The Refinery And How It Hurts The Game

I think we need to step back from why the refinery does/does not work, and look at the issue that was "fixed" by the refinery, and the problems it caused.

Pixels are really hard to get in Stable right now, unless you farm a lot of monsters. However, ore is plentiful, especially late-game. Thus, something exists to turn ore into pixels. Boom! Crafters can now have tons of money to 3d print their fun items and make awesome bases. However, non-crafters are drowning in pixels (lategame) with nowhere to spend them, and this does not help out that early-game pixel gain sucks.

You could "fix" the refinery by stopping the symptoms it causes (lower ore stack size, remove ability to store pixels, remove ability to store ore), but those fixes by themselves kinda...suck. They're just punishment for players because the refinery exists. They don't make players find new ways to play the game, they just say "You can't do as much anymore".

The point of the refinery was to augment pixel gain (rare resource), by converting readily-available resources (ores). If the progression updates are half as successful as the CF team wants them to be, pixel gain should be a LOT better than on Stable, and the refinery itself may not be necessary (or delayed until lategame, just for crafters). The crutch won't be necessary anymore, and then we don't have to deal with the issues it causes.

 

So I tried to surf through the thread to see if someone had already said this, but I somewhat agree with this thought. I only say somehwhat because I find myself burning through pixels at a very high rate late game. What if they just upped the cost i.e. 2 copper ores per 5 pixels? Seems this would the pixels back their value without nerfing the refinery to hard.

 

Losing ores is a thing in the nightlies, and everyone hates it. Trust me, it's terrible. I think they should just lower the penalty for using the compressor to, say, 20%. That way, you have to choose between definitely losing some pixels and maybe losing a lot of pixels

 

I agree, I do not see how it hurts the game.