KSK

Well the simple answer to that is for Take Two to not put out a wall of legalese that's open to misinterpretation and doubt and then stay resolutely silent when people get concerned about it. Instead, they could pull their collective thumbs out and craft a reasonable agreement that's more suitable to a game like KSP which has grown up as an early-access game with a heavy emphasis on community involvement. But instead they throw their standard 'we reserve the rights to own everything and have total control' boilerplate at us. Or in other words - don't pull a dork move, refuse to explain said dork move and then act surprised when people call you on it, reasonably or unreasonably. And yeah - about explaining themselves. I'm curious why you think that Take Two would conflict themselves by providing clarification on their own damned agreement. Because I'm really not seeing how that works. If you are right (which is possible I suppose), then you end up with some ridiculous situations: Party A: This is our draft contract - please read it over and sign it if you're happy. Party B: Umm, it's mostly OK but we're not sure about clauses 4.1, 5.4 and 7.8. We think we could make them work but could you give us some background, so we can see where you're coming from and why you need them? Party A: Nope - can't do that because we'd be giving you legal advice which would a conflict of interest on our part. Party B: ... All I can say is that I've been involved in plenty of contract negotiations alongside our legal team and I can safely say I've never seen anything like the above. I have seen plenty of examples of Party B stonewalling with a 'these are our standard terms' line, without further explanation (which isn't terribly helpful) but I've never seen them claim that telling us anything else would be a conflict of interest. Oh - and to the folks who aren't really fussed about the new terms and conditions because they don't believe it's in Take Two's interest to enforce the more draconian ones? Well you might be right. Or you might not. Now, I could be missing something but since Take Two bought out the rights to KSP, I haven't seen anything from them about the game. I have no idea what their intentions are, how they feel about the community or anything. In fact the sole interaction I've had with them, is the introduction of these egregiously lopsided terms and conditions. I have no basis for trusting them or for assuming that I should take the EULA and privacy policy at anything other than face value. And yes, for what it's worth, I agree that they would be stupid to enforce various terms of their EULA. But it would hardly be the first time that a large company has made a stupid decision in the name of greed or short term gain.

I'll take a swing at this one. Because, for the size of it's community - and certainly the part of that community that hangs out on these forums - KSP has unusually large number of players contributing content of various kinds, whether that be mods, videos, fan art or whatever. As a result, the community tends to feel more personally engaged with KSP development. Therefore it's no great surprise to me, when the community actually pays attention to and comments on any updates and news about that development. By the same token, it's no surprise to me that elements of the community get irate about what they see as especially boneheaded decisions by Squad or Take Two. And it's really no surprise that ignoring those irate community members doesn't make them go away - rightly or wrongly, they feel invested in the game and expect its publisher and developers to be at least somewhat invested in them as a community rather than a collection of customers. Speaking personally, with these new terms and conditions, I feel that Take Two are not remotely invested in the community and just expect us to be a good little flock of geese that take whatever we're given with gratitude and keep laying those golden eggs of free KSP content without complaining.

Possibly. But an awful lot of the privacy policy and associated parts of the EULA that @Brainlord Mesomorph is concerned about doesn't appear to have anything to do with protecting Take Two against damaging behavior.

Leaving the arguments about spyware to one side, I have serious objections to this paragraph: “…the information we collect may include personal information such as your first and/or last name, e-mail address, phone number, photo, mailing address, geolocation, or payment information. In addition, we may collect your age, gender, date of birth, zip code, hardware configuration, console ID, software products played, survey data, purchases, IP address and the systems you have played on. We may combine the information with your personal information and across other computers or devices that you may use.“ I can see a rationale for collecting your name, address and payment information, since you'll need to hand those over in any case to buy KSP or the expansion. I could quibble about mailing address vs billing address but that's getting picky, since for most people, I imagine they're one and the same. I can see a rationale for collecting hardware configuration and console ID. The first provides them with useful information that could actually benefit the player base (hey we know that 99.9% of our players are playing KSP on a machine that can handle x, y and z graphical features - why don't we add those to the next expansion?). The second sounds like it might be useful in combating piracy. Might - I don't have a console so don't know how that works. Software products played, survey data, purchases (of what?), photo (of what? My bare bottom? My raised middle finger?), geolocation - I see no KSP related reason for collecting those. I'm sure that Take Two would love the extra data for marketing purposes but that's not an adequate reason. Age - possibly relevant, although a basic 'are you old enough to play KSP based on its rating' check, would be preferable. Whether I'm 28 or 68 is frankly none of Take Two's business. Likewise gender - I can see some positive reasons for collecting that but at the same time - it's really none of Take Two's business. But in any case: "We may combine the information with your personal information and across other computers or devices that you may use.“ No. No you may not. That's just basic stuff. Aggregating data is acceptable under some circumstances. But a 'privacy policy' that allows for combining that kind of information - and then sharing it with third parties is... well it's a policy. It certainly isn't any sort of privacy policy. Now, given the varied privacy legislation in different countries, it's debatable how much of this over-reaching piece of mulch would actually stand up in court. But, at the end of the day, I believe the onus should be on Take Two to use an EULA (or heck, even to have more than one EULA tailored to different jurisdictions) that is compliant with the relevant law, rather than using a ridiculously over-reaching agreement and leaving it up to their customers to either trust them (hah!) or challenge them on it, in court or otherwise. Squad were a small company, with limited resources. Going with a boilerplate EULA was excusable if not ideal. Take Two do not have that excuse.

Spacehopper? To be brought to you by the Boring Company, in a grand Musk crossover.

And then you posted it again... Who cares - I've watched it twice already, so having four copies to choose from is a win.

Powered by frobscottle (cos that stuff always goes down - although sinking bubbles would probably mess up tank pressurisation something fierce) and LOX? And on a different note, a friend sent me a link to this video of the Falcon Heavy launch. Slightly old news I know but I thought it was a nice video that folks on here might appreciate. Also , keep an eye out for the core booster footage at 1m11. And that dual booster landing never gets old...

Also, I don't think there's necessarily a correlation between number of fingers and preferred mathematical base. The Babylonians used a base 60 system (which still survives for timekeeping) and no matter how hard I squint, I can't find 60 fingers and toes. If the kerbals found base 10 to work well for their maths for whatever reason, I think they'd just go with it.

Depends which way the invisible unicorns are pointing. Duh.

Sorry to see this thread die @Third_OfFive but I respect your reasons - and I doubt you're the only one re-evaluating how much you wish to contribute - directly or indirectly - to Take Two's bottom line. Good luck with whatever you do next!

And I'm all caught up! Still thoroughly impressed by the racing and how you manage to keep it all fresh and gripping, when it could easily get really repetitive. That first date though! The aftermath seemed about right to me (although Alexis has a stronger constitution than I do if she could face fruit juice first thing in the morning. ).I'm glad Jeb was such a gentlekerb too. Thanks man - I needed to chill with a good book this evening and that did the job nicely.

First of all, you're talking about one particular section of 'the community', which is the section that generously donates its free time, skills and labour to create content for the rest of us to enjoy. As far as I'm aware they don't get paid for any of that except on a purely voluntary basis, by an even smaller section of the community. They don't even get a great deal of thanks for their time - indeed the general attitude on the forums is that 'there's a mod for that'. The 'community' just seems to take it for granted that there will be a continuous stream of free content available. Judging by the way the new EULA has been handled and the fact that a signature feature of the Expansion is another content creation tool, I think that Squad / Take Two were also taking that free content for granted to some extent. Here's the thing though. If you're consistently taking the goodwill and free time of others for granted, you really shouldn't be surprised if some of them get fed up and decide they've got better ways of spending their time. I don't know if you're a content creator @ThirdOfSeven. If you are then fair enough - I can respect your opinion but I don't think it's reasonable to criticise content creators that don't share it. If you're not a content creator then go right ahead and dive in. Nobody is stopping you from getting involved.

Bit of a change of pace here but I've just been to an excellent talk by Dr Ellen Stofan, former Chief Scientist at NASA. It was a women-in-science style of event so space exploration was kind of the backdrop to the talk rather than its raison d'etre (if that makes any sense) but even so, several namechecks for our favourite reusable rocket company! TL: DR Much lower launch costs plus satellites also becoming far cheaper = great science excitement. Also Mars (and obviously this is totally unofficial) will be a grand partnership: public, private and international. Musk is doing great things but he can't afford Mars. Interestingly, a certain other launch vehicle didn't garner a mention as I recall, although as I said, space per se wasn't really the focus of the talk. Oh, and in the interests of balance, I should mention that SpaceX did get dinged on diversity issues, so it wasn't all unicorns and rose-tinted glasses. Even so, I sensed much excitement about what they're doing. Edit the Second. Very happy to chat about the diversity parts of the talk too because that was it's (very important) raison d'etre, but sadly it's probably best to take that to private messages rather than derail this thread.

Both of those would be much appreciated - thanks!

Never say never, but I certainly have no plans to buy it in the near future. I was only middling enthused about the content anyway and the new EULA and the way it's been handled have soured me. The latter can all change of course, hence the 'never say never'.

Perhaps this is better taken to private messages but as an honest question, motivated by professional curiosity, which strict and punishing IP laws did you have in mind? I ask as an IP manager for a tech transfer office but one who's more familiar with patent law (and European patent law at that) than copyright law. Hence, whilst I appreciate that you can only deal in generalities, I would be genuinely interested in your take on corporate risk perception in this context if you had the time to chat. It could be useful to me for future reference.

A 'like' isn't exactly the appropriate response here but its the only one on offer. Hopefully things won't come to this but if they do - well good luck to you too and my respect for holding to your principles.

There's something deeply wrong with that situation. For background, dealing with contracts of various kinds is part of what my department at work does. If we see a clause that we don't like or don't understand, very often the best way to resolve that is simply to ask the other party why they included it. Sometime's there's a good reason that we hadn't considered because it turns out that the other party need the contract to cover various specific situations that we weren't aware of. At that point we're in a good place for further negotiation - perhaps we can agree to a restricted version of that clause, or can agree to the original version, provided that they can agree to tweak another clause somewhere else in the contract to protect our interests. However, if the other party can't provide a reasonable explanation for that clause they wanted, then we would tend to regard it with a somewhat jaundiced eye and at the very least, we may end up pushing back harder on the rest of the contract, since we don't have much option but to take a pessimistic approach to it. Not knowing what the other party wants from a contract isn't the best way of building a good working relationship with them, either. In the present example, it appears that Take Two are throwing a contract at us on a take-it-or-leave-it-basis without being willing or able to explain that contract. Which would be ridiculous in a business-to-business relationship and is egregious in a business-to-consumer relationship, because our ability to negotiate a more favourable contract is severely restricted. If that's correct then so be it. No more KSP for me and (probably of more concern to Take Two) no expansion pack purchase either. And yes, there will doubtless be other games that I'll look at in future with similarly overbearing and overreaching EULA's attached. As other folks have pointed out on this thread, Take Two are hardly unique amongst game publishers in their liberal over-application of legal boilerplate. However, just because something is standard practice, that doesn't make it good practice. I'll just have to decide whether I care about playing a new game enough to agree to the over-the-top EULA. You can bet that I'll be disinclined to engage with the game community and developers at anything more than a superficial level though, without taking a long look at what I'm signing up to. Because, at the end of the day, that's the only real negotiating position we have. Agree to the terms or walk away.

Not sure how I missed the last chapter but one! That wasn't the Kolumbiad launch site by any chance?

I'm wondering if they're keeping quiet about some parts (like the range being closed) out of professional courtesy. Much like they did with the Flight that Shall Not be Named where we got a brief factual statement then nothing. No point badmouthing customers in public or grousing about stuff outside of your control.

Well said Jim. It's not about the money. I wouldn't turn it down mind, but the chances of making money from any sort of writing is pretty slim, let alone fan-fiction where you're ultimately dependant on somebody else's good graces. That's fine and was understood from the outset - or at least it was once I got past my 'holy moley - people are reading this stuff!' moment and took a slightly more objective look at things. But if I could offer another example - and to be quite clear, this isn't any sort of competition (you do pictures, I don't. Pictures are hard), I've been writing First Flight for a few months short of five years now and the total word count is somewhere north of 320,000. If folks want a point of comparison with a rather better known series, that's all of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, plus all of Chamber of Secrets, plus all of Prisoner of Azkaban, topped off with well over a quarter of a Goblet of Fire. That's a lot of work and a lot of free time spent. Now I don't claim to be making the same impact on people's enjoyment of KSP that the big name mods do. Far from it. On the other hand, some commenters have been kind enough to say that reading First Flight has added to their game and, at the least, I'm kinda hopeful that I've given other folks another reason to stick around the forums and maybe get involved in other aspects of the community, all to the advantage of Squad and/or Take Two. So yes. I don't think it is very likely but if Take Two did decide they wanted to use First Flight, then in truth I'd be thrilled. However, I'd certainly want to be credited for it - given the time I've put into it I don't think I'm being terribly precious there. And if we disagreed about any necessary edits, I'd hope they'd respect that and simply decide they couldn't use it rather than making the edits themselves and going ahead regardless.

Nobody Home by Pink Floyd. "I got a little black book with my poems in. Got a bag with my toothbrush and comb. When I'm a good dog, they sometimes throw me a bone."

Kerbonaut was caught. Welcome to the forums.

Well there's your problem right there. Only a touch of peroxide? Clearly that was woefully insufficient to kill off any bugs on the chicken. Chicken fillets marinaded in peroxide and briefly flambeed using a spare RCS thruster. The breakfast of (temporary) champion kerbonauts!

Not as I read it. A Mission pack based on Emiko though - yeah you most likely sign over any rights to those automatically. Assuming that EULA doesn't change and assuming that Missions count as something 'made using the software' - in this case KSP. And under the new Forum terms - well you sign away any rights to new Emiko chapters posted after the 6th March. Take Two get an exclusive license to them with no obligation to compensate or credit you for them. Doesn't mean they won't of course, but the fact they feel the need to give themselves that snatch-and-run option in the first place doesn't inspire confidence. Yup - as written by A.Nonymous. Not this Kuzzter fellow - never heard of him. Potentially anyway - one would hope that they would throw you a bone and stick your name on it.