An ugly flaw

[Vylon]

First of all I'd like to point out how amazing this game is and also how gracefully the devs make this otherwise kinda complex game work. Makes me think that it's one of the few teams who can actually code.
But... the Family Sharing does not work EDIT: properly. Tried different ways to make it work, it didnt, even though the store page states that it does.

All this directly leads me to be deeply disappointed, because I find it hard to believe that a team so thorough simply overlooked this thing and it's a "bug". Which means that it's on purpose.

You should either make it work or state clearly that it doesn't. Either way is fine really. But it caused me some frustration as is.

EDIT: It appears to me that my post was too strongly worded for people's taste. Perhaps they were right. My goal was to communicate my frustration but not offending anyone needlessly. So I edited it to be more civil.

[PunCrathod]

Yeah I agree that they probably should have a disclaimer that the online components do not work with family share.

[Galileus]

Originally posted by Vylon:

All this directly leads me to be deeply disappointed, because I find it hard to believe that a team so thorough simply overlooked this thing and it's a "bug". Which means that it's deliberate false advertisement which is just nasty.

So, a team that is thorough, dedicated, taking a lot of flack because they believe in honest and forward advertising decided to deliberately lie about a small, mostly overlooked by people feature. For giggles, probably?

I get it, you are disappointed, but throwing around such accusations with no other basis than "I did not like this, so I want to attack someone" is... well, I was going to say nasty, but it's way, way worst than nasty. Behave yourself, sir.

[Khaylain]

How doesn't it work?
Can't other people in your Family Share play Factorio at all?
If they can play it at all then I would say it did indeed work.

You really haven't provided any information about how it doesn't work, so I can't check whether your claims are true or false.

[PunCrathod]

Originally posted by Khaylain:

How doesn't it work?
Can't other people in your Family Share play Factorio at all?
If they can play it at all then I would say it did indeed work.

You really haven't provided any information about how it doesn't work, so I can't check whether your claims are true or false.

You can play singleplayer just fine. It's just that you can't use family share to get a paid factorio account so no multiplayer or mods.factorio.com access. This has been a thing since factorio came to steam. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a bug or false advertisement but it would not hurt if it was explained on the store page somewhere.

[Vylon]

Galileus: Well I can be fine with it not working. But don't claim that it does. Simple as. It is not me liking it or not, not really a personal, subjective thing or anything to do with my oppinion. And tbh if I am indeed wrong and they simply overlooked this whole thing and it's an honest mistake, I am not sure that is better at all.

Khaylain: It won't join a multiplayer game, it states that the steam account doesn't own the game, go buy it. Which is true, but this would be the whole point of the Family Sharing.

Some details: I have a steam family of 4 accounts, 2 of them have their own copies of Factorio for a long time, recently bought 2 copies of the DLC for each. Wanted to play it online with one of those accounts and one different account that doesn't own the game individually.

For me it is very obvious and clear as day. And I would be just happy about it if the store page said the truth.

And as a father of two little kids I have very limited gaming time. I probably would have already purchased a 3rd copy instead of spending way too much time trying to troubleshoot this. Sadly I have more money than time so I really value if I am respected with honesty, and I wouldn't mind throwing money at a great dev team. But at this point I am not really enthusiastic about that.

EDIT: corrected details

[PunCrathod]

Originally posted by Vylon:

It won't even start. The game simply won't even start, it states that the steam account doesn't own the game, go buy it.

Is it steam saying that or the game itself? Because there is a huge difference.

I mean last time I checked the game itself asks for your account information once it has reached the main menu and it has a skip button that lets you play singleplayer(or directly connect to a multiplayer server that has account verification disabled). If steam is saying you don't own the game then you have a steam family configuration issue.

[Vylon]

PunCrathod: Maybe I am way off chart about this, but having a co-op game in family sharing would be really likely about playing multiplayer. TBH I didn't even pay attention to the fact that it works in single player. And again this makes it even worse, since it clearly could work but they intentionally opted out of multiplayer working without clearly stating it.

I understand the sentiment of some of you. Not a big deal. And I wouldn't expect any better from some random indie dev. But again these guys seem to be knowing what they are doing, and I would think that they got their fair share of value out of this project (I certainly hope so). And perhaps I should not care or waste my time on this. You know it's just that I was genuinely surprised by this whole thing from this dev. In my head they were one of the best devs really, and I find it hard to wrap my head around this stuff.

EDIT: The game itself saying not steam.
Corrected the quoted part in my previous post, which was incorrect on my part.

[PunCrathod]

Yeah. I understand your complaint. The thing is as far as I know there is no way for the game to know whether it is available through steam family. Steam does not provide that functionality. The best they can do is ask steam whether or not a steam account owns the game. So this is a limitation on steams end.

But I do agree that they should have a disclaimer about this on the store page.

[Vylon]

Originally posted by - EMPTY -:

Trying to ruin your family with this game is not the way.

+1

Thanks for taking the time to read my complaint and giving feedback guys!

[Galileus]

Originally posted by Vylon:

Galileus: Well I can be fine with it not working. But don't claim that it does. Simple as. It is not me liking it or not, not really a personal, subjective thing or anything to do with my oppinion. And tbh if I am indeed wrong and they simply overlooked this whole thing and it's an honest mistake, I am not sure that is better at all.

I am not saying it does work. Though, as you yourself stated, it does. I am saying accusing someone of being intentionally malicious when your proof is limited to "I wanna" is despicable.

Family share never, ever let you play multiplayer in games that require external login and steam account link to work. It cannot. It will be the same in any game. It's not a bug, it's a decision. You might dislike it, and it might be hard to find proper info, that I will give you. I would even feel slightly bad if not for the calibre of accusations you used.

[Vylon]

Facts: If you check the store page it sais in multiple occasions that it is a multiplayer game. It also sais it has family sharing. And there is no indication that these two things are not true together.

And in short what I said is that I don't -Think- that it is by mistake. It is an oppinion and it why my emotions are what they are. Tbh nobody needs to care about this part at all.

The problem is the fact part.

You saying I am malicious.. well, I was frustrated when after wasting some time I realized that I was mislead. Maybe I should have or shouldn't have or whatever, still I am the one who was mislead. And I am sure you could name some other parts of life where a misinformation like this could make people frustrated as well, or even more in some cases. And no, I don't feel like being polite when I was just made a fool of, but I am a good customer becasue I bought 2 copies of both the base game and the DLC, so there is that as well.

If you still think I am the bad guy here, so be it then.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

You assumed that a game which requires an external account for multiplayer would work with family share, but why would it?

There is no misinformation aside from your claim that you were lied to.

[Vylon]

It indeed does, but who decides it to be that way. I mean.. I have seen games in the past that did not require such. And also: where does it say on the store page that it requires an external account for multiplayer? (it may be there but I didn't find it)

Coincidentally since I did not buy it just now I could have known that it is the case, but honestly I bought it years ago not much after it popped up on steam and I didn't remember.

And well, it is not technically unheard of that it could have worked even while needing an external account. Afterall many games in the family sharing considers another user (who doesn't individually own the game) an unrestrained user with their own cloud saves, progression and whatnot even to the point that in case they buy it in the future and leave the family group, they could still retain their progress and account. Seems to me that it can be as simple as a "owns the game: y/n" not considering the circumstances of the ownership.

So nope, I did not assume anything. I just read the store page.

[Chindraba]

Originally posted by Vylon:

EDIT: It appears to me that my post was too strongly worded for people's taste. Perhaps they were right. My goal was to communicate my frustration but not offending anyone needlessly. So I edited it to be more civil.

I don't recall what the prior version was. To me, however, it wasn't 'too strongly worded' for my tastes. It was you experience to relay, not mine to relive. It may, or may not, have been more strongly worded than intended, probably from the frustration of the moment. How strongly worded it was, or is, doesn't alter the fact that you had a problem nor make the issue greater or lesser for the wording.

Originally posted by Vylon:

the Family Sharing does not work EDIT: properly. Tried different ways to make it work, it didnt, even though the store page states that it does.

I'll have to mentally amend that to say it didn't work for you as you intended, since I've followed other threads where players were talking about the ways they have used it. If it works for them and not for you, either you are not doing something correctly, your account(s) are set up wrong, or you're expecting a 'feature' to be present which is not. That it 'works' and seems to work properly I'll take as a given and that the problem was other than it doesn't work properly. (Don't bother trying to explain the details, I don't know anything about family sharing and those details would be way over my head and waste your time to type them.)

Originally posted by Vylon:

All this directly leads me to be deeply disappointed, because I find it hard to believe that a team so thorough simply overlooked this thing and it's a "bug". Which means that it's on purpose.

You should either make it work or state clearly that it doesn't. Either way is fine really. But it caused me some frustration as is.

I, too, find it surprising that a 'bug' of such magnitude is overlooked by WUBE. I'm even so surprised by this that I tend to think it's either user error or out of their control. A 'warning' on the store page might be a proper response. I cannot decide that, now or ever, as I'm never going to know enough about it to make an informed decision. However, family sharing is not a 'new' thing, Factorio is not a new game, and multiplayer has been a part of Factorio for more than a few years. If your case, as you see it, is common enough - either in occurrence or misunderstanding - I'd think such a warning/notice would already be there.

As it is more germane here, I'm jumping to the (currently) most recent post.

Originally posted by Vylon:

So nope, I did not assume anything. I just read the store page.

This is probably the root of the problem. You did assume something. If you'd 'just read the store page' and found nothing to clearly state what conditions must be met, or what limitations existed, and then acted as if your desired use was 'included', you assumed it was so. Skip the point of comparing what other games do, or don't do - every possible combination exists somewhere and you can probably find as many cases where your intentions work as others can find where they don't. Comparing them only enhances the assumption, it does not justify it.

Originally posted by Vylon:

Galileus: Well I can be fine with it not working. But don't claim that it does. Simple as.

Turn-about is fair game. Don't claim it don't work when it clearly does. Many players have used it successfully and Steam. presumably, has enabled it and verified that it works as intended. As intended by Steam and/or the developer, not as intended by a random user.

Originally posted by Vylon:

Khaylain: It won't join a multiplayer game, it states that the steam account doesn't own the game, go buy it. Which is true, but this would be the whole point of the Family Sharing.

That you got an error message, or some form of notice, as to exactly what the problem was, and acknowledge that it was correct, suggests that 'the whole point of the Family Sharing' could be different than your assumptions about it. Again, what ever facts you didn't have at the time, the message is your first clue to find out what you didn't understand correctly.

Looking at the Steam help page for Family Sharing, I see two bullet points which seem to be exactly the issue.

Originally posted by Steam Help:

Family Sharing:

• Access to all games owned by family members
  
• Ownership of games remains with the purchaser

I will guess that you've never installed a non-Steam version of the game. No reason you would have. As such, as near as my memory servers, the connection to the mod downloads, and the game's authentication with WUBE's multiplayer service are baked-in and you never see, and probably have no reason to know or suspect that there's any 'authentication' happening in the background. This could be a case where I'm making my own assumptions. Other games could require authentication and not have it work as seamlessly as WUBE does, and you could actually know that it's normal to need such to happen. Safe and more charitable, however, to think you don't know than to think you don't care.

I am curious, however, about one thing. When I play the game the map always shows a name as the 'character'. That name happens to be the same as my account name, and not something I've actually entered into the game like many others where, using some sort of plot device, the game prompts for the main character's name. When someone who does not own the game uses Family Sharing to play the game, is the engineer's name that of the game owner or the account accessing it through Family Sharing?

Originally posted by Vylon:

I understand the sentiment of some of you. Not a big deal. And I wouldn't expect any better from some random indie dev. But again these guys seem to be knowing what they are doing, and I would think that they got their fair share of value out of this project (I certainly hope so). And perhaps I should not care or waste my time on this. You know it's just that I was genuinely surprised by this whole thing from this dev. In my head they were one of the best devs really, and I find it hard to wrap my head around this stuff.

You're more charitable than I. Perhaps some of the retorts were sparked by the original wording, or not. Somehow this game attracts a larger than average share of people who frequently deal, for a living, with technology 'users' in one fashion or another. In those fields the most common 'error' is a euphemized version of 'problem exists between keyboard and chair'. That it is true does not remove the 'problem', it only directs the troubleshooting process. If the solution is user education, attacking the user won't solve the problem. Though, to toss in a mirror, I also don't understand why, with the opinions you express about the dev team in other regards, you'd jump to the conclusion that they mislead you or overlooked a 'bug' in their marketing.

Originally posted by Vylon:

Facts: If you check the store page it sais in multiple occasions that it is a multiplayer game. It also sais it has family sharing. And there is no indication that these two things are not true together.

I'm going to guess (assume) that, unsaid by you, there is also no place in the store page where it says that multiplayer is a feature in the family sharing options?

Originally posted by Vylon:

You saying I am malicious.. well, I was frustrated when after wasting some time I realized that I was mislead. Maybe I should have or shouldn't have or whatever, still I am the one who was mislead. And I am sure you could name some other parts of life where a misinformation like this could make people frustrated as well, or even more in some cases. And no, I don't feel like being polite when I was just made a fool of, but I am a good customer becasue I bought 2 copies of both the base game and the DLC, so there is that as well.

Since you keep coming back to the idea, in one fashion or another, that you were mislead, lied to, deceived, or tricked - what ever terms you should choose - I'll return to the 'by whom?' part. I think the misleading was done by your assumption of what does, or should, work, not by what was stated did work. "The problem is the fact part." So, keep to the available facts - as given by some source other than your expectations.

Originally posted by Vylon:

If you still think I am the bad guy here, so be it then.

No such thing here. I'll not speak for others. Frustration and unmet expectations are never 'fun'.

Originally posted by Vylon:

It indeed does, but who decides it to be that way. I mean.. I have seen games in the past that did not require such. And also: where does it say on the store page that it requires an external account for multiplayer? (it may be there but I didn't find it)

Where on the store page does it say that multiplayer does not require an external account? And, just to be obnoxious, and turning to something I know nothing about, does the Steam Remote Play Together work with Factorio?

Originally posted by Vylon:

Coincidentally since I did not buy it just now I could have known that it is the case, but honestly I bought it years ago not much after it popped up on steam and I didn't remember.

I'll go so far as to say it doesn't matter if you knew, knew and forgot, or didn't know. Once you got the error/notice from the game (WUBE) that the steam account doesn't own the game ought to have been the first clue that expectations and reality did not match and that information was lacking.

Originally posted by Vylon:

And well, it is not technically unheard of that it could have worked even while needing an external account. Afterall many games in the family sharing considers another user (who doesn't individually own the game) an unrestrained user with their own cloud saves, progression and whatnot even to the point that in case they buy it in the future and leave the family group, they could still retain their progress and account. Seems to me that it can be as simple as a "owns the game: y/n" not considering the circumstances of the ownership.

Assuming that 'this' works "here" implies 'that' works "everywhere", is a recipe for disappointment and frustration. If 'this' works "here", then wondering if 'that' works "there" is valid - and deserves to be investigated and tested. It does not translate to automatic success. Turning the water faucet with "C" on it usually gets me a nice cold glass of water (weather permitting). I do know, however, that such is not always the case. There are places where turning the knob with "C" on it could scald my hands.

I do believe that, by now, you know how to make things work to play the game you intended to play. Of course, the "moment" may have passed already as well. You know, now, what the error message meant, and why it was that way, and you can either use the other account, which does own it, or play a local (LAN) multiplayer game. (Or, as you've mentioned, you could get a 3rd copy. Seems a bit high-priced when there are other options, though.) I'm not expecting any changes in the wording of, or additions to, the store page.

Now, if I could only get someone to kick the damn soapbox out from under me.

[Gordon Shumway]

MP works, just not official public games with active user verification - which is logical since the account doesnt own it.
It is as simple as "owns the game" which in your usecase is correctly answered with NO
Family sharing limitation, not Wubes fault so maybe dial back on those harsh critics and honestly, maybe stop lamenting here (waste more time?!)

Yes there could be a disclaimer about it but to be honest - there is no statement that you can quote (despite the feature flags MP and family sharing, which is merely saying that is has thoes features) that would say it works like you thought it would