trek Universe, where you can run into nonstandard, unexplainable phenomena all over the place and the galaxy is just teeming with intelligent life that has abnormal powers, strange morality, and biology that defies understanding so the effort of exploring is rewarded, and there's nigh infinite novelty to be found because the rules of what is possible simply can't be pinned down.

Hmm... I can relate to this sort of thinking. I too think something is lost in the transition between a casual game and a competitive game. But something is gained too.

Speedrunning Minecraft, is a different game than Minecraft. Even if they share most of the mechanics in theory. Letting the game play you... Is the point.

We're doing to ourselves something similar to what we do to train LLMs. Because falling into the flow of that training is pleasurable. And optimizing for something (like speed) helps us to unveil something new about the game and provides a direction for improving our own capabilities.

Those ACE bugs can be used for more than just end credit skips after all. The knowledge generalizes back to casual play. And if you don't like one category, because too much of the game has been cut out or you have grown tired of the route, you can always switch to another. Or to casual play. It's not like your free will has been entirely circumscribed.

I do think the communities get a bit overly excited about the metric of mastery over the game improving, (completion speed) when the more valuable thing to me is the understanding that has been gained regarding the game. But its alright. I won't begrudge them their records.

This is what has burned me out on most video games. Eventually you discover that there’s one “right” way to do it and everything else is pointless. That’s part of why I loved PUBG so much: you had to scavenge limited supplies of items from the game world so most of the time nobody is running meta because they have to work with what they can find.

I don't really mind if there is a right way to do things, irl or in games. It's just that figuring it out should feel like reasoning from first principles, not trying to get into the head of the writer to follow his weird moon logic.

It's like the old adventure game puzzles where to fix a broken pump you had to use a banana on a metronome to hypnotize a monkey. There's no way your intuition can lead you there, you just have to know what the designer wanted you to do.

Minecraft mod packs almost transcended this because the appeal is in exploiting unintended interactions between different designers' moon logic progressions. You're back to real reasoning again, but at the end it's still built on a pile of gibberish.

And yeah, I feel the same way about working with what you get. Starsector is at its most fun in the early game, when you're using ships and weapons because they're what you salvaged from an ancient debris field.
It's less fun later on when you're micro-optimizing fleet builds to farm the end game content for 1% AI core loot drops

You take that back about Monkey Island 2! The correct example is Gabriel Knight 3. In a world where masking tape is some kind of powerful neodymium supermagnet for cat hair, you use it to make a fake mustache to disguise yourself as a man who doesn't have a mustache.

In a world where masking tape is some kind of powerful neodymium supermagnet for cat hair, you use it to make a fake mustache to disguise yourself as a man who doesn't have a mustache.

This is my favorite sentence of the week.

It is a summary of Old Man Murray's article, who absolutely deserves the credit here.

That’s part of why I loved PUBG so much

By contrast, this is why I find BR games literally unplayable- they're either boring as fuck because you're busy scavenging and not fighting, or you roll suboptimally, die, and have to wait 10 minutes to get back to a place you can try again. I hate not being in control of how I get to play.

This is why people bitch and moan about people picking the character with the most interesting mechanics available out of the box, getting downed, and immediately disconnecting.

CoD 4 was peak gaming because it wasn't 10 minutes, it was 10 seconds (other titles that didn't include support for having 32 players on the map had this closer to 1 minute). You could use meme strategies and bad guns, and still have a chance of having fun.

All other popular games- like the camping simulators (R6 Siege, Counter-Strike) and the MOBA-in-FPS-clothing (Overwatch)- have by their nature very opinionated ways to play. And it's as you say; they aren't fun because of it.

This is what has burned me out on most video games. Eventually you discover that there’s one “right” way to do it and everything else is pointless.

I maintain (with no personal disrespect intended) that this is a self inflicted problem. If the game is less fun when you go with the optimal solution, it is very easy to simply... not use the optimal solution. I do it all the time (for example, I played wide in Civ V despite all the game's mechanics pushing you away from that). Humans aren't rats who can't help but do the things that trigger dopamine in the brain, we have agency and should use it.

@ZorbaTHut had a post on I think /r/TheMotte about how, as a game designer, you basically had to trick the players into having fun because otherwise they'd fall into whatever pattern looked "optimal". I can't find it though.

This?

That's the one. How did you find it? I couldn't get DDG nor Google to cough it up.

Normal google/bing/ddg search is pretty useless on modern reddit: you pretty much have to use tools like pullpush. In theory, newer threads should be searchable with the reddit-internal search, but it's incredibly unreliable.

I know the one you mean. It was about Rimworld, and how players wanted grow lamps for plants to turn off at night (because they used a lot of power). But the lamps were intended to be expensive, to nudge people towards growing crops outside. So they wound up having the lamps turn off at night, but use twice as much electricity when active.

Another similar example is how beta WoW had a "fatigue" penalty to XP from kills (after playing for a long enough time), because they wanted quests and not grinding to be the best way to level up. Players complained, so they added the rest XP system which was mathematically equivalent but inverted - you always gained the lesser rate of XP, but if you logged out for a while you would gain rest and earn double XP while rested. And people praised the system even though it was the same thing.

Yeah, I know what you mean. Seeing people “correct” others’ Space Age designs online, they’re basically scooping out the fun and replacing it with a vague sense of “correctness.” It defeats the whole point of having a fresh playground of puzzles.

You’re 100% right about Minecraft, too. I remember listening to all my friends argue about solar panel layouts and energy budgets and thinking to myself, “why did I just spend an hour planting 50 different crops?”

I guess the best I can do is try to avoid spoilers for the main progression. But the longer I take to play the actual game, the less likely that gets…

The game spoils a lot about the progression just through in game research trees. Best of luck in avoiding the spoilers.

I've beaten the game at this point and my one suggestion is to just go for it. The major progression points in space age felt big and daunting, but when I was in the moment overcoming them it was just fun and less worrying than I thought it would be.

Oh, yeah, I'm not trying to avoid spoilers for planets/mechanics. I'm trying to avoid the posts which cross the line from "tips" to "guides." Optimizes the fun out of it for my slow ass.

Minecraft is at least also about building. No amount of Draconic Evolution having higher numbers really replaces how cool this worthless farm I built looks.

And usually, unless its a challenge pack with altered recipies, most of the best building tools will be fairly early game allowing you to entirely sit out the combat or energy meta or what have you. It's not like most packs give you anything to kill with that infinity + 1 sword that doesn't already die to the infinity - 1 sword anyway...

Though... maybe the meta is to build a ComputerCraft Turtle and download your entire base... Still. Even with super intelligent building tools there's still your own personal aesthetic to choose to express.

I guess the best I can do is try to avoid spoilers for the main progression. But the longer I take to play the actual game, the less likely that gets…

I had to cave on Gleba and look some things up. My production lines were constantly running out of seeds because I didn't notice that biolabs have a 50% productivity bonus, and you only really stay seed positive if you do your basic processing on them. Oops. Then I looked back and noticed that Vulcanus' forge building also had a 50% productivity bonus, which I guess explains some things, but I wasn't forced to be aware of it to survive.

I'm currently trying to work up the motivation to just wrap up some science and rocketry on Gleba and peace out. But I've been distracted by playing Final Fantasy XII again, and dabbling in Heroes of Might & Magic 1.

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