Concerns
Salutations, everyone! I've been playing Arknights: Endfield for a while now, basically purely from the factory, and i've seen that Endfield has divided people with the nature of rebuilding the factory per update. It seems as if the developers have also noticed that given the newest survey, so as someone who severely enjoys the factory, including the rebuilding part as it gives me something to do for multiple days per update, the newest survey answers do concern me as they seem to hint at a possible reduction of the friction in factory gameplay.
Endfield is the first true large live service game with a factory built in it, which also means that in the case of less stubborn devs, it may end up getting sidelined, this is my main concern as the complaints that "Endfield has no content" will likely only grow bigger as factory players end up solving the factory significantly faster than they used to. Do note as well that a lot of people have mentioned that they believe the Valley-IV factory to be lacking an incredible amount of depth, yet now that Wuling has that depth, people are now complaining, even though these same people are also able to understand that there's not a single reason to have a mega optimized factory, added on to the fact that if they really wanted to, they could just use blueprints.
Rebuilding for me as someone who's actively looking to improve has become part of the fun specifically because it introduces some form of friction and "antagonism", if you will, in the factory, which is something i find fun getting around since at their core, factory games are about solving problems, by playing a factory game, you're actively looking for issues to solve.
In the end, I know the rebuilding discussion is a divisive one, however, I will repeat, there's a reason why the developers added blueprints, specifically to make it so people don't need to experience that friction if they don't want to. Why spoil the enjoyment for people who like factory games that have depth when you have the solution drawn out for you already?
And yes, as a lot of you have noticed, this is a personally motivated post. There's been an increasingly worrying trend of people asking for the factory to continuously be dumbed down when, again, people can simply blueprint it all and leave people who enjoy the depth of the factory to learn the ropes by themselves, and i'd like it if we could maintain a healthy relationship between factory veterans, factory beginners and people who just want to skip it all, so that beginners can learn, veterans can have the depth they want, and people who want to skip can simply blueprint and not infringe on either.