Worst at Video Games NA

That seems like it needs to be toned down quite a bit, IMO. That's pretty ridiculous and defeats the purpose of science-specific parts altogether.

I've actually never once used this thing ... When I unlocked it in career mode I was excited because more science! But then I read up on what it did and I thought "Well, this doesn't seem particularly effective..." I feel like the science-specific techs in general really drop off in significance after the Science Jr. Unlocking barometers far down the tech tree just to get 10 dinky extra science or whatever feels really bad.

I like your idea, but honestly I also really like parts testing. An early mission I got was to test a certain booster at 23km. It really made me stop and think because I'd never designed a rocket before that waited until it was that high up to even stage to boosters. I think parts testing encourages interesting and unique rocket designs that normally people would never explore.

I kinda ducked out of the conversation because it evolved to something outside of the scope I had set out, but I LOVE this idea. This, I think, provides some really fun and interesting gameplay, as well as realism, that KSP currently lacks. Maybe have the test center in the RND department.

I wanna point out that I don't think the problem is difficulty; I think the difficulty is actually fine. It's still a really complex game with a really high learning curve. The problem as I see it is that funds didn't actually change the way anyone played. The effectiveness of funds to introduce new gameplay was watered down by how cheap everything is and how easy it is to get money. It's not about difficulty, it's about whether or not funds succeeded in changing the game significantly. Just for clarification

Thanks for the advice, but I'm trying to go clean on this one; total stock, no mods Maybe once I finish the tech tree, I can start over with a couple mods and try to do something more difficult.

This could be okay with rep decay, but if your rep never goes down without failures, then you just pump up your rep with easy tier-1 contracts and then time warp till you have all the money you'll ever need. This could very well be true. Since I started over the game for the patch, I'm not at a point yet where I'm launching stuff like that into orbit, so I can't say for sure. I'll reserve judgment on this point until I can test it myself

0.24 has been out for a couple days now, so I'd like to discuss the changes. The addition of funds, in my opinion, is not fulfilling the intended purpose. I started over career mode, and within a single in-game day, I've managed to work up 80k funds. My next mission is to get a stable orbit around Kerbin, which is probably going to cost me about 10k to perform and which promises to net me about 3x that much on the back end, putting me over 100k funds on the first in-game day of career mode. The only thing 0.24 has changed for me is that, rather than orbiting Kerbin because I want to practice orbital turns, I'm doing it because the contract says so. That's fine, but it doesn't add any unique gameplay that wasn't already there. So, funds were supposed to act as a gating factor; they're supposed to make every launch count. But when I have enough funds in the bank to burn away 10 cheap ships after one in-game day, it seems like funds aren't really limiting much at all. I think funds should be changed in one of two ways; either A) Decrease the amount of funds rewarded by completing contracts while simultaneously increasing the cost of ship parts. This turns funds into a true limiting factor; if you don't build cost-efficient ships and balance your contracts, you just can't proceed with the game. or Increase the amount of funds rewarded by completing contracts even more, BUT give us something else to spend excess funds on. If funds could be spent on R&D, or lobbying certain companies ("Hey, lemme test ride your new nuclear engines so I can make it to Jool"), then completing contracts to build up an excess of funds could then add gameplay value because you'd have more choice and flexibility when you're rich, rather than just being rich for the sake of being rich. Thoughts? Opinions? Alternate ideas?

Don't shortchange yourself; you have 12 whole funds!

Darn! My greed was my own undoing! Alright, I guess that's better than being bested by a kraken ... I'll keep that in mind next time. Thanks guys!

I accepted a contract to test out a new parachute. I had to be between 480 and 680 m/s, and between 17km and 29km. So, I launched a simple ship up to about 50km, then controlled my descent just enough that I was at around 600 m/s at 28km, within the upper bounds of the contract parameters, and then manually opened the chute (I wanted to try and save as many of my stages as possible). I landed the ship safely, but I didn't receive any of my contract pay. Now I'm short about 10k funds and I don't have enough to finish the contract? What did I do wrong? =/ I can't figure out what went wrong. Is there something I'm missing?

I dunno, maybe I'm overly optimistic about people's willingness to watch KSP, but I think this is a cop-out. Hearthstone is consistently near the top of twitch rankings in number of viewers and it's a strategic card game with almost no action or activity, and right now has 24k viewers. As I type this, over 14k people are watching Minecraft streams. Civilization V, a personal favorite game of mine but a game that even I would never watch on stream, has almost 700 viewers. KSP, by comparison, has less than 60. We're pulling a tenth of the viewer base of Civilization V. I don't think that's a genre issue. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's not what it looks like, at least not to me.

His stupidity is far too high for him to ever deceive you. Send him in orbit around Jool just to be sure, though.

The small stuff has always been the little extra flair that makes this game amazing to me. I love the little details.

Of all the changes being made, the Vernor is what I'm most excited about, actually. Running out of monoprop halfway through a docking procedure is just frustrating. The struggle is real.

He volunteered! He knew the risks!

I REALLY love this idea. This is a fantastic way to make contacts continue to be meaningful without silly stuff like a "World Record Company" asking you to keep expanding.

I dunno, I kind of like the idea of the KSC being a business instead of a government entity. It makes the idea of a privatized space program IRL a lot easier to swallow, at least in my opinion.

It seems interesting in certain contexts, but paying another company to build a rocket for you seems like it's taking out one of the major draws of the game. Just my two cents.

Well, the responsibility is two-fold; it's on the very skilled and experienced KSP players to provide high-quality, informative streams instead of just playing how they normally do but letting others watch, and it's on the community as a whole to support the players that do so in order to provide incentive to continue doing so. Imagine a world in which high-quality, top-tier players could actually make a living streaming KSP, the way top-tier streamers in other games do.

I imagine it'll be a balancing act; you do contracts for "the man" and then use the profits to explode stuff.

This is a good point, but you have to look at it from the view of a casual player who doesn't know what they're looking at. For example, I had a friend who wanted to play KSP. Long time fan of space travel, watched the original Carl Sagan Cosmos, but had NO idea what he was doing behind the metaphorical wheel of a spacecraft. He read tutorials and couldn't make sense of abstract concepts like delta v. I got on stream and explained to him what I was doing and why every step of the way, and he grasped it once he saw it being done in real-time in a way where he could ask questions and get involved in the process and visually see what was going on the whole time. A big, big part of the reason streams in games like League are so popular is because the very top players (the guys actually getting paid to play professionally) can offer professional-tier advice and coaching to tens of thousands of people in real time. It's a learning experience first and foremost, and a good streamer turns the stream into essentially a classroom. And, to be totally frank, this game has an EXTREMELY high learning curve-- far higher than the vast majority of games. First time players are very likely to get frustrated and give up before they ever get to the juicy stuff. If KSP wants to continue getting new players into the game, we HAVE to figure out how to help novice players bridge this gap; how do you teach someone who's never played before how to get into orbit? If you throw terms like "apoapsis" at them right off the bat, they'll just get frustrated. Youtube tutorials do a decent job at this, but they fail in the sense that people can't really ask questions and get immediate response. That's where streaming really turns into a very useful dynamic for helping the low end of the player base play catch up with the high end.

I disagree; I think allowing people like Danny to get community involvement ("Okay, guys, what are we building today? How can we do something totally crazy? What new way can we break the game?") could make streams incredibly interesting and encourage regular viewers to come in and offer ideas and opinions. Likewise, I could watch Scott just drift through space talking about science for hours and ever get bored. The man has a power over me. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Yeah, Danny and Scott are what made me think of the idea. I would watch either of those two do streams in a heartbeat.

That's a very real concern that I've been thinking about, too. I think maintaining dialogue between the streamer and their audience, and maybe even playing other games during the boring bits (many top-tier League streamers, for example, have to wait 40+ minutes inbetween games and spend that time answering community questions or playing stuff like CS:GO and Hearthstone). I'm obviously not an expert at this, but it seems to me that a larger streaming base means more casual players, which means more money for devs, which means more and better updates to the game.