Pthigrivi

Thanks, Nate and all! Dang those thunderheads!

This is over the top. The same roadmap is still there—colonies, interstellar, resources, multiplayer. At each stage we can gauge the deliverables. Folks don’t get fresh info for a couple months and we’re all back to chicken little acrimony. How about a little chill. I don’t disagree with life support, I think there’s real bang for buck there. Robotics would be great too but aren’t as integral to a functioning resource system which is the real spine of a live-off-the-land fleshed out colony system. More planets and interstellar are coming, code and money are probably out and for mods. Just to point out the obvious: I care quite a bit about KSP, it was my favorite game for many years, I check this forum daily, and still there is no player for whom KSP is a bigger part of their lives than the people who are currently working on this game. If the worst thing imaginable happened and KSP got cancelled you will all move on with your lives with no disruption. Thats not the case for the people at intercept. Take a moment as a fellow human being to acknowledge that these folks are all pouring their careers into a very cool thing that is for you a pleasant distraction. Definitely give feedback. Definitely give negative feedback. But be real and treat these folks like they’re humans doing their best with the resources they have just like you are with whatever it is you do. Speak your mind, but be patient and be chill. No one likes to be harassed at work and nothing about a video game is worth harassment.

Anyone have experience/ recommendations on prebuilt sellers? ABS, MSi, iBuypower etc? Mainly Im looking for reliability and good support.

No I totally get this and it is a fine balance. You do have to be practical about how and when you change things. Im an architect so I see both sides of it. Since Wube has a pretty stellar perception among fans I thought I'd use this recent Factorio Friday Facts as an illustration (Full text here). Basically the story was they had a whole planet designed but after seeing it in action it just felt boring so they dropped most of the initial design and started from scratch. I think the result is pretty awesome. I've also mentioned Cyberpunk a few times. They've utterly reinvented the perk tree and loot drop system--two of the most core elements in an RPG--much for the better. But if early on they said "Oh yeah btw we're just going to remove most of the value of randomized armor and clothes will basically be cosmetic" people would have thrown even more of a fit. They wouldn't have any of the first-hand play experience to realize wandering around looking like a spazoid because some random tshirt had a better AC stat isn't actually good gameplay and since the game is all about cybernetic modification it doesn't make sense in that world anyway. In the end cleaning up the messy, incomplete release and implementing those kinds of major overhauls took 3 years. When it comes to some of these creative processes sometimes you've just got to try things and see if they work. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don't, and yeah its not efficient and it takes a long time, but in the end it's the only way new ideas can be made to actually work.

I have no argument with the first part of your post because I actually do think negative feedback on the merits of actual content is great and useful and totally warranted. I just think it can be done politely and without taking any of this quite so personally as some seem to. Maybe Im wrong and they really do feel personally wounded by this, but it feels to me kind of hyperbolic and hyperbolic arguments don't mean much. This last bit though I do disagree with, mainly because Im in a creative field and doing this kind of work is rarely a linear process. If you're really vetting and testing and and seeing what works and what doesn't there will be lots of things that appear one way as WIP and emerge completely differently as a finished product. That ability to make big changes along the way is really important to producing good work, but folks watching from the outside or only seeing small snippets might not understand how you got from A to B. Normally thats fine, but given how folks tend to react to being shown one thing and being delivered another I wouldn't blame them at all for just keeping everything under wraps. Making creative and practical changes to better the end-product doesn't make you a liar, but there are a great many folks here who will find a way to frame it that way and thats a drag for all involved. Yeah totally. I may have said this here on another thread but for me KSP2 probably won't return as my main gaming obsession until resources are implemented. I still kinda wish they would swap interstellar and resources for that reason, but I know resources is probably the hardest gameplay nut to crack so its gonna be a while anyway.

The point is that the tone of personal aggrievement is so wildly overstated given the actual stakes of the situation that it just can’t be taken seriously. The actual things you mentioned: wobble, font, UI, orbital decay and I would add my own list absolutely were of the highest priority and everyone was pretty clear on that. Again those are genuine substantive issues and 100% fair game. They have and are tackling those things as they should be. You’ve got to realize though by focusing instead on “but you promised!” complaints you’re actually disincentivizing transparency, because any sneak peak or WIP or planned feature leak just becomes fodder for more accusations of false promises, even if features are cut or altered for legitimate reasons. If fans are going to throw a fit every time their expectations aren’t met its best to just not say or release anything until its fully ready.

No I completely agree. The latter is exactly what folks should do, and I haven’t been shy in voicing my own view on missing game elements that are sorely holding the game back (primarily flight and transfer planning tools, but also the lack of planetary mapping, no plans for LS, etc. ) I also acknowledge that Im just one data point among many and thats my personal perspective. I guess I think the genuine substance of the critique is enough and can only be muddied by dredging up personal slights.

So Im definitely going to dip in and try out colonies and interstellar but what Im really here for is resources. Thats when KSP becomes a real game for me. Probably gonna be a minute but thats fine. I like dabbling in the meantime. Even to do that more seriously though Im going to need to see some major improvements to maneuvers, transfers, and flight planning.

My question is: if all negative feedback is framed in the same tone of personally aggrieved apoplexy about process and promises rather than actual content and quality why and how should anyone take it seriously? Why not skip the theater and performative anger of it all and just cut to the actual, substantive feedback? Because as far as I can tell the former achieves nothing and dilutes and distracts from the latter.

But like, its still just a game, dude. You don’t have to buy it and you don’t have to play it. Purchases are voluntary and no one is dying here. This isn’t personal. All of the histrionic pearl clutching just seems so put on at this point. A lot of folks have given good feedback. Thats great. Thats useful. Continuing to whine for years and years on end about some apparent personal harm thats been done to you by a video game that didn’t live up to your expectations in the timeframe you imagined seems super weird to me. If you don’t have the patience to let the devs succeed or not that’s fine. Ymmv. If you’re really that mad just take your money and time to other games and move on with your life.

I mean really love this team and I think things are coming along nicely but I believe even they see it as getting on base after a tough at bat. Unfortunately we're living in a really toxic gaming culture and its got to be hard for passionate developers and designers to gauge real reactions and actionable feedback in a clear and honest way. The atmosphere from a vocal player standpoint is to take all of these things really personally, or pretend to take them really personally, and then engage in an over-the-top Kabuki dance of feigned rage demanding groveling supplication from the corporate entities they've been wronged by because they think thats the only way games improve. But it's kind of like Cable news outlets constantly running BREAKING NEWS banners. If you're always turning everything up to 11 then people who might listen might as well just tune you out. If players believe rage-bombing every title that doesn't meet their expectations is the only way to convince developers to improve their products then eventually developers are just going to take those flame-campaigns less seriously. I would guess they already are. They'll look to more balanced and genuinely informative heuristics to identify the worst problems and work their way up from there. As test case lets talk about Cyberpunk--widely dragged and laughed at when it first released and probably deservedly so. It probably should have incubated for a couple more years. And now all of the initial hard work of good writing and good VA and story can be capitalized on because they fixed most of the bugs and redesigned the core mechanics into something incredible. Which is great! I genuinely hope as colonies and interstellar and resources are phased in the folks at Intercept remain open to making big internal changes to game mechanics depending on how things play out. What matters in the end is how the 1.0 product actually plays. Is it fun? Is it deep? Are the actual mechanics well tuned? is QOL up to snuff? Thats what matters. In my experience most people in this world are doing their best to be good at what they do. They're already incentivized to do that. Heaping shame and vitriol on them usually makes things worse, not better. The changes Cyberpunk made weren't just because players dragged CDPR through the mud. In fact the more substantive changes outside of bug-fixes--police system, fixing drops and the tech tree, etc. only come from very specific and clear feedback on whats not working and then having the time and creative process to create new and better systems. I personally would argue if you as a gamer are dissatisfied you produce more specific and actionable feedback on whats wrong--and passionately so!--rather than focus on grievances.

Listen, lets pretend for a moment you actually care about KSP being a great game. I want you to think about your strategic approach to making that happen. Whats better: a) concrete, actionable, polite advice on real gameplay changes; or b) repetitious, unsolvable industry process complaints?

It's all a matter of how much time it takes to satisfy the need for the greatest number of people. If you take time to understand the nature of the idea and have the patience to truly solve problems in the right way and make something great most folks will feel like they got what they asked for even if it takes more time than they expected. Other people are fundamentally concerned first and foremost with perpetual dissatisfaction no matter the time or effort invested and making them happy is impossible and invites a kind of diminishing returns death spiral. My business, and most other businesses cut our losses when clients present that behavior.

I mean, we screen pretty hard against misanthropes who are utterly focused on their own personal disastifaction no matter what the reality is so that doesn't happen so much for us. Our clients are generally reasonable people who understand we are in a creative enterprise and the proof is in the pudding even if it takes longer than they initially expected. When folks are unreasonable we're understanding, but we'll probably take our time to make sure the final product is really up to snuff. We may shine them on in the process because often they suck up a hugely outsized amount of time compared to folks who are just as deserving but more constructively responsive.