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9 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Dupes are _very_ obedient, but can only think of one thing at a time. I think you are making them do this. Not enough toilets?

That said, I would like things dropped from a sweep errand to stay marked for sweeping. 

One each not enough?

We both know more wouldnt fix it and making excuses doesnt help. The derps do this because the AI has does not employ foresight and bladder overrides eating based on a digital absolute. It could be cleverer. The question is coding priorities. 

Devs are professionals and we need to progress the discussion about why the derp AI is so low budget and undeveloped. 

IMHO the question is, is the poor AI worth what it does to the gameplay? From my perspective the answer is no but I have a quad core i7. Thing is I dont play games on mobiles, if that is the target market and computing constraint. I have never finished this game past mid game as it has always been too exasperating either micro or x3 and crossed fingers style. 

Following the theme of the OP I had hoped for better AI late beta and post release. If they were thinking of doing that I would urge them to do it

Last point being from an integrated creative production and business perspective, if the base game is flawed at a fundamental level why would I buy DLC? And its not just me I am talking about, its a segment of a bell curve.

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23 hours ago, Ceos said:

To the points brought up about dev intent  and abusing mechanics I keep coming back to the single player nature of the game. My abuse should not hurt others enjoyment (I do love drowned electrolyzers, and associated infinite gas storage) 

The problem with that is that these days single player games are connected to the internet too. People ask questions in forums and read/watch tutorials to learn stuff. And there is an unfortunate tendency in the ONI community to completely dismiss the basic/intuitive solutions and immediately jump to the "exploits"/weird mechanics or whatever one may call it. That's understandable for advanced players who've already tried out everything, but I don't think it really belongs in beginner tutorials. And for newbies it shouldn't be recommended instead of the basic solutions, but that's what often happens. It's also not all that fun when there is one weird mechanic that's obviously so much "better" than some other way to do things, so that it then becomes the main solution for a certain problem

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14 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

dupes will run and dig one tile, then run back and harvest a plant, then go dig another tile.. You can "solve" the problem by using the priority system, but that still doesn't help when there are multiple jobs of a single type in multiple areas of the base. 

It's a scheduling problem and can't be solved perfectly without external hints. Also, if you queue up digging commands at the two opposite sides of the map at the same time, and leave the prio at 5, you're creating the problem. Queue one side at 4 and the other at 5.

 

As for other tasks, I do want my dups NOT to prioritize them based on how long they have to travel (lazy dups). That deodorizer that is 1000 tiles away needs sand as much at the one that is within 10 tiles.

It works as long as you have idle dups, all tasks completed with spare time. 

If not, and there are too many tasks and too few dups, there are things you might want prioritize locally, other tasks that you don't want to be neglected even if they are at the opposite side of the map. There's not easy solution for that, you have to set priorities correctly.

It's weird, but I had many problems with the priority system at the beginning, eventually setting everything at 9. This was in my first 3-4 colonies.

Now, I don't know what when and why, but something changed, I have an army of dups, half of them idle, things are getting done even when I don't care. Even when I set the prio at 1, "ok do this when you've got nothing else to do", I lift my finger from the left button of the mouse and the dups are already building/digging...

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18 hours ago, frogglebunwich said:

One each not enough?

We both know more wouldnt fix it and making excuses doesnt help. The derps do this because the AI has does not employ foresight and bladder overrides eating based on a digital absolute. It could be cleverer. The question is coding priorities. 

And why do you assume I am making excuses? I see this thing only rarely. One of the things you  can do wrong is having too few toilets. There are other ways you can cause this. But my point is this is something you need to fix. ONI is not an idle-game after all.

18 hours ago, frogglebunwich said:

Last point being from an integrated creative production and business perspective, if the base game is flawed at a fundamental level why would I buy DLC? And its not just me I am talking about, its a segment of a bell curve.

The game is not flawed "at a fundamental" level.There are some people that like to claim this (thereby destroying their credibility). Hint: If you want to align with the language commonly used, you may want to call small annoyances "game breaking". Now, if it would crash all the time, your stores would magically vanish, dupes get stuck and die with no apparent reasons, thermal transfer suddenly behaves completely differently or Meep starts using your fresh water supply to pee in _without_ a good reason, _that_ would be "flawed at a fundamental level". Well, maybe. 

This type of criticism is common in any type of game. It often comes with an (empty) economic threat. Games have been destroyed by developers listening too much to the small minority that likes to use this kind of hyperbole and threat. 

For ONI, there are 96% positive STEAM reviews of around 50k. That is an absolutely excellent score. The very best scores I was able to find are not much better. Sure, there are some that reach 98%, but there are also absolute gems that only get 95%. A "fundamentally flawed" game should not even make it into the low 80% scores.

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11 hours ago, Steve8 said:

The problem with that is that these days single player games are connected to the internet too. People ask questions in forums and read/watch tutorials to learn stuff. And there is an unfortunate tendency in the ONI community to completely dismiss the basic/intuitive solutions and immediately jump to the "exploits"/weird mechanics or whatever one may call it. That's understandable for advanced players who've already tried out everything, but I don't think it really belongs in beginner tutorials. And for newbies it shouldn't be recommended instead of the basic solutions, but that's what often happens. It's also not all that fun when there is one weird mechanic that's obviously so much "better" than some other way to do things, so that it then becomes the main solution for a certain problem

If you play this game right, you do not go looking for "how to do things right". That is a false god you are not in any way required to pay tribute to. You figure things out yourself. Otherwise you are missing some 90% of the game. Copying designs is easy, but boring. And other people's ideas on how to play ONI are just that: Other people's ideas, i.e. not yours. If you base your play-style on them, then you get the ideas of other people and the very nature of that is that they are not your ideas.

Hence, in essence, I think you are criticizing yourself for not having the same ideas as others. But fear not: There is a great fix for this! You just ignore what others think the "true solutions" are! The great secret is that there are no such true solutions. No, really not. Everything that works is a good solution, no matter how much it deviates from the "established wisdom". For example, I never build a SPOM (I did to the anti-SPOM though, but that is completely my own design) and I never used the flaking mechanic. I accomplish this marvelous feat by simply designing my own solutions. Sometimes, I look at what others have come up with, usually to conclude that some people like pretty weird designs. For example the trend to try to squish anything in the smallest possible space is completely alien to me, as is the obsession to energy optimize everything and then claim perfection. Engineering is not about perfection, it is about good enough and so is ONI. It is also about doing your own design to find out how well your own ideas compete against reality, or in ONI, against the simulation. Except for Pip planting (which required a community analysis to figure it out), I do not remember a single instance where my own efforts were not eventually adequate to the task.

Of course, I lost colonies in the beginning. So what? I came back and tried something different. That is the whole point of the game. 

9 hours ago, TheMule said:

Now, I don't know what when and why, but something changed, I have an army of dups, half of them idle, things are getting done even when I don't care. Even when I set the prio at 1, "ok do this when you've got nothing else to do", I lift my finger from the left button of the mouse and the dups are already building/digging...

Exactly. When things are not done anymore, even when set to 9, that is the game telling you you need either more dupes or a lot more patience. With enough dupes, you can always assure critical things are getting done. For example, in the "outhouse phase" I always have one dupe that has tidying higher than everything else. I sometimes also use a spare outhouse. Result: no messes. There is also a dupe that has researching above all other things and one for farming, etc. At some time this gets non-sustainable with 3, so I got to 6. Then 6 get bogged down, hence I go to 12. I never have needed more, although I sometimes go to 16, just so the colony still has 12 when somebody is in space and my shifts (usually 4) are still all the same size. 

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19 hours ago, frogglebunwich said:

One each not enough?

We both know more wouldnt fix it and making excuses doesnt help. The derps do this because the AI has does not employ foresight and bladder overrides eating based on a digital absolute. It could be cleverer. The question is coding priorities. 

I really haven't had the issue you're talking about. My dupes tend to use the bathroom, then eat (or vice-versa).  They don't get interrupted in the middle of eating, unless they HAD to go, but someone else was occupying the toilet.  In that case, they started eating, but will stop once the toilet becomes free.   Either way, the problem isn't game breaking, and it gives my sweepy something to do.

19 hours ago, frogglebunwich said:

Devs are professionals and we need to progress the discussion about why the derp AI is so low budget and undeveloped. 

Perhaps because they've been working on optimizing the massive computing algorithms that are bogging systems down.  For example, the thermal energy code.  Could the dupe AI be a little more robust? Certainly -- but as I stated above, it isn't a big problem.  As long as you make use of the priority system, your dupes will do pretty good about getting base tasks completed.

19 hours ago, frogglebunwich said:

IMHO the question is, is the poor AI worth what it does to the gameplay? From my perspective the answer is no but I have a quad core i7. Thing is I dont play games on mobiles, if that is the target market and computing constraint.

My opinion is that the dupe AI really isn't a big issue.  I don't know why people continue to make a big deal about it.  There are things I would like to see improved, but their current functionality is perfectly adequate for the game.   As for the target market and computing constraint?  Currently the recommended machine is an i5 desktop -- so they aren't targeting the mobile community.  The "computing constraint" is very likely the bandwidth between the CPU and the RAM.  Many players have done a lot of tests, and the most significant improvement in performance is increasing the bandwidth between the CPU and RAM.  This means that if you have a tablet with a faster processor and more cores than a desktop, ONI will run worse on the tablet.  Its simply a matter of hardware design.

19 hours ago, frogglebunwich said:

Last point being from an integrated creative production and business perspective, if the base game is flawed at a fundamental level why would I buy DLC? And its not just me I am talking about, its a segment of a bell curve.

While I agree with your sentiment, I don't agree with the implication that ONI is flawed at a fundamental level.  I think that ONI is very well developed.  It has given me thousands of hours of enjoyment since I started playing the pre-release, and has only improved in quality since then.  There was a short period of time where the AI would fail to process tasks that occurred outside the field of view, which meant that if your farm wasn't visible, your dupes would end up starving rather than harvesting the food.  That was the only time that I felt the dupe AI had a fundamental flaw, and Klei resolved it quickly.

 

55 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

The game is not flawed "at a fundamental" level.There are some people that like to claim this (thereby destroying their credibility). Hint: If you want to align with the language commonly used, you may want to call small annoyances "game breaking". Now, if it would crash all the time, your stores would magically vanish, dupes get stuck and die with no apparent reasons, thermal transfer suddenly behaves completely differently <snip>

I agree with you.  If a game is not working exactly the way you want it to, that doesn't mean it is fundamentally flawed.  In my opinion, fundamentally flawed means that you can't even play the game.  I remember early in EverQuest when a new patch would hit and suddenly you couldn't even play because either you couldn't log in, or you crashed within a couple minutes of getting logged in.  ONI is more stable than a lot of games at this point.  I can leave it running for days without an issue -- provided I correctly set up sustainability.  In fact, its been months since I've actually managed to crash the game.  Do my dupes do stupid things occasionally? Sure -- but they're 3d printed from ooze.  I'd be surprised if they DIDN'T do stupid stuff.

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

This type of criticism is common in any type of game.

I've been noticing that. Small problem, outraged reaction.  It isn't just games getting this treatment. 

Spoiler

Just the other day at my (temporary) job we had a woman send her 8-year-old daughter in to order.  We allowed the girl to pay, even though technically it was illegal for her to be using her mom's EBT card, and we prepared the food the way the girl ordered.  Turns out that what the girl ordered was not what the woman wanted, and she went ballistic about how we prepared her food incorrectly.  We told her that we would re-make her order, and that to avoid this problem in the future, perhaps she could come in and place the order herself... and she went ballistic on us again.  I can't repeat her words here, but the general idea was "how dare you discriminate against my daughter!"  Small problem, huge over-the-top reaction.

Anyway, my opinion remains -- ONI is a fun game, even in the late-game stages.  I am not disappointed with it in the least and consider my money well-spent.

33 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

But fear not: There is a great fix for this! You just ignore what others think the "true solutions" are!

This.  Completely.  100%.  

40 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

Engineering is not about perfection, it is about good enough

Reminds me of the VCR vs Betamax.  As far as engineering designs, Betamax was better, with higher quality video and audio and a better mechanical design that would protect the tape from wear.  But the VCR was 'good enough' and a lot cheaper, so that was the route technology went.

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10 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I've been noticing that. Small problem, outraged reaction.  It isn't just games getting this treatment. 

Yes, it seems to be a fundamental issue. With life being so safe today and societies being "egalitarian", some people lose all sense of proportion. With the Internet, they can then find a group that supports them and ignore the 90%+ honest feedback that just says it is not a big issue and would they please calm down?

Your example with the food? Total stupidity. She discredited herself and if her little girl is not stupid (and I gather she is not) the 8 year old will have noticed pretty exactly what was going on and will have concluded she is not trusted by her mother. And anyways, maybe the food was exactly how the little one wanted it? The trust issue is a big deal. The food is not. 

Originally, I was very surprised by the hands-off approach Klei has to the forums, though there are (rare) indications they read everything. By now I have realized it is probably to side-step pretty much this issue.

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2 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

if her little girl is not stupid (and I gather she is not)

Off-topic, but I still feel compelled to reply, so another 'spoiler' window:

Spoiler

The girl was not stupid, she's 8.  She simply forgot one of the ingredients.  It wasn't like she asked for a cheeseburger and got a taco instead.  However, the mother was absolutely convinced that WE had forgotten to put the ingredient on and were "blaming" our ineptitude on her daughter.  It didn't matter that we had a receipt that agreed with the order, and it didn't matter that we offered to remake her order.  So now we have a sign on the door that says "We cannot accept orders from unaccompanied children."  

 

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4 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Copying designs is easy, but boring. And other people's ideas on how to play ONI are just that: Other people's ideas, i.e. not yours. If you base your play-style on them, then you get the ideas of other people and the very nature of that is that they are not your ideas.

I don't agree fully on that. I don't think "figure it out yourself" is a good advice for newcomers.

I want new players to experience the game fully as soon as possible. Look at the percentage of the achievements on steam... you clearly see a lot of players stopping very early on... those for whom the game doesn't click. I don't see that as a problem.

The problem lies with those who do try and play. They like the game, the invest into it but still many of them don't go past early game anyway.

I do think that learning "standard" solutions makes progress much faster. Even just acquiring the skills to build them effectively is important. I took me almost 100 cycles to build my first rodriguez SPOM. I was still a newbie, made mistakes, wasn't able to prime it correctly etc.

This - alone - can be a colony killer.  With time I've develped the skills required to plan in advance. It all comes together the better you get at playing. By the time I build a SPOM, I have the workforce to build it fast, and also I've learned how to queue up everything in a way that dups build it unattended with very little micromanagement. And, again kind of misteriously, I never fail at starting them up now. It only takes seconds.

In short, maybe as a veteran you forgot, but just being able to build stuff effectively is a skill by itself. IMHO, the most important skill a for a newbie to develop. Newbies are most likely to realize what they need to build when it's late already. Knowing that you can build the module you need fast and that it will work the first time is a colony saver.

Here's where well known designs come into play. So my ideal path for a newbie would be:

- understand the basics;

- learning about "standard" modules and how to build them correctly and effectively... give a player a stone hatch stable and a rodriguez SPOM and you solve 90% for their problems;

- complete the game once... by that I mean playing with rockets and space materials, volcanoes, boilers... all this still copying existing designs;

- rinse and repeat, on different asteroids, different conditions; meanwhile try and "improve" the standard designs or maybe optimized them for your current situation - you also learn their shortcomings. For example SPOMs are great for newbies, but one day you realized you could have saved all that hydrogen for later;

- challenge yourself out of your comfort zone; e.g. don't do ranching for food; start doing things differently from what you usually do;

- start making your own designs, interact with the community, get feedback, improve them etc;

- learn the magic of bug hunting, and building crazy stuff

- go full @mathmanican

Ok, maybe skip the last one. :)


Yesterday I figured out how to break into a swamp biome that had steam at 1100C. I wanted to break in because it wanted to collect the liquid gold w/o mining it and wasting 50% of it. So cooling the thing down wasn't an option. I had to remove the steam first. It tried thinking of bypass pumps but unfortunately they dont work too well with liquid metals, beads neither.
In the end, I made my own door compressor. Took me a while but I figured out the automation that I wanted. It has an extra safety that you can turn it off and its last cycle would be to close all doors and then reopen just the two internal ones, creating a vacuum seal. It seemed a good idea should things go south when dealing with tiles of 200kg steam at 1100C.

It worked like a charm, pressure down to 100g, and I managed to corner build a thermium pump (with a rail bridge to cool it), and I'm now down to grams. Figuring out how to mop/pump gold is next now, but I think I'll just mop it where possible and pitcher pump it elsewhere. Oh, and the place is full of ceramic too. Weirdly enough, there's a bunch of wort seeds around, apparently they don't mind 1100C.
Unfortunately, the magma nearby did a great job at refining amalgam into gold and turning sand into ceramic, but solidified in the process. I know it's not gold, but I'm greedy now so maybe I don't feel like digging all that igneous rock and loosing 50% of the mass... need to figure out a way to smelt it back into magma and bottle that...

It's actually amazing how much fun I'm still having with this game, after 2466 hours.

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1 hour ago, TheMule said:

Look at the percentage of the achievements on steam.

Achievements don't get counted if you're using Sandbox mode, which a lot of players are.  There's a lot of achievements I still haven't gotten -- and it isn't because I don't know what I'm doing.  I simply haven't felt the need to get them.

 

1 hour ago, TheMule said:

I don't think "figure it out yourself" is a good advice for newcomers.

I want new players to experience the game fully as soon as possible.

I disagree with this, but my mindset is different.  I enjoy figuring things out.  That's a good portion of the fun for me.  "What happens if I do ... this?"

 

1 hour ago, TheMule said:

being able to build stuff effectively is a skill by itself.

It is, and its a skill you develop by trial and error.  Copying a design from the forums isn't building, its copying.  Many of the mistakes people make when copying designs from the forum is that they don't understand some of the underlying principles, so they do something wrong.  Their build then fails to function correctly, and they get confused and dejected.  "But it looks the same!"  Sometimes its as simple as building a bridge backwards.  

In my opinion, taking conceptual ideas and building something from it is far more rewarding than copying someone else's design.

2 hours ago, TheMule said:

In the end, I made my own door compressor. Took me a while but I figured out the automation that I wanted. It has an extra safety that you can turn it off and its last cycle would be to close all doors and then reopen just the two internal ones, creating a vacuum seal. It seemed a good idea should things go south when dealing with tiles of 200kg steam at 1100C.

That's a great idea, and an excellent example of the design process. You start with a problem, then figure out how to fix it.  I bet it felt good when you finally got it up and running.

2 hours ago, TheMule said:

Oh, and the place is full of ceramic too.

Yes.. cooking algae gives you dirt, then sand.  Cooking clay gives you ceramic.  There's a LOT of clay in slime biomes. I'm somewhat curious how your slime biome got so hot.  Was there a volcano?

You listed your ideal path for new players, well, here's my ideal path for comparison.

  1. Learning the basics.  I started playing with the pre-release, when there was not a lot of stuff to go on.  The tooltips weren't finished, the database didn't exist, and the wiki was both sparse and wrong.  My first 100 cycles were learning the basics of the game.  How do I get oxygen, how do I keep my dupes from starving, why are these hatches attacking me, etc.
  2. Learn which buildings go together well.  Discover the underlying physics of ONI.  For example, when building a SPOM (which I don't recommend), the physics involved is crucial.  Hydrogen rises above oxygen, meaning that you can exploit the natural sorting of gasses to avoid using the Gas Filter building and save on energy costs -- which is why the SPOM works.
  3. Learn about heat management. Some initial conceptual ideas may be useful, but I still remember when it was first added to the game and we had to discover all the rules from scratch.
  4. Balance your base.  You don't have to get it truely self-sustaining, but getting a good balance is a fine accomplishment.  Balancing oxygen supply with food production and heat management can be very rewarding.  Its nice to get to a point where you can say, "I don't have to pause the game while I think about my next build!"
  5. Discover the joys (and failures) of the magma biome.   How many of us have accidentally flooded our base with sour gas? <raises hand>  That was especially fun when it first started happening because NOBODY knew where the sour gas was coming from.  
  6. Discover the joys (and failures) of the space biome.  "Hey, look! My first rocket!" *crash* "What the... where are those rocks coming from destroying my rocket??!"
  7. Challenge yourself to try new ways of doing things.  "Well, sure, I CAN use a SPOM, but is there a better way to fill my base with oxygen that also lets me save up Hydrogen for my rockets?"  Or "That refinery sure produces a LOT of heat..  Can I do something fun with that heat?"
  8. Try different asteroids, and different combinations.   Some particularly challenging ones are Rhime with a frozen core and buried oil, and Volcanea with lava tubes AND volcanoes.
  9. Start playing around with the underlying physics.  Build a petroleum boiler, or a sour-gas condenser, using counter-current heat exchangers -- or using doors to create a hot plate; or both!.  Try flakeing some materials.  Power your base using a volcano.  Build an escher waterfall, a bead pump, or an airlock that uses only trapped gasses.

I don't think I've ever completed any of the end-game cases.  Its not that I can't.. On many of my bases there's only one 'event' preventing me from reaching those points.   Like building a great monument, or sending a rocket into the temporal tear.  My last two bases have come short of opening up the space biome, as I have been playing without space materials and trying to do fun things.  Like getting molten aluminum into a pipe using an aluminum pump.  There's almost an art to it.

I'm not saying your path is wrong, I'm simply providing an alternative.  I grew up playing games before the internet, when you would stick a cartridge into your machine, turn it on, and start playing without knowing any of the rules or what was coming up next -- or how to beat that hard boss.  So later you'd get together with some of your friends and start discussing and trying things until you figured it out.  Lately many of the people I rub shoulders with don't appreciate the discovery phase.  They just want to hop online and see how "its supposed to be done" and move on.  It destroys my soul a little every time my nephew pauses his game and says, "OK, I don't know the next part, so I'm gonna go online real quick."  He enjoys his game, certainly, but he's lost the thrill of discovery.  He's lost the feeling of accomplishment you get when you encounter something hard, put your mind to work, and figure out a solution.  Maybe that's a failure on my part; maybe its a societal failure.  Its easy to hand out a solution, it isn't as easy to teach someone how to discover their own solution.

This game can teach you how to find your own solutions, if you let it.

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1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Maybe that's a failure on my part; maybe its a societal failure.  Its easy to hand out a solution, it isn't as easy to teach someone how to discover their own solution.

This game can teach you how to find your own solutions, if you let it.

Some people are engineers, tinkerers, experimenters and explorers. Others just want a show, some simple interaction optional. People changing from the 2nd camp into the first one are exceptionally rare. It is almost like the human race is a mix of two different species. (Same applies to independent thinkers: The 10...15% that do it do it habitually and all the time. The others cannot be bothered and avoid it, even though they in principle have the skill as it comes with intelligence. But using it is a choice.) I don't think it has ever been different. The beauty of the Internet age is that something as complex as ONI or Factorio can be profitable because of global exposure, despite only addressing a small part of the gamer population. 

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On 8/6/2020 at 9:35 PM, mathmanican said:

... And what percentage of people playing ONI come in knowing the different thermal transfer properties of various metals?  My guess is that most people playing the game (kids under 20?) will think, "metal should transfer heat nicely, and the metals I find later in the game should be better than the metals I find early game, and space metals should be totally awesome." This is precisely how the game currently moves (with aluminum being an interesting exception).  It's pretty clear that the 75C overheat temp on things is arbitrary, and you quickly learn that in ONI the key to increasing this arbitrary constraint is "find gold" or "make steel." 

I'm going to guess your background includes something that gave you specific experience with different type of metals (material science?).  Mine is pure mathematics. Something in your background gave you training to know things about material properties so you know exactly which ones to pick in real life (or you looked them up because of the game - Klei won and educated someone -  and are now frustrated they didn't pick the exact values and preserve real life relationships).  My background (a PhD in mathematics, with plenty of time spent with PDEs, heat flow, gas diffusion, etc., from a theoretical point of view) did not give me any intuitive notion. I know that different metals have different properties (I just slap a constant in place), but I don't bother with specific materials (the "pure", hence "nonapplied", modifier).

...I was never annoyed that the game chose different values than real life, and assumed the devs picked values that made things reasonable for game play sake....

I did not have a material science background. While I did study quite a bit of physics, thermal conductivity was one thing that was barely touched on, and I mainly learned about it as a result of ONI, not prior. My main background is in computer science. I would caution in general against making these assumptions about where people are coming from, because it can serve to dismiss their reasoning. I do like to tinker and experiment and discover, it's just with ONI, I feel like after learning about things that I'm looking at a poor design that doesn't make much sense given a few selective injections of realism would fix some parts.
I would like to note that a lot of what I take issue with in ONI is related to choices Klei made in regards to processing chains and material properties in things added very early in the game. Lead and aluminum tossed in with realistic thermal conductivities has done a lot more for the game than copper and gold at their weirdly-average values.

Knowing about copper specifically is actually fairly common I think, as it's commonly used in pans meant to quickly heat up oil in cooking. I wasn't aware until I looked into it just how good it was, but my expectation coming in was that it would be up there with aluminum, not down with iron. I would also like to point out that there are always reasonable breaks from reality, such as with pressure mechanics, but what frustrates me about copper is that the game has thermal conductivity overall much like real life, and no apparent reason to make copper so bad, given how well aluminum has worked out, and so it ends up being a curveball you run into after ONI has already set up some differing expectations from reality, and that specific curveball messes with the potential of builds.

I think it would be more sane if thermal conductivities were nearly realistic (not exactly, maybe thermium > diamond > copper/aluminum > gold > current copper/gold) and starting biomes always had decent iron ore, and aluminum/gold/copper/diamond were goodies you found around the map in smaller amounts than present; starting forest biome having an absurd thermal conductor in it is just...weird. Actually, I think it would be interesting to have a small amount of refined copper sitting around buried nearby (this is how ancient civilizations got started with it to my knowledge), and push players to refine metals once they run out of it. Lead kind of does this right now, but in absolutely ridiculous quantities and far too far from the base (pretty much you go from famine to feast with being able to run conductive wire etc., sure lead sucks for heat but there's just so much it feels stupid).

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17 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

That's a great idea, and an excellent example of the design process. You start with a problem, then figure out how to fix it.  I bet it felt good when you finally got it up and running.

Oh absolutely. I think we agree on that being part of the game. But also I've got 2466 hours under my belt.

What we disagree on is the nature of the learning process. I believe there are things you can learn by yourself, and things you can't w/o someone teaching you (or reading books, etc.). Knowledge is meant to be shared not recreated indipendently every time. I doesn't work like that. Or rather, maybe for the simplest of things.

My first videogame was a pong console (a clone of the original). Yeah that was a time you had to figure out the rules yourself. But I don't think ONI is that simple. I don't think telling newbie to reinvent the wheel by themselves is a good idea.
 

You also seem to vastly underestimate how much copying is part of the learning process. Let's see: what do you think is the best way of learning Judo. Do you think it makes sense to enter a Dojo, ask for the Master, tell them "ok, what's the principle this thing is based on?", then go home and figuring it out yourself? Or do you spend 10 years trying your best at "copying" 100+ techniques, get your black belt, only to understand that you finally managed to qualify as a student, all that was only for you to start undestanding what a Master has to teach you?

Do you think the best way of learning how to play the guitar is to buy one and figure it out by yourself? Or do you start by learning chords, and songs made by others, "copying" them if you will, and only after you've studied long enough you might be tempted at writing your own songs?

Copying is the beginning phase of every learning process.

17 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

There's a lot of achievements I still haven't gotten -- and it isn't because I don't know what I'm doing.  I simply haven't felt the need to get them.

Oh I'm not talking about those. https://steamcommunity.com/stats/457140/achievements

Almost 50% of the players never got "One Bed One Bath". Those people basicly haven't played the game, I'll ignore them. They aren't even beginners. I don't count them as players, just owners of the game who don't play. It wouldn't be a fair argument to count them in.


So,I'm going to double all the percentages for the rest of the achievements.
 

The problem is see comes from half of those who play never getting "Royal Flush". They stopped playing at very early game.

"Red Light, Green Light" is at 40% only. 60% of the players never got to use automation. This is not something you don't get because you don't care about achiements. It means you played ONI but never used a smart battery.

The list goes on:

66% of the players (82% of the owners) never made to cycle 100, ever.

77% of the players never entered the oil biome.

93% of the players never built a bunker door.

I find those number a problem. There are many players who experience only a very small fraction of the game.

I believe we need to help people experience more of the game than just early game.

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13 hours ago, TheMule said:

Do you think the best way of learning how to play the guitar is to buy one and figure it out by yourself?

Jack White, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Prince all thought so...

But I do understand where you're coming from.  I think with something skills-oriented such as Judo or Electrical Engineering, its a good idea to have some instruction to avoid hurting yourself or someone else.  My opinion, though, is that ONI is a game, and a mistake won't hurt you or anyone else, or even your computer.  A mistake in ONI means that you might lose a dupe or have to restart your colony.  It is a lot like a bucket of legos.  The tooltips tell you what each part is, or what each building does, and the rest is up to you and your imagination.  If you build something and it doesn't work, take it apart and learn from the experience.

13 hours ago, TheMule said:

The problem is see comes from half of those who play never getting "Royal Flush".

If you leave one outhouse or one unpiped sink, you won't get Royal Flush.  It could simply be that they never got around to removing their early-game facilities.  Or maybe they're trying to grow morbs.

13 hours ago, TheMule said:

"Red Light, Green Light" is at 40% only. 60% of the players never got to use automation. This is not something you don't get because you don't care about achiements. It means you played ONI but never used a smart battery.

<snip>

66% of the players (82% of the owners) never made to cycle 100, ever

Now these are telling achievements.  It would be interesting to learn why players are stopping before reaching 100.  And smart batteries are key to Not Running Out of Fuel. I mean, you can control your electric production in many ways, but the easiest and most reliable is still a smart battery.  I wonder how many are stopping at basic research and never building a science station?

 

13 hours ago, TheMule said:

I believe we need to help people experience more of the game than just early game.

No doubt.  I wonder if there's a better way to do a tutorial for ONI.  Not necessarily giving them a blueprint for a common structures, but rather giving them a firmer grasp of how the various parts work.  For example, dealing with the hydrogen from an electrolyzer, or managing the waste CO2 from a coal power plant.  Personally, I enjoyed figuring all that out on my own, but I can see how some might find it daunting when their dupes start dropping everything to run to the next open air pocket even though you're supposedly producing oxygen.

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1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Jack White, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Prince all thought so...

Nope. They may have not got "proper" guitar lessons in classical way, but for sure they learned from someone and for sure they spent hours studying and trying to imitate other guitarists of the time... at the beginning. No one is saying they spent their entire life just copying others. But they were imitators well before they were creators.

Not being classically trained, or even not being able to read music doesn't mean you haven't studied, or copied from others. The Beatles couldn't read music, but would travel to some random guy only because they heard he knew a chord. To copy (learn) a chord.

Mozart is - most likely - the most famous genius in music. His father kept writing to his friends about how amazing he was. But he was a musician himself, and taught how to play instruments to Mozart... and his sister, who happened to be very talented too, or maybe their father was a good teacher to begin with. Mozart was still very young, when he composed his first simphony... under the guidance of Bach's son, no less.
No, not even Mozart figured it out himself. He was genius-level in learning and then reelaborating what he had learned.

And are you sure people like Larry Graham never taught anything to Prince?

2 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

A mistake in ONI means that you might lose a dupe or have to restart your colony.

Or that you get frustrated and stop playing.

1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

It could simply be that they never got around to removing their early-game facilities.  Or maybe they're trying to grow morbs.

They grow morbs in every single colony they play?  Anyway, that's just line with the rest.

There's a clear progression, at every step we're bleeding players.

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On 8/10/2020 at 6:28 PM, Gurgel said:

Some people are engineers, tinkerers, experimenters and explorers. Others just want a show, some simple interaction optional.

Well, teaching depends very much on who you teach. For the first camp, the classical approach is generally not very suitable, you need to give them a lot of freedom and allow them to experiment early on to keep them interested. For the second camp, sure. But do not expect them to get creative any time, it is just not what they want. This is also embodied in people doing "lifelong learning" (a minority) and people learning a job and then basically sticking with it as long as possible and potentially doing mostly the same for their whole life.

Pretty obviously, ONI will have a good appeal to the first group and not much appeal to the second one. It is not Minecraft. That is why I advocate doing teaching that fits the first group and that means minimal tips (like do not grow your basis fast) and only for those that seek them. Sure, in real life you may have mixed groups or the majority of the people you teach will be from the second camp, and then that approach will not work. But ONI is by its very nature a strong selector massively biased to the first group.

Note that I am not saying these groups corresponds to intelligence or education. You find independent thinkers and explorers and tinkerers on any level of skill, education and intelligence. Some need a lot of help from tools eventually and need to look things up all the time. But they will still get there and it will still be their own accomplishment. 

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3 hours ago, TheMule said:

Nope. They may have not got "proper" guitar lessons in classical way, but for sure they learned from someone and for sure they spent hours studying and trying to imitate other guitarists of the time... at the beginning. No one is saying they spent their entire life just copying others. But they were imitators well before they were creators.

Playing on a computer someone else built, with an operating system someone else designed, then loading in a game Klei made, is already a lot of imitation.  Yes, all those guitarists were imitators before they were creators, but the point of the example is that at some point they decided to teach themselves and become creative, and that's when they found joy in music.  If players copy modules to learn how to build a stable colony they've sucked the joy out of the best part of the game.  That's just my opinion, but I would suggest rethinking which part of the musical journey ONI is attempting to reproduce.  I personally have played ONI for thousands of hours, and I've spent more like ten thousand hours playing musical instruments, and my opinion is that ONI is trying to replicate the feeling you get when you've put in hundreds of hours of practice already and you're moving from novice to intermediate level.  Playing ONI is a way to start being creative now, without having to spend all that time building in muscle memory first.  If you had to spend hundreds of hours building muscle memory before you could get creative in ONI, why would you play it, over spending those hundreds of hours not being creative learning a musical instrument and coming out of it with an actual skill, or something comparable like learning to weld, or rock climb, etc?

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If you don't have time for a long read, then let me summarize this for you. 

... education theory rant and how ONI connects to education - personal opinions that I hope you challenge me on - crazy ideas - anecdotes from childhood ...

or just 

... rant ...

Done.  You read it all.  The longer version lies in the spoiler. Grab popcorn. Maybe it will become a NY Times best seller. :) 

Spoiler

If any of the stuff below sounds like something you want to explore further, let me know and I'll gladly share links to papers you can read.

On 8/10/2020 at 8:35 AM, KittenIsAGeek said:

maybe its a societal failure

This entire thread has become an amazing discussion about education, and possibly some of the societal failures (or successes) of our educational systems. It makes me think about comparing/contrasting pedagogy versus andagogy, which is similar to comparing/constrasting teach-directed learning versus self-directed learning.  You could also compare it to the discussion of "artisans" and "virtuosos" give here.  I propose that we have so many more artisans that virtuosos, precisely because our pedagogical, teacher-directed, educational system (societal issue) leads to this. It's not a "failure", rather a consequence. 

On 8/10/2020 at 10:28 AM, Gurgel said:

People changing from the 2nd camp into the first one are exceptionally rare.

I would call your "first camp" those who seek self-directed learning (andragogy principles apply). They want to have a large measure of say in every step of the learning process (outcomes, assessment, activities, etc.). Having to do exactly what they are told is boring, insulting, demeaning, or whatever. The second camp are those who depend on teacher-directed learning (pedagogy principles apply). They expect someone else to dictate what should be done (may not want it, but have become accustomed to letting other dictate).

I would argue that the reason we see so few people in the first camp above is a natural consequence of the mostly teacher-directed pedagogy that dominates public education (around the world). Very little of the systematized formal educational process (kindergarten through first few years of graduate school) lets the learner self-direct. In some sense, we almost force students to learn to copy others. Going rogue is strongly discouraged, and sometimes punished. Compliance is rewarded. 

18 hours ago, TheMule said:

What we disagree on is the nature of the learning process. I believe there are things you can learn by yourself, and things you can't w/o someone teaching you (or reading books, etc.). Knowledge is meant to be shared not recreated indipendently every time.

Many people learn to copy from others, as the first step in learning, because that is what pedagogy promotes. We are trained to copy others. It doesn't have to be that way though.

Kids naturally try solving problems on their own, without copying other's solutions. Some educational trends use pedagogy principles, coupled with constructionist ideas (inquiry-based or inquiry-oriented learning as two examples in mathematics) to design educational experiences that let the student propose their own ideas (without copying others). The reason it still sits in "pedagogy" is that the instructor has a specific outcome that they want the students to eventually realize, hence providing a chance for the students to independently recreate knowledge.  You could argue that this is still "copying," as the instructor is creating an environment (making scaffolding) which facilitates helping the students copy (without knowing it) someone else's work. I use these principles daily in class, and sometimes am very pleasantly surprised by completely new discoveries (at least to me) that students make. Some of these student discoveries have completely changed my viewpoint on topics, and changed how I teach. I still see my teaching philosophy heavily tied to pedagogical teacher-directed trends. This next year will involve a lot of unraveling and turning control over to the students.  

18 hours ago, TheMule said:

You also seem to vastly underestimate how much copying is part of the learning process. Let's see: what do you think is the best way of learning Judo. Do you think it makes sense to enter a Dojo, ask for the Master, tell them "ok, what's the principle this thing is based on?", then go home and figuring it out yourself? Or do you spend 10 years trying your best at "copying" 100+ techniques, get your black belt, only to understand that you finally managed to qualify as a student, all that was only for you to start undestanding what a Master has to teach you?

I was enjoying this example, about Judo, and had a different perspective. If the goal is to train a group of people who will do exactly what is asked (an army of soldiers), then you absolutely want people to copy. You want to be able to predict what they will do, and you want exact obedience. This sounds a lot like current public education (create an army of factory workers), and so we find a huge chunk of people in @Gurgle's 2nd camp. That's the goal, so it's what we get. 

Here is an alternative. Rather than copy the instructor, what if a master Judo instructor presented a new problem to the students (even young introductory students), and asked them to come up with solutions, practice them, and share them with the class.  Then have a demonstration/discussion day and spend time letting them identify pros and cons of each solution. This would create a group of independent thinkers who learn to compare/constrast their solution with others. This needs to also include a discussion about how a solution fits, or does not, with the Judo theory. Some solutions would violate Judo requirements, even if they might be more effective (which would be a great discussion itself - why do we not just pull out a gun and shoot the attacker - maybe skip demonstrations on that one). Weekly practices can then help train muscles to reproduce instinctively the moves that are agreed to be "best". The students "copy" thing when they have decided that the things are worth copying (not the other way around).  I can 100% agree that "copying" is part of the learning process, though whether it comes first, or later, is completely arguable (and may be a difference between camp1/camp2 people), and whether we call it copying, or repetition, also makes a difference (connotation).  

Students can definitely compare their solution to a solution provided by the previous "master". If the a consensus shows that the solution beats the previous master, then acknowledge it. An instructor can also seed new discussions occasionally with a  hidden recognized best approach, which will be discussed as well. Rather than indoctrinating people with a specific set of moves (that is one take on education, and possibly the current most prevalent), the students could learn what makes Judo different from other martial arts methods, and arrive at becoming a master through creative virtuoso endeavors, rather than rigid replication of artisan skill.  Both have value, by the way. 

18 hours ago, TheMule said:

Copying is the beginning phase of every learning process.

Debatable.  The beginning may actually be, "I want to solve a problem."  From there, traditional modern pedagogy tells students they should find someone else's solution (from a math textbook or teacher lecture) and copy it (do problems 1-79, every other odd). However, young children don't do this approach first. Older children, who don't want to copy to start out with can be punished by the traditional system. The system we live in can result in copying being the beginning phase. Alternatives do exist.  Eventually, we copy (or better, repeat) things that we find to be useful.

Let me give one example, from high school (long ago). We learned the product rule, and spent a couple days working on functions of the form (u)^p(v)^q, where u and v are arbitrary functions and p, and q are real numbers (not necessarily integers). This type of problem forces students to come to grips with factoring rational expressions, especially because the form of solution acceptable by the teacher had to match the book (fully factored to be something like $(u)^{m-1}(v)^{n-1}(nuv'+mvu')$).  The solution I gave in parenthesis was not provided by the text, nor any book I had read. Instead, we were expected to do each problem starting from the same "copying start" of (uv)' = uv'+vu', and then factor until we had one term.   I did a few, and then saw the huge slew of 30+ problem ahead of me. I said, "I'll do this symbolically once, and then just learn to copy the solution in one step to save time."  I did the problem symbolically, checked it a couple times, made a nice proof, then forgot all the details and copied the solution to all my homework. It was super fast, homework came back with a perfect score, and I was happy. Then came test day, where I reproduced the answer instantly without any glitch.  I of course got it marked wrong and given zero credit because I "didn't show my work."

The example above gives an example of how rigid the "copy and repeat this process" can be. The example above may have started with me "copying" the product rule, but I can provide plenty of other examples that clearly have no start in copying something else. My physics course in highschool had a project related to position and velocity that led me to build a graphing calculator program to independently discover the derivative and limits, the week before the derivative appeared in my calculus course. 

Our society trains us to copy the "accepted" solution. It's ingrained in culture and traditional pedagogy. So it should not be a surprise that ONI players want to have things to copy, and that there is a market for this. Players are predictable, and YouTubers profit off this. It is a self-fulfilling prophesy, though, to claim that copying is hence the beginning phase of every learning process. I'd just remove that "every" word and replace it with "some". Then we agree 100% here @TheMule.

4 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I think with something skills-oriented such as Judo or Electrical Engineering, its a good idea to have some instruction to avoid hurting yourself or someone else.  My opinion, though, is that ONI is a game, and a mistake won't hurt you or anyone else, or even your computer.  A mistake in ONI means that you might lose a dupe or have to restart your colony.  It is a lot like a bucket of legos.  The tooltips tell you what each part is, or what each building does, and the rest is up to you and your imagination.  If you build something and it doesn't work, take it apart and learn from the experience.

If experimentation with something new could lead to catastrophic failure (death, people abandoning the game) then something needs to be put in place to prevent this. ONI is a survival game, so I'm with you @KittenIsAGeek that having to restart or load a previous save is an acceptable consequence and so a warning could be skipped. The key is to make sure a grand majority of players don't abandon the game because of it. Since Steam's rating is so high, I don't think this is the issue (though the lack of achievements in many places is awesome feedback that I hope Klei uses). On a side note, the devs clearly understood this principle, and hence the oil biome and space biome (two things that can lead to catastrophic death) are far from the new player. The location of all the biomes, I feel, are there to let us explore with relatively benign consequences for making mistakes.  The fact that Terra has no options for extra features is also there to prevent a new player from having to deal with magma channels in their first game. :)  That would definitely lead to frustration and rage quitting from a newbie. 

4 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I wonder if there's a better way to do a tutorial for ONI.

Possibly. You and I both started the game with ZERO tutorial. They have since added videos, but I still haven't watched them. :) I think adding those videos before release was a very important move, otherwise rage quitting may have been quite rampant. The alpha and beta players knew what they signed up for. 

2 hours ago, TheMule said:

Not being classically trained, or even not being able to read music doesn't mean you haven't studied, or copied from others.

Agreed.  Eventually, a good solution to a problem will get copied. Whether the copying lead to realizing it was good, or realizing it was good and hence copied, are probably hard to distinguish (but I know both happen).  If that solution is your own, and you copy it many times, that works too. However, no one will ever come up with "the best" solution to every problem on their own. They may come up with a solution, realize how subpar their idea is, and decide to adopt their buddy's, or a random person with a cool last name, or a famous YouTuber, etc. They might even decide to play without ever wanting to compare their work to someone else's (looking at you @Gurgel).

In the bussiness world, we have to compare to survive. Some people may want to use ONI as a place where they can ignore the incessant competition demands placed on them. My PhD advisor, after solving a 100 year old problem and becoming world famous with lifetime NSF funding, decided to completely abandon the realm he was in and picked up a 100 year old topic that was left for dead (to get away from the dog-eat-dog world).  His work started a completely new field in mathematics, where collaboration abounds. It took 10+ years of campaigning why this "dead" topic should be revived, but it eventually took off (when someone famous says do something, people look). If you find someone working on the same topic in this field of mathematics, you coauthor rather than fight to publish first. I feel like ONI has the same collaborative realm. I loved working with @nakomaru on the EZ-bead pump last year, and am happy that it has gained wide-spread appeal. This year's collaboration projects have been quite extensive and a true joy. 

I love the ONI forums because people come to share the things they are excited about. It's the place where we can "get together with some of your friends and start discussing and trying things until you figured it out" (quoting @KittenIsAGeek).  Copying can happen because we recognize that something is an amazing solution, worthy of copying (doesn't happen first). It can also happen first (which is the current education trend). Copying, for me, happens when I see something someone did, but notice one tiny tid-bit (a corner tile, a liquid blob, a mesh tile) seems to solve a problem I have had, or behaves in a way I didn't expect.  Then i go into full on "mathmanican" mode (haha @TheMule - I did blush a tad). The ONI community shares awesome contraptions, and they get passed on. 

We need to get @wachunga's waterfall/bead petro boiler out there with more attention. Maybe @JohnFrancis will make a video of it sometime (please, please). Once that design gets more widespread use, I am excited to see what other cool things will come of a wider understanding of waterfalls and beads (I may have a vested interest in those). 

2 hours ago, TheMule said:

Or that you get frustrated and stop playing.

Yep. This is something that the devs would want to avoid. Frustrated and determined to do better, on the other hand, is probably what they are going for. :) I think they've currently got a good balance. 

The endgame, back to the OP of this entire tread, may need more tweaking. The comment, "What do you do in endgame" is a common one that appears on many of the ONI hangout places. I think the DLC will help with that.  Some people love the current endgame (so they shouldn't get rid of it), but others get very bored with it.  Hence a DLC seems reasonable. I don't find much joy in waiting around for rockets to get back, so I don't play that part much at all. I'd rather just make liquid hydrogen because I can, not so that I can get space materials to make it more quickly. 

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

Well, teaching depends very much on who you teach. For the first camp, the classical approach is generally not very suitable, you need to give them a lot of freedom and allow them to experiment early on to keep them interested. For the second camp, sure. But do not expect them to get creative any time, it is just not what they want.

This returns me to contrasting adragogy (adult leading) and pedagogy (child leading), or self-directed and teacher-directed learning. Adragogists would posit that all adults (and actually in many cases children too) actually prefer the self-directed approach, but will only implement it on things they find value in. Since the teacher-directed, often copying/mimicry, approach is what the majority of people are educated with, it seems reasonable that the "second camp" will want to copy/mimic what others have made (so providing them options to copy is a worthwhile endeavor that can be profitable for the diligent YouTuber). I also expect the "second camp" to get very creative when they finally decide something in the game is worthy of their creative endeavors. I think saying "it's just not what they want" is unfair, unless you condition it with "in playing ONI". "They" are actually very creative, when you provide them something worthy of that creativity. Unfortunately ONI is not a worthy endeavor for my wife (dislikes all computer games), or son (who loves fortnite). Put them in the right realm, and they are "camp 1" all the way.     

I don't think that people fit into one camp or the other, rather I think that we all choose (based on what we value) how to apply self-direction to our learning.  Some of us have learned how to apply self-directed learning principles to a much broader spectrum of problems than others (so some will decided that ONI is a great play space for self-directed practice, while others want an escape from reality and use the comfortable/familiar teacher-directed style, this sounds like your nephew @KittenIsAGeek). Current education practice, pre-thesis/dissertation work, gives very little time and effort to training self-direction. It's often about mimicry to meet standards as quickly as possible. Those who learn self-direction on their own, early on in education, are sometimes punished and pushed out of the system. 

We could continue this discussion much more, and discuss how ONI play styles could help inform management on how to treat employees.  But maybe we should start another thread so we stop bumping "Disappointed with Late Game" to the top of the forums. :)  Anyone have a preferred title?  

 

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38 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

If you don't have time for a long read, then let me summarize this for you. 

... education theory rant and how ONI connects to education - personal opinions that I hope you challenge me on - crazy ideas - anecdotes from childhood ...

or just 

... rant ...

Done.  You read it all.  The longer version lies in the spoiler. Grab popcorn. Maybe it will become a NY Times best seller. :) 

  Reveal hidden contents

If any of the stuff below sounds like something you want to explore further, let me know and I'll gladly share links to papers you can read.

This entire thread has become an amazing discussion about education, and possibly some of the societal failures (or successes) of our educational systems. It makes me think about comparing/contrasting pedagogy versus andagogy, which is similar to comparing/constrasting teach-directed learning versus self-directed learning.  You could also compare it to the discussion of "artisans" and "virtuosos" give here.  I propose that we have so many more artisans that virtuosos, precisely because our pedagogical, teacher-directed, educational system (societal issue) leads to this. It's not a "failure", rather a consequence. 

I would call your "first camp" those who seek self-directed learning (andragogy principles apply). They want to have a large measure of say in every step of the learning process (outcomes, assessment, activities, etc.). Having to do exactly what they are told is boring, insulting, demeaning, or whatever. The second camp are those who depend on teacher-directed learning (pedagogy principles apply). They expect someone else to dictate what should be done (may not want it, but have become accustomed to letting other dictate).

I would argue that the reason we see so few people in the first camp above is a natural consequence of the mostly teacher-directed pedagogy that dominates public education (around the world). Very little of the systematized formal educational process (kindergarten through first few years of graduate school) lets the learner self-direct. In some sense, we almost force students to learn to copy others. Going rogue is strongly discouraged, and sometimes punished. Compliance is rewarded. 

Many people learn to copy from others, as the first step in learning, because that is what pedagogy promotes. We are trained to copy others. It doesn't have to be that way though.

Kids naturally try solving problems on their own, without copying other's solutions. Some educational trends use pedagogy principles, coupled with constructionist ideas (inquiry-based or inquiry-oriented learning as two examples in mathematics) to design educational experiences that let the student propose their own ideas (without copying others). The reason it still sits in "pedagogy" is that the instructor has a specific outcome that they want the students to eventually realize, hence providing a chance for the students to independently recreate knowledge.  You could argue that this is still "copying," as the instructor is creating an environment (making scaffolding) which facilitates helping the students copy (without knowing it) someone else's work. I use these principles daily in class, and sometimes am very pleasantly surprised by completely new discoveries (at least to me) that students make. Some of these student discoveries have completely changed my viewpoint on topics, and changed how I teach. I still see my teaching philosophy heavily tied to pedagogical teacher-directed trends. This next year will involve a lot of unraveling and turning control over to the students.  

I was enjoying this example, about Judo, and had a different perspective. If the goal is to train a group of people who will do exactly what is asked (an army of soldiers), then you absolutely want people to copy. You want to be able to predict what they will do, and you want exact obedience. This sounds a lot like current public education (create an army of factory workers), and so we find a huge chunk of people in @Gurgle's 2nd camp. That's the goal, so it's what we get. 

Here is an alternative. Rather than copy the instructor, what if a master Judo instructor presented a new problem to the students (even young introductory students), and asked them to come up with solutions, practice them, and share them with the class.  Then have a demonstration/discussion day and spend time letting them identify pros and cons of each solution. This would create a group of independent thinkers who learn to compare/constrast their solution with others. This needs to also include a discussion about how a solution fits, or does not, with the Judo theory. Some solutions would violate Judo requirements, even if they might be more effective (which would be a great discussion itself - why do we not just pull out a gun and shoot the attacker - maybe skip demonstrations on that one). Weekly practices can then help train muscles to reproduce instinctively the moves that are agreed to be "best". The students "copy" thing when they have decided that the things are worth copying (not the other way around).  I can 100% agree that "copying" is part of the learning process, though whether it comes first, or later, is completely arguable (and may be a difference between camp1/camp2 people), and whether we call it copying, or repetition, also makes a difference (connotation).  

Students can definitely compare their solution to a solution provided by the previous "master". If the a consensus shows that the solution beats the previous master, then acknowledge it. An instructor can also seed new discussions occasionally with a  hidden recognized best approach, which will be discussed as well. Rather than indoctrinating people with a specific set of moves (that is one take on education, and possibly the current most prevalent), the students could learn what makes Judo different from other martial arts methods, and arrive at becoming a master through creative virtuoso endeavors, rather than rigid replication of artisan skill.  Both have value, by the way. 

Debatable.  The beginning may actually be, "I want to solve a problem."  From there, traditional modern pedagogy tells students they should find someone else's solution (from a math textbook or teacher lecture) and copy it (do problems 1-79, every other odd). However, young children don't do this approach first. Older children, who don't want to copy to start out with can be punished by the traditional system. The system we live in can result in copying being the beginning phase. Alternatives do exist.  Eventually, we copy (or better, repeat) things that we find to be useful.

Let me give one example, from high school (long ago). We learned the product rule, and spent a couple days working on functions of the form (u)^p(v)^q, where u and v are arbitrary functions and p, and q are real numbers (not necessarily integers). This type of problem forces students to come to grips with factoring rational expressions, especially because the form of solution acceptable by the teacher had to match the book (fully factored to be something like $(u)^{m-1}(v)^{n-1}(nuv'+mvu')$).  The solution I gave in parenthesis was not provided by the text, nor any book I had read. Instead, we were expected to do each problem starting from the same "copying start" of (uv)' = uv'+vu', and then factor until we had one term.   I did a few, and then saw the huge slew of 30+ problem ahead of me. I said, "I'll do this symbolically once, and then just learn to copy the solution in one step to save time."  I did the problem symbolically, checked it a couple times, made a nice proof, then forgot all the details and copied the solution to all my homework. It was super fast, homework came back with a perfect score, and I was happy. Then came test day, where I reproduced the answer instantly without any glitch.  I of course got it marked wrong and given zero credit because I "didn't show my work."

The example above gives an example of how rigid the "copy and repeat this process" can be. The example above may have started with me "copying" the product rule, but I can provide plenty of other examples that clearly have no start in copying something else. My physics course in highschool had a project related to position and velocity that led me to build a graphing calculator program to independently discover the derivative and limits, the week before the derivative appeared in my calculus course. 

Our society trains us to copy the "accepted" solution. It's ingrained in culture and traditional pedagogy. So it should not be a surprise that ONI players want to have things to copy, and that there is a market for this. Players are predictable, and YouTubers profit off this. It is a self-fulfilling prophesy, though, to claim that copying is hence the beginning phase of every learning process. I'd just remove that "every" word and replace it with "some". Then we agree 100% here @TheMule.

If experimentation with something new could lead to catastrophic failure (death, people abandoning the game) then something needs to be put in place to prevent this. ONI is a survival game, so I'm with you @KittenIsAGeek that having to restart or load a previous save is an acceptable consequence and so a warning could be skipped. The key is to make sure a grand majority of players don't abandon the game because of it. Since Steam's rating is so high, I don't think this is the issue (though the lack of achievements in many places is awesome feedback that I hope Klei uses). On a side note, the devs clearly understood this principle, and hence the oil biome and space biome (two things that can lead to catastrophic death) are far from the new player. The location of all the biomes, I feel, are there to let us explore with relatively benign consequences for making mistakes.  The fact that Terra has no options for extra features is also there to prevent a new player from having to deal with magma channels in their first game. :)  That would definitely lead to frustration and rage quitting from a newbie. 

Possibly. You and I both started the game with ZERO tutorial. They have since added videos, but I still haven't watched them. :) I think adding those videos before release was a very important move, otherwise rage quitting may have been quite rampant. The alpha and beta players knew what they signed up for. 

Agreed.  Eventually, a good solution to a problem will get copied. Whether the copying lead to realizing it was good, or realizing it was good and hence copied, are probably hard to distinguish (but I know both happen).  If that solution is your own, and you copy it many times, that works too. However, no one will ever come up with "the best" solution to every problem on their own. They may come up with a solution, realize how subpar their idea is, and decide to adopt their buddy's, or a random person with a cool last name, or a famous YouTuber, etc. They might even decide to play without ever wanting to compare their work to someone else's (looking at you @Gurgel).

In the bussiness world, we have to compare to survive. Some people may want to use ONI as a place where they can ignore the incessant competition demands placed on them. My PhD advisor, after solving a 100 year old problem and becoming world famous with lifetime NSF funding, decided to completely abandon the realm he was in and picked up a 100 year old topic that was left for dead (to get away from the dog-eat-dog world).  His work started a completely new field in mathematics, where collaboration abounds. It took 10+ years of campaigning why this "dead" topic should be revived, but it eventually took off (when someone famous says do something, people look). If you find someone working on the same topic in this field of mathematics, you coauthor rather than fight to publish first. I feel like ONI has the same collaborative realm. I loved working with @nakomaru on the EZ-bead pump last year, and am happy that it has gained wide-spread appeal. This year's collaboration projects have been quite extensive and a true joy. 

I love the ONI forums because people come to share the things they are excited about. It's the place where we can "get together with some of your friends and start discussing and trying things until you figured it out" (quoting @KittenIsAGeek).  Copying can happen because we recognize that something is an amazing solution, worthy of copying (doesn't happen first). It can also happen first (which is the current education trend). Copying, for me, happens when I see something someone did, but notice one tiny tid-bit (a corner tile, a liquid blob, a mesh tile) seems to solve a problem I have had, or behaves in a way I didn't expect.  Then i go into full on "mathmanican" mode (haha @TheMule - I did blush a tad). The ONI community shares awesome contraptions, and they get passed on. 

We need to get @wachunga's waterfall/bead petro boiler out there with more attention. Maybe @JohnFrancis will make a video of it sometime (please, please). Once that design gets more widespread use, I am excited to see what other cool things will come of a wider understanding of waterfalls and beads (I may have a vested interest in those). 

Yep. This is something that the devs would want to avoid. Frustrated and determined to do better, on the other hand, is probably what they are going for. :) I think they've currently got a good balance. 

The endgame, back to the OP of this entire tread, may need more tweaking. The comment, "What do you do in endgame" is a common one that appears on many of the ONI hangout places. I think the DLC will help with that.  Some people love the current endgame (so they shouldn't get rid of it), but others get very bored with it.  Hence a DLC seems reasonable. I don't find much joy in waiting around for rockets to get back, so I don't play that part much at all. I'd rather just make liquid hydrogen because I can, not so that I can get space materials to make it more quickly. 

This returns me to contrasting adragogy (adult leading) and pedagogy (child leading), or self-directed and teacher-directed learning. Adragogists would posit that all adults (and actually in many cases children too) actually prefer the self-directed approach, but will only implement it on things they find value in. Since the teacher-directed, often copying/mimicry, approach is what the majority of people are educated with, it seems reasonable that the "second camp" will want to copy/mimic what others have made (so providing them options to copy is a worthwhile endeavor that can be profitable for the diligent YouTuber). I also expect the "second camp" to get very creative when they finally decide something in the game is worthy of their creative endeavors. I think saying "it's just not what they want" is unfair, unless you condition it with "in playing ONI". "They" are actually very creative, when you provide them something worthy of that creativity. Unfortunately ONI is not a worthy endeavor for my wife (dislikes all computer games), or son (who loves fortnite). Put them in the right realm, and they are "camp 1" all the way.     

I don't think that people fit into one camp or the other, rather I think that we all choose (based on what we value) how to apply self-direction to our learning.  Some of us have learned how to apply self-directed learning principles to a much broader spectrum of problems than others (so some will decided that ONI is a great play space for self-directed practice, while others want an escape from reality and use the comfortable/familiar teacher-directed style, this sounds like your nephew @KittenIsAGeek). Current education practice, pre-thesis/dissertation work, gives very little time and effort to training self-direction. It's often about mimicry to meet standards as quickly as possible. Those who learn self-direction on their own, early on in education, are sometimes punished and pushed out of the system. 

We could continue this discussion much more, and discuss how ONI play styles could help inform management on how to treat employees.  But maybe we should start another thread so we stop bumping "Disappointed with Late Game" to the top of the forums. :)  Anyone have a preferred title?  

 

Basically agree to most of that, except top your last point. I am in the "nature" camp, from my observation "nurture" does not turn people that just want to get by and have some fun into people that suddenly explore options and get experimental and creative. As I said, it is almost like the human race was two different species. In all my years of teaching, I have exactly seen one person move from group 2 to group 1 and he may just have been fed up completely with the standard teaching style aimed at creating more factory workers and office clerks. In fact, transitioning from camp 2 to camp 1 may be a process that takes a few 1000 years of lifetime or more (stipulating a certain model how things work on that fundamental level).

That is fine, I have absolutely no problem with people in camp 2, unless they start intruding into camp 1 and trying to force their experiences and approaches on it, usually with zero understanding how insulting that is to camp 1. When they then also quote "divine will" ("play the game how the developers meant it to be played"), I usually get triggered, although it has gotten better now that I have a pretty long list of people I just ignore here. 

As to moving this somewhere else, I would be happy to leave it at where we are now. We cannot resolve this anyways, we can only lament the sad state of affairs in standard teaching, where _everybody_ has to fit in the same pattern. Otherwise, any proposals were we can move it? We probably will be pretty off-topic in the Klei forums for this if we continue so if we continue we should probably go someplace else.

Somewhat (or more) related: https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/04/25/1438249/voices-from-the-hellmouth  for its discussion how much education (in the US) aims at enforcing conformity and suppression and punishment of all that need a different style or a bit more freedom in how they learn things.

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7 hours ago, Trego said:

  That's just my opinion, but I would suggest rethinking which part of the musical journey ONI is attempting to reproduce.  I personally have played ONI for thousands of hours, and I've spent more like ten thousand hours playing musical instruments, and my opinion is that ONI is trying to replicate the feeling you get when you've put in hundreds of hours of practice already and you're moving from novice to intermediate level.

That's your experience. I don't agree that the purpose of ONI is to entertain only those who already put 2000+ hours in it.

5 hours ago, mathmanican said:

... education theory rant and how ONI connects to education - personal opinions that I hope you challenge me on - crazy ideas - anecdotes from childhood ...


Only that this is not sterile ranting on educational parallels. This is trying to understand why out of 100 people who buy the g
ame, only 20 ever build any automation and only 17 make it to cycle 100. Only 2.5 launch a rocket(*). Ever.


There are people, both here and on reddit, that actively advice newcomers not to look into premade solutions, guides, tutorials, and figure it out by themselves, because "it's more fun that way". I don't think at all that recipe works. I think that's the main reason 80 out of 100 stop playing the game at very early stages.

My point being, they stop playing w/o even learning what the game is really about. 

(*) And just to point out the obvious, why this is relevant.  References have been made to the fact that endgame/space is "broken", "boring", "unpolished", "bug ridden", etc. I don't agree at all, but that's not the point. The point is it's hard to ask Klei to invest into something that is being experienced by only 2.5% of thier customers. It's hard even for the devs at Klei to ask their management to do so.
And the answer is NOT revamping space. Those 83 who didn't make it to cycle 100 didn't abandon the game because space is boring (and yes, of course, I'm aware that not everybody that doesn't have that achievement has abandoned the game... yet).

 

Well apparently the forum messed up again... I've no idea how and if it'll merge my posts. I'll try and fix any inconsistency. Sorry about that.

Edit2: ok it seems fine, actually.

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Oh let me just add this. I think you totally got me wrong here. I'm not saying that copying is the most of learning, I'm saying it's the start of learning. That's the point of my parallel with Judo. Anyway,

4 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Let me give one example, from high school (long ago). We learned the product rule, and spent a couple days working on functions of the form (u)^p(v)^q, where u and v are arbitrary functions and p, and q are real numbers (not necessarily integers). This type of problem forces students to come to grips with factoring rational expressions, especially because the form of solution acceptable by the teacher had to match the book (fully factored to be something like $(u)^{m-1}(v)^{n-1}(nuv'+mvu')$).  The solution I gave in parenthesis was not provided by the text, nor any book I had read.

So you're saying that in high school your math teacher told you nothing about standard notation, nothing about the basics, and to figure it out youself? To come up with your own notation, your own theory of logic, because is more fun this way? That you never ever copied one symbol from anywhere? I doubt it.

You need to develop a common language. Or learn the established one, if there's one. In Judo you learn the basic techniques that let you understand what the Master is teaching you, before you can become a student. And yes you're supposed to learn the language the proper, the standard way. You learn by copying, before anything. And no, that doesn't not even mean you can't express yourself in your own ways. It's hard to explain, but you do develop your style, and there's nothing wrong with it - as long as you understand the principles. You may have a personal way of doing things, yes there's a moment when the point is to be as much by the books as possible (Kata) but most of the time you get to be yourself.

Let me stress again that's only for the starting point. Like in math. Your use of the standard notation is not there to prevent you from coming up with something new, something that is not in the books. It's there for you to communicate with others. It helps, not prevents.

In ONI, the game doesn't end when you reach the tear and build the monument for the first time. Luckily. If anything it starts then.

I want people to be able to do that much sooner than it is now. People are wasting time trying figuring things out by themselves and that's only first part of the beginning. We shouldn't be afraid of giving away the basics, to create a common language.
 

"Ok kids, today we're going to learn the letter A. I'm NOT going to show you the shape of it, you have to figure it out yourself by trial and error. You're forbidden to copy it from anywhere. I'll tell you when you get it right. You have to start over if you get it wrong. Next week we do the letter B."  No, I don't agree that's a good learning process, and - more than anything - I don't think it's more fun that way.

My point is that you can't begin the learning process w/o copying something.  And yes, maybe ONI is easier than Judo, or a language, or playing the guitar, and it's possibile to figure it out by yourself.

But this is a game and people are looking for fun. A few of them may find frustration entertaining, but not the vast majority. I think we should cut on the initial frustration instead of encourging it.

And that said, you people seem to neglect that there're skills involved in "copying" too. And they are the same skills you need to translate your own ideas into reality. It's much harder to understand how something works in ONI w/o building it, unless you have 2000+ hours under your belt, but that only means you've build similar things for 2000+ hours.
The sooner you learn how to build something, the sooner you start experimenting with your own designs. And on the converse, if someone is not able to even build a basic electrolyzer setup by copying someone else's design, how do you think it's going to end if they try implementing their own? Let me tell you, a lot of frustration. And the purchase of a different game. Well, most of the time, apparently. 

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Oxygen not included 2: mass deletion not included.

Maybe we could hope for ONI 2 that will not have magic mass creation and deletion.

I still have 1000h+ in ONI so I got my money's worth x100.

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4 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Somewhat (or more) related: https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/04/25/1438249/voices-from-the-hellmouth  for its discussion how much education (in the US) aims at enforcing conformity and suppression and punishment of all that need a different style or a bit more freedom in how they learn things.

We're not talking about that tho.

The fact when you write the shape of your letter A is the same (almost) as every people because someone showed it to you and you had to learn how to copy it has nothing to do with the freedom to express yourself in writing.

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7 hours ago, mathmanican said:

If you don't have time for a long read, then let me summarize this for you. 

... education theory rant and how ONI connects to education - personal opinions that I hope you challenge me on - crazy ideas - anecdotes from childhood ...

or just 

... rant ...

Done.  You read it all.  The longer version lies in the spoiler. Grab popcorn. Maybe it will become a NY Times best seller. :) 

There is a lot of awesome stuff in this post. I would LOVE to start a new thread discussing this with you and others.  Maybe when I get back from work today I'll be surprised and find a thread already active that I can participate in.  

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6 hours ago, TheMule said:

That's your experience. I don't agree that the purpose of ONI is to entertain only those who already put 2000+ hours in it.

 

That's a blatant strawman, not only are you not 'agreeing' with something that no one said; that strawman is pretty much the opposite of my actual point, which is that people should carefully consider not skipping past the first 20 hours of ONI by looking at outside help because it's a super fun stage of the game--and you can't go back and play your first 20 hours again if you regret that choice later.  

Your point, that ONI's player retention is too low, is somewhat symmetrical, in that a player who tries ONI and then decides to give it up permanently probably isn't coming back.  Here are the problems that I see with your argument:

1. As someone pointed out, achievements aren't tracked in sandbox mode; without statistics about how many players use sandbox mode we're just guessing as to what achievements actually mean.

2.  Without relevant statistics about other games retention, it's hard to interpret the numbers you mention.  Maybe ONI is actually doing great at retention compared to other similar games?

3.  You have apparently decided that people are quitting because the game is too complicated--what if people are quitting because they are following your advice and using premade modules and finding that path boring?  These are both just guesses about other people's experience.  How are these wildly aimed guesses better on relying on our own actual experience?

4.  In the absence of the above statistics, we kinda have to stick with our personal opinion about the game.  My personal experience, having played many similar games, is that ONI is extremely newbie friendly already, comparatively.

Yes, my point is based on my experience. However, in the absence of 'good enough' statistics, our only choices are to rely on our own experience, or make guesses about other people's experience.  There's a trend on our society to put down the former choice, and then pretend that the latter choice is somehow 'scientific', but that's pseudo-science at best.

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