Regional pricing exploit (Klonan) Earlier this week I received an unusual number of support emails, some players were having trouble redeeming their Steam keys on our website. In each case, the key they purchased was not a key eligible for a Steam key. Our order/account system isn't the most intuitive, so let me explain the ways in which people can buy the game, and how it relates to our website: Our website - You buy from our website, and you get a key from the Humble checkout. You use this key to upgrade an account, and you can redeem a Steam key. Steam - You buy on Steam, which adds it to your Steam account. You then link your Steam on our website, which upgrades your account. Humble Store - You buy a Steam key, which you activate on Steam, and then follow the steps above. GOG - You buy the game on GOG, which lets you download the DRM free version. You can also redeem a retail key, to upgrade your account. So in the cases above, the only way to get a Steam key from our website, is by buying directly on our website. The players in question managed to get their hands on 3rd party retail keys. These retail keys aren't distributed for reselling anywhere, so the fact I was seeing a lot of emails coming in about these keys, was an indication something fishy was going on. The source of these keys is GOG, I double checked this my comparing some of the keys these people purchased with the list of keys we generated for GOG, and they matched. My first suspicion was someone cheesing the GOG return policy, buying the game, redeeming the key, and then refunding it. I emailed our contact and there were only 21 refunds in the last 3 months, so it was not the case. The second suspicion was that the GOG server was breached somehow. They reported no incident, but we disabled all the unredeemed keys anyway just to be sure. I checked with the list again, and none of the keys that we deactivated were used by any account. This led to the conclusion, at the very least, these keys were purchased legitimately. So people are legitimately buying keys, GOG confirmed sales had shot up in the last week. Then the question, where are the sales coming from? One last email to GOG and we had our answer: Russian Federation. The reason? We have regional pricing on GOG at parity with Steam, which means someone buying from Russia could buy the game for ~$8.30. Once they buy on GOG, they can redeem the retail key, and sell it for about $20 on a 3rd party site. So one clever guy saw this opportunity, and started buying the game hundreds of times on GOG. The immediate solution is to remove the regional pricing, and in the long term we may be able to implement some 'GOG linking' similar to the current system for Steam users. It is strange that it was only taken advantage of recently, as we have had regional pricing since our launch on GOG 2 years ago. It may be related to the recent price increase.
Hello, these Friday Facts are focused solely on our view of gameplay issues in Factorio, and our plans to solve these.
Demo upgrade for stable Abregado TLDR; We have released a new version of the Introduction campaign to the Experimental branch. If you are following the campaign development please play it again and send us your feedback.
Being brought in to create content on a very mature project has been an interesting experience to say the least. One of the first things I did was analyse the features of the game and which kind of player the game currently supports. The obvious thing is that Factorio Freeplay strongly attracts and engages players who enjoy an open-ended sandbox type of game. Achievement statistics show that only about 11% of players on Steam have ever launched a rocket, which currently means 'won the game'. What about the other player types? Well for those that are new to the game, or unsure if they are interested, we will have the New Player Experience. This is a free, combined tutorial and demonstrator mission which we discussed in FFF-241. But what about those that prefer a guided experience? This is the sort of player who wants to play the game, and experience all of what it has to offer, but wants to be taken on a journey. For these players we have the campaign. Why do we need a new campaign at all? We find that the current campaign: Does not include all the Freeplay content as it currently ends after Advanced Circuits. Severely limits player investment by forcing a new factory to be built each mission. Does not convey the feeling of loneliness that the Freeplay does. Is showing its age visually, as it was made before high-res textures and the terrain rework. To solve these issues we have set about designing new Campaign elements to act consistently to provide the player with a guided experience all the way from Science pack 1 to Space science packs. The first step to achieving this is to have the map border expand each time the player completes a section of the main 'quest line'. This means that the player never loses any of their progress, and as long as these transitions are presented in a smooth way, the jarring effect of the old level restarts will be removed. Having a continuously expanding map presents many other challenges, but we are confident that it will be worthwhile. This style of level will fit with the style of Factorio much better. Such a map should also end up being as huge as a regular Freeplay environment so as to better place importance on exploration. Exploration in Freeplay is generally player motivated, such as when you are almost out of iron and need to find that next big patch. In a guided experience, letting the player know that there is something out there can give them impetus to dive into the unknown. This brings us to technologies. Now that we have removed level transitions, we have also shot ourselves in the foot. How else will we deliver the technology tree in chunks? Simply making the entire tree available from the start of the game will cause all sorts of balance issues. In our NPE discussion we stated that new recipes should only be given to the player via research. In the campaign, unresearched technologies will only be given by moving to given locations on the map. These would include some non-generated terrain and pre-placed factory structures to help to player see where they are. These could also help to show concepts and workable designs, one thing that the current campaign does do well.
Hello, engineers! I'm a newer face at Wube and have been mainly working on expansion content for about one year now. Today, I'm here to share some exciting non-expansion news for our Mac players.
The Character GUI Twinsen It was 11 months ago when we first mentioned the new Character GUI, in FFF-289. After all that time, it's finally getting ready. Since you can expect to see it released sometime in the next 1 or 2 weeks, we would like to present a quick recap of the features and changes, and some real in-game screenshots. The Character window is now split into 3 tabs. Logisitcs and auto-trash were moved from the central frame into a tab and a new tab called Character was added. Using inventory/stack transfers in the player inventory will transfer the items either to weapons and armor slots or to trash slots depending on the selected tab, regardless of item type. Logistics and auto trash are now merged into 1 panel. Using a double slider you can set an interval. If you have less than the first value, robots will bring more, if you have more than the second value, extra items will be auto-trashed and taken away by the robots. The double pop-up and extra confirm might seem strange, but it's made this way to solve the problem of robots bringing you items before you finished setting up your request. With the merging of requests and auto-trash, we also made it so you can now set an unlimited number of requests, regardless of research. Furthermore, everything is unlocked in one research: unlimited logistic requests, auto trash, and 30 trash slots are all unlocked by the "Logistic robotics" research that is at blue science. Searching now not only searches the recipe GUI, but also the inventory and logistic requests. By popular demand, we also added a switch to quickly turn personal logics on or off. Turning off personal logistics will stop logistic robots from bringing requested items. It will also stop items from automatically being moved to the trash slots. Logistic robots will continue to empty the trash slots. Since the recipe GUI has a new style, we also updated the look of the filter, item, circuit signal, and upgrade selection GUI styles. Some of the other GUIs in the game will have some visual issues due to the mix of old and new styles. My next step will be to fix these issues as soon as the Character GUI is released. Looking back, this GUI took 13 months and 3 programmers (working alternatively) to implement. This is excluding mockups and UX design. It's a long story, but one thing that's obvious is that the GUI scope has grown far beyond what our codebase is capable of. For this reason, we won't be focusing obsessing that much on the GUI in the future. We will finalize the transition of styles, fix obvious issues and low hanging fruits, and try to get everything at a consistent level of quality for 1.0. This new Character GUI and changes will likely affect some mods, especially those relying on logistic technologies, logistic slot related APIs, old style definitions, etc. Thankfully a lot of mods will be unaffected, so we hope it won't be too much disruption. Still, we wanted to give some forewarning.
Scan-codes vs Key-codes (posila) While migrating from Allegro to SDL, HanziQ and Jiri replaced the keystroke handling from using key-codes to scan-codes. Before you start jumping with joy, you’ll probably wonder: What is that and why should I care? Well, funny you should ask. You probably won’t care, unless you live outside of USA and/or you use a non-US keyboard layout. In short, key-code is a key identifier dependant on the symbol the key will output when pressed, scan-code is a key identifier based on the physical location of a key. So for example players with French keyboard layout (AZERTY) have to jump to the control options after launching the game for the first time, and remap movement from WASD to ZQSD, in order to be able to move their character without hurting their hand. In 0.17, the controls will map to the correct keys by default, regardless of your layout, and stay mapped to those physical keys even if you for some reason change your keyboard layout while the game is running. The disadvantage is, most of the non-US layouts didn’t end up with completely broken controls, so people kept playing with them and got used to them. So they’ll need to get used to the layout the game was originally designed with, or manually configure controls back to what they are used to. But wait, there is a catch... A few weeks ago we have announced new construction tools, which are by default bound to quite universal shortcuts (Ctrl+C for copy, Ctrl+X for cut and Ctrl+Z for undo). Bilka pointed out that the German keyboard has Z swapped with Y (as does the Czech one, but developers often don't use it) and undo incorrectly defaults to Ctrl+Y instead. To fix these kind of shortcuts we determine the appropriate default scan-codes at start-up, so that undo is always Ctrl+Z, regardless of your layout, but the action will stay bound to those keys if you change keyboard layout at runtime, which is hopefully a reasonable compromise. We might do it for other controls too (it feels natural for M to always be the default key to open the map, and T to open the technology screen), but there is another catch. It is completely reasonable for player to walk north, and Ctrl+click some entities. Remember AZERTY keyboard? Player keeps Z pressed down to walk north and presses Ctrl to start control clicking. Well, I tested this and it doesn’t trigger undo, but still stops player from walking. So it is not completely destructive, rather annoying. I am not sure how or if we’ll solve this, perhaps people with these layouts that create these kind of collisions will need resolve them by changing controls options manually.
0.13 release is getting close. The programming guys are trying to finish the features so we can start internal playtesting and bugfixing next week. The art guys are working hard on the new trains graphics. In the meantime, here's some more information about the circuit network.
