Are MODs like KER, and tools like KTOT, cheating, or just un-Kerbal?

[Pixel of Life]

Neither. They're features the game should have but doesn't.

[OddFunction]

Edit: Fair enough

Shutting up.

[Red Iron Crown]

No longer relevant, nothing to see here.

Edited September 29, 2015 by Red Iron Crown

[sp1989]

I look at it as adding things that the game should have. For example NASA isn't going to eye, guess, and hope the launch window to mars. So if I use Kerbal Alarm Clock its not cheating, I am using something to make my transfer more efficient. Hyperedit is an example of a cheat in my opinion. Unless you are in sandbox mode and just want to get something big into space.

[adsii1970]

No longer relevant, nothing to see here.

These are not the droids you're looking for...

- - - Updated - - -

I look at it as adding things that the game should have. For example NASA isn't going to eye, guess, and hope the launch window to mars. So if I use Kerbal Alarm Clock its not cheating, I am using something to make my transfer more efficient. Hyperedit is an example of a cheat in my opinion. Unless you are in sandbox mode and just want to get something big into space.

I forgot who said it earlier in the forum and am not going to go look it up, but it is a game and for the most part, even career or science mode is free style. If someone uses MechJeb, Kerbal Alarm Clock, or any other mod and it gives them a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, it doesn't bother me one bit. There are various mods I have installed just because I wanted more flexibility in design, or I have a specific mission or style of mission I want to perform. Then there are some mods that I've downloaded just for fun. It is about maximizing my ability to have challenges and to increase my enjoyment of the game. And to be quite blunt, I am not overly concerned with those that think I am cheating because I use MechJeb to perform docking maneuvers...

I think the only thing that upsets me is when someone wants to cast judgment on those who do play with various mods as somehow being less worthy of playing the game. One of my co-workers also plays KSP but does not use any mods but the EVE packs and MechJeb - does it bother me? No, and in fact, the differences in our game-play gives us some great things to compare and discuss during very boring office hours!

Personally I want the satisfaction of getting my monstrosities into space on my own. I especially enjoy the look of terror on Bob's face as parts begin to bend and fly off... muhahahah!

Edited September 29, 2015 by adsii1970

[Laie]

Un-Kerbal? That accusation has not been raised since Senator John McKerman has been stranded in LKO during what should have been a short pleasure trip.

[GDJ]

Oh goodness me.

Another one of these threads.

Here's my 2¢ on this "cheating" thread.

Quit worrying about it and play the @#$%^ game already!! Mods were made for a reason!! Either play with them or don't!!

It's not cheating, and please moderators just delete these clickbait threads already.

[Hannu]

Is it cheating depends on your rules. I can not answer it.

Is it kerbal? Maybe not. Even Squad have used term "kerbal way" to explain some irrational, humorous and childish choises. But I feel that it is very great thing that they allow to mod this game to fill very different needs. It can be played by humorous "more boosters and fancy explosions" -way or it can be modded to very nerdy simulator for those who like math and engineering problems. I like engineering way. It is somewhat easy because everything is perfectly predictable (I would like to random failures of things), but "kerbal" way would be very boring after couple of funny explosions. Random trial and error would not reward my brains as well as careful planning and execution.

But why so many people think so much is something cheating or wrong? This is just a computer game.

[WWEdeadman]

Apart from the obvious "It's not cheating in a single player game":

I find Kerbal Engineer and Kerbal Alarm Clock more of a Quality of Life thing than an actual way of making stuff easier. I could do all math that KER does, but I wanna play the game, not sit in front of a half finished ship calculating deltaV. I could keep track of multiple missions and slow down time warp and calculate transfer windows, but that would be annoying and/or time consuming, so I just use KAC.

However, I personally don't find any fun in watching the game play itself, which is why I don't like MechJeb.

Also, I personally am past the time in my KSP career in which I go "Let's just try it like that". I got everywhere and back, and I don't like playing for hours to realize I am 100 deltaV short of being able to come home safely or something like that, anymore. I'd rather plan a bit more on the construction, and have a mission go well than just shoot off some random construction I put together to realize it's underpowered in the end. Stuff goes wrong enough even with planning, so these tools just keep it to a minimum.

If you like to build "the Kerbal way" and live with the consequences, fine, your gameplay, your time. To me the mods are neither cheating nor un-Kerbal. I can still build something that looks totally "Kerbal", but does the job it was build for.

[Nathair]

But why so many people think so much is something cheating or wrong? This is just a computer game.

I do think certain mods (which shall remain nameless) are cheating. By this I mean they cheat me out of doing something I enjoy or find challenging. So I don't use them. End of story, really.

[Kobymaru]

Mayonnaise isn't cheating as long as it's homemade, with eggs you collected from a chicken you raised yourself.

Which reminds me...

http://munchies.vice.com/articles/we-spoke-to-the-guy-who-spent-six-months-and-1500-making-a-sandwich

[Cairol]

I thing mods like KER make the game playable in the first place.

Without such a tool, it's just guessing what your rocket will be capable of. Or it will mean you have to do all the math by yourself.

Which is not what I understand this game should be. (at least for me)

Tools that actually automate stuff you've done 1000 times manually is also something I can accept,

because it just removes something tedious whenever I don't feel like doing it the old fashioned way the 1001st time.

My personal border is, when I use Mods/cheats that take a key factor out of the game.

Like HyperEdit for actual Missions (not just experiments) or unlimited fuel, disabling heat effects ect.

So it's not so much about whether or not I'm "cheating", but about if it adds or takes away something from the game I enjoy.

[yorshee]

A lot of KER's features were going to be implented to 1.0, but then weren't for some reason. I hope the game gets it soon because it really should be stock...

[Feradose]

Btw astronauts don't often pilot stuff. Its all done by computer, and ground control. I don't consider real life systems cheating myself.

[Rune]

Without getting into the "cheating or no cheating" debate here (I concur with most of what's been said in page one, and I imagine it's been repeated a lot in the rest, which I skimmed), I will bring up two points about stock KSP instrumentation:

-Maneuver nodes and dV readouts: Game: "Ok, to do this, you need 875 delta-vees" You: "Ok, so how much do I have?" Game: "Not telling!" Tell me that doesn't sound a tad ridiculous. The concept is mentioned, so a dV readout for your ship is really the logical thing to add. Or, you know, remove maneuver node dV readouts, and nobody wants that. If such a readout was stock already, I doubt it would be contested in any way. And I think it eventually will be, so yeah, maybe I'm bringing this up without reason. But it's long overdue.

-The vertical velocity indicator: Did you know there is one in there already? Yup, staring at you right besides the altimeter. Problem is, it's unreadable. I mean, you can tell when you are going level and whether you are going up or down, but since it's logarithmic, and tiny, who the hell knows if you are going up at 50 or 150m/s. Some of the one in IVA are much more readable, but then again, you have to go into IVA, and piloting form there is hard. Really, the only reason I have a KER readout in flight is to add a vertical velocity indicator, and a time to apoapsis: with those two, I no longer have to be frantically switching views all the time, and I can focus on actually flying my thing and enjoying it. That's just a gameplay note form a player that has been playing for years now: if only I had it form the beginning! A much needed polish, that I (perhaps hopelessly) hope to see in the new UI somewhere.

I remain hopeful, because in general as the game has evolved over the years, pretty much all my mods have been becoming stock one after another. Will really the first one I installed (KER, or rather one of its predecessors, I can't remember) be one of the last ones to come into the game?

Rune. Or, you know, I'll keep modding my game. KAS and KIS are there to stay for sure...

Edited September 30, 2015 by Rune

[Temeter]

A lot of KER's features were going to be implented to 1.0, but then weren't for some reason. I hope the game gets it soon because it really should be stock...

The systems weren't yet finished or had to be reworked, they are supposed to be linked with skills. Most probably coming in a later update.

[TimePeriod]

"Cheating" is biased towards everything and nothing, thus the conversation turns philosophical in tune with religion.

Pfff just let these topics die.

[Goddess Bhavani]

Mods are how you play KSP 1.0.4 when the official version is 0.23.5, and KSP 2.0 when the official version is 1.0.4.

And how is it cheating if the most popular and largest mods exist to add difficultly, realism and huge layers of complexity to enhance the stock game by making it closer to real life space exploration?

[MaxwellsDemon]

Mods are how you play KSP 1.0.4 when the official version is 0.23.5, and KSP 2.0 when the official version is 1.0.4.

And how is it cheating if the most popular and largest mods exist to add difficultly, realism and huge layers of complexity to enhance the stock game by making it closer to real life space exploration?

Well said!

I never see the point of mod-bashing. KSP was intentionally designed to be mod-friendly, and the developers are happy there's such an energetic modding community. To ignore that is to miss the point. I suppose you can play straight 'vanilla' if you really, really want to, but I think you're missing out on a lot of interesting stuff.

[regex]

And how is it cheating if the most popular and largest mods exist to add difficultly, realism and huge layers of complexity to enhance the stock game by making it closer to real life space exploration?

OP is asking about a specific type of mod, those that add additional information, and whether that type of mod constitutes cheating or is just "un-Kerbal". They're not wholesale dismissing mods in general. Let's try to keep this on-topic.

[Dodgey]

Can the devs just hurry up and add splash text to loading screens that just say "there is no such thing as cheating". Please. These threads are just getting tedious. ....I wonder if there is a mod for that

[damny]

You can only cheat yourself in a single player sandbox, so the question is what are you cheating yourself out of with the various features of these mods. Then you have to answer for yourself which of those things you actually enjoy.

With KER and KAC specifically... I basically consider these two community bug fixes, not feature add-ons. KER displays a bunch of info that you can otherwise obtain by switching between screens, mousing over stuff, and so on (orbit parameters etc.). It also displays some info that is easy to calculate, but tedious: Calculating 9.8 * isp * ln(wet mass/dry mass) for every stage of your rocket after every change or between manoeuvres isn't exactly difficult, but it also doesn't enhance the gameplay in any way. And then it shows some info that's obtainable via gameplay but that just seems like an odd thing to do, e.g. you can totally map an action group to a biome sensitive experiment to easily see the current biome, but if the game will already freely give you this information, what's the point of not having a readout somewhere on screen in the first place.

KAC stops time warps safely. The game tries to do that too, it just fails sometimes. It prevents you from messing up your orbit by time warping through SOI changes, which shouldn't mess up the orbit in the first place since it's not actually something that happens in the game world. It lets you calculate transfers (and KER lets you do something similar), but if you don't use anything other than stock game tools (no web apps, no wikis, no protractor held up to the screen), the actual stock game way to do this is to move a manoeuvre node around and tug at its attached gizmos until the game gives you positive feedback. But sometimes the manoeuvre nodes disappear, and sometimes you mess up your node by grabbing the wrong gizmo or accidentally scrolling near it. Often, "feedback" (i.e. encounters and such) just flickers in and out of existence even when you're not touching anything. The gizmos also aren't very precise in the first place. So yeah, most of this isn't actual gameplay either.

The alarms that KAC provides are pretty much the only feature of these two mods that aren't an obvious bug fix... but even then I wonder why a game that lets me do things that literally take years doesn't have any built-in way to prevent me from babysitting it while it's time warping instead of spending my time on actually playing the game.

There are mods that do more than show information, and personally I don't like mods that make things easier by removing gameplay. But if we're talking about KER and KAC or similar mods, IMHO those don't remove gameplay in the first place. I don't need skill nor knowledge to get most of these things right without a mod, just a lot of patience.

[eataTREE]

I have always found it absurd to suppose that Kerbals can build rockets powerful enough to travel to other planets, but not any sort of computer to help navigate and fly those rockets. IMO, you should do exactly one Munshot and one trip to Duna with pencil and paper and holding a protractor up to the screen. Then your Fo'Realz pass is considered stamped and you can use KER/VOID/MJ for the rest of your life.

[I_Killed_Jeb]

op is an engineer who believes in mysterious moho encounters.

ok.

[Tourist]

There is a simple way of knowing if something is cheating or not in KSP. If you did a thing, did or used something to help you do the thing, and you feel that because of it you didn't really do the thing. That is it! Unless there is some aspect of competition with other players, like multiplayer, or challenges where there may be actual rules/restrictions governing fairness, the only metric to determine if something is cheating is if after doing it, you don't feel like you really accomplished what you set out to do.