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Signed Contracts can't be changed, but Terms of Service can. If you have a contract with Unity, check it. It will tell you that the Terms of Service can change - as well the licensing terms. EULAs, on the other hand, can change - and they are contracts the same - ergo, some contracts can change. Microsoft is doing it for years. Hell, Android is doing it for years - just updated my phone that I paid in full and I had to agree with the new ToS. "Just don't update it, so" someone could propose - but them I can't install and use the productivity apps I need to carry on my work (as a freaking 2FA for github, or even my new banking). Don't think you are safe from this - the only novelty on this crap is that, now, Software Publishers are being bitten in the SAS the same way their users were being for years. This will hardly reach the tribunals because a lot of big players are (ab)using this on their business (see my last paragraph). So any attempt to pursue legal action on the matter will A public gaslighting campaign, and perhaps a character assassination one. That failing, some serious retaliations. The dude/small company surviving the retaliations, an agreement will be signed solving the issue punctually (as well as a NDA preventing the agreement from being disclosed). If and only the agreement is not accepted (but usually the money is too good to let it go) things will reach a Court of Law Where some really serious money will be spent for years. IMHO, you will have about 12 months of tranquility. They will try something again unless they managed to stop bleeding money. Keep in mind: they desperately need lots of money, and they have little to no hope of getting it from expanding the customer base (I can't imagine why… ). So they will be forced to squeeze the current user base instead. They didn't retreated - they just did a step back to earn time and do two steps forwards later. They don't have a choice, to tell you the true. Not the CEO, I can guarantee you. He may be a scumbag, but he's a seasoned one - he knows better. The next obvious suspects are the BoD. Talk to a Psychologist about pathological personality disorders, then attend to some PMI (or similar) classes, then tank to the Psychologist again about what did you learnt from how to… well… do Management. Of course I'm not implying that every Manager is a sociopath - but every manager need to act like one now and then. When they enjoy what they are doing, things get hairy.

Lowell Etroublant, 1949 After the second world war, the Eastern European division of Lowell Cars, the Lowell Automobilwerk GmbH, came under communist rule and was nationalized. Soon (August 1945) the government ordered the design of a cheap family car to help the struggling economy and to satisfy the disgruntled, often defiant, population. The Lowell team started designing and had a prototype ready in February 1946. They invited government officials for a test drive. It was a disaster. The government rejected the proposal based on the used technology like standard suspension and wheels, gearboxes and the piston engine running on regular fuel (Normalbenzin). The argument was they needed the parts for building up military vehicles. Back to the drawing board. After many months of searching the team found parts they could use. From a terminated company (because the Soviets felt the fighter jets competed with their own designs, which made Stalin angry) they acquired jet engines and landing gear. At first the engineers wanted to use the landing gear as the main wheels but this idea went into the trashcan after they discovered the tires couldn’t handle the roads, which were in terrible shape. They had already made the landing gear units a part of the bodywork design and a redesign presented a problem because of the delay, they wouldn’t make it before the deadline. They eventually found, just in time, the final solution: elephant skateboard wheels. There was a huge surplus because a famine in early 1948 made the government order all elephants to be slaughtered for food. It looked funny but did work: they were compact to install, provided reasonable grip and a smooth ride. Plus the brakes were excellent because -as we all know- elephants are heavy. But because of the fact there was no gearbox and thus no way of driving the wheels, there also was no reverse. Drivers had to push their car if they had to back up. For the time, aerodynamics were excellent. The jet engine could propel the car to an amazing 90m/s at 100% power. It was decided to reduce the power to 18.5% though, partly because the weak suspension damping made the car dangerous at speeds above 35m/s but mostly because all government officials displayed a different colour of the rainbow during a demonstration. They couldn’t handle the idea that a cheap car for the plebs would be faster than their own state limousines. The population soon discovered how to remove the engine limiter but if the state police would catch you speeding, you’d spend the rest of your life in a gulag for instilling anti-socialist thoughts to the public, an act of high treason. After production started in 1949, the population soon discovered funny little levers labeled Einziehfahrwerk hidded away behind panels, which would lower the original wheels. They also discovered these wheels didn’t have bad tires like the design team claimed, in fact they were a lot better. After a short trial the design team admitted the lie because they wanted the car to look ridiculous and make a fool out of the communist government. They were hanged the next day. The name of the car was allegedly the name of the wife of one of the team members. It sounded French but no government official spoke the language of the former enemy. There was another way the team made the car ridiculous but this wasn’t spotted by the government nor the public. It was discovered in the memoirs of a widow of one of the team members, when she published those decades later. Tip for fun: Set the Juno to 100% thrust and disable crash damage, it’s fast and good for drifting. Download link

As much as project managers really, really, really wish it was the case, sheer developer hours sat in front of a problem doesn't come anywhere close to linear correlation to actual productivity. Its also unlikely the daily scrums are hour long beasts, in all my experience its more like 15 minutes, with the occasional longer one for proper backlog grooming. When it comes to trying to project manage bugfixes specifically, its pretty much all bets off trying to actually predict anything. At any point, for absolutely no discernable reason, a developer can have a brain flash and suddenly find the problem. Other times, they spend a week painstakingly iterating through every step of every point in the process a dozen times over, only to later find out that they were accidentally 'fixing' the very issue they were hunting due to some bizarre specific criteria to reproduce the bug that they just never knew to try. As far as the whole instigating communication question of this thread? I'm really not sure what they can do. The root cause of the lack of communication is painstakingly clear - They just don't have anything to say, that's a good idea to say right now. That's not because they aren't doing anything, but because of the specific predicament they're in right now. The core guts of the game are in bad shape, and the timelines for the major updates have been unsatisfactory to the general community. You can't really provide effective frequent communication on bugfixes if the bugs aren't getting fixed - You'd put out regular "Yea still looking" messages then suddenly "whoop its done here's a hotfix", not really anything of substance to speak of between the two. On the major update space, the bad state of core guts means a lot of people take any major talk about the upcoming features as smoke screens, or misallocations of resources, etc - I don't want to hear about the new toys when my current ones fall outta the sky. And any early communication about the next major milestone also risks delivering unrealistic expectations. People will see X features complete, and some will fabricate connective features wholecloth in their mind, setting themselves up for disappointment. Some will use the feature list to predict delivery windows, which often end up circulating in the community as fact rather than expectations, setting up for disappointment. And its also risky to show off things that might not end up making the final or first cut - The last thing you want is to show off a bunch of really cool, fully fleshed out features that don't get delivered right away, especially with community trust being in the state it is currently. On top of all of that, the longer this state of affairs goes, the worse it will get. People want communication because they feel that things are not getting done in a timely manner and want answers. But there are no answers or timely solutions to software bugs, that sort of work is very much an artform. The long term solution really is "The game needs to be stable".

What is there to talk about that hasn't already been said? There's nothing new in KSP2 and hardy anyone is playing it. There isn't even anything from the devs to discuss.

One thing I'm hoping for is a way to edit/add to vehicles in flight like KSP1's engineer construction mode (DLC?) Has there been any talk of this making its way into KSP2? Would it be handled by engineers or could some kind of colony building also offer something similar to vessels landed on the colony pads/runways?

Which place is better? Just don’t talk about the great goals of the developers; today, where can I see, touch and check this better simulation?

I have this coworker who has a few roles because we're a small firm and part of it is IT and and he really seems to relish in loudly berating tech support folks who are trying to help him, to little effect. Everyone else in the office has to have real conversations about actual business while rolling our eyes at the stream of expletives from the other room. Sidebar: One time I had a Macbook that was 3 years and 2 weeks old, but Apple had (possibly deliberately) failed to notify older owners that laptops have a humidity problem that in the end compromises monitors and the motherboard. It took a couple of weeks of calling, but eventually I was able--with determined, polite conversations with tech support, to have the recall covered under Applecare. Im sure there's a macro-strategy of waging a social media campaign against a particular company which might raise the heat enough to make its way into an actual upper-management meeting. Maybe Im more cynical than some imagine but I don't think they much care. At that level your [complaints] about bugs and communication is weighed against investor demands and you will absolutely lose. There's a famous scene in the life-lesson that is The Wire wherein Bunny Colvin declares: “Middle management means that you got just enough responsibility to listen when people talk, but not so much you can't tell anybody to go [snip] themselves.” For those of you using fellow forum members as a prop in a theatrical pressure campaign against a subsidiary of a multi-billion dollar multinational corporation this is who you actually want to direct your attention to. Please don't waste your time bickering with hopeful fans. We have our own campaign: to as best we can accurately and conceptually convey to the actual makers of this game what real meaning, quality, and value translates to in concrete deliverable terms in the context of KSP.

I think there's a difference between trying to build up hype, and talking about new features they have already finished creating. Talking up hype would be like interviews and content before EA release, where they went on at length about how KSP2 was going to outperform KSP1, and just generally be better in just about every way. The kind of talk I would like to see, might be for example, even one screenshot or short video of something not analogous to a system we've used before. And we've gotten some of that for sure, it's just that it feels to me like it simply gets moshed in with generic screenshots of assets that don't tell us anything we don't already anticipate. Instead maybe these newer features could be put front and center where a little bit of further explanation can be given about their specific context. I'm just trying to run ideas out, honestly. They've said they want to improve communications, and I'm trying to help brainstorm how that can happen. Because I hate to see that they're stuck with the same feeling that they know they have to improve communications even though, between the two statements they've made on the matter, they definitely have TRIED to do so

I think what people want to see more, is how NEW systems are going to work. We already knew science would have parts, we already knew it'd have... some kind of mission control system? Or rather, we knew science would have some kind UI from the KSC to manage it. I don't think we knew there would be cranes, but on the topic of communication... what's the context behind some of the images like that? Will we use that for building assembly? Or is it just a backdrop piece? If it's just a backdrop, why drop it along a supposed display of new features without explaining at all What we've yet to see, is much of anything about systems that we have not played an analogue of before. Stuff that KSP2 science will do, for example, that KSP1 science never did. There's been a bit of talk about that, but no show unfortunately.

the thing i was trying to point out is the lack of "real" talk of science, showing us one model (the gif) that had ALOT of people interested in... may... 4 months down the line to see another model, from reentry alongside mission control WIP, in a 7 month span, most people lose interest in it when people expected to be "alongside" the development.. Like, I'm going keep screaming at the top of my longs, look at Twitter user dedaPong.. He is Co-Founder / Creative Director at Gamepires, and is pretty much in "charge" of a game called SCUM. This guy "leaks" as much as you can without just giving out pure dev clients stays talking to his community, leaks things that are months/weeks out, asks the community questions about how the game should be developed, or what can we do to fix it if there is a huge issue, even when there is something wrong, he is there. Now, don't get me wrong this game has had issues in this game, but the sheer amount of work leaks and user engagement is on another level, and when there is nothing, well it does go silent.. KSP 2 has been different in kind words for a game that had a rough start, and a rough post launch 30 days +... Even in bad "little to no payoff" he still posts. idk, just offtopic.

Oh this bad community! They constantly write about the problems of the game and the poor work of the developers (including their PR department), why don’t they talk about the merits of the game in a variety of ways with good arguments! Or fantasize about the fact that there is a magnificent game hidden somewhere in a closet that is being hidden from us

As a professional Community Manager with nearly a decade behind me, it was my Job, to talk to the community. It was what I was paid for, that meant taking all the abuse that was hurled at me. The death threats, the people yelling and screaming at me telling mw that I was the worst thing to walk the earth, and listening to people hurl insults at my co-workers who I knew for a fact were working as hard as they could. I started this thread because I was and still am disappointed with the pacing of communication and I do personally feel that the community deserves more communication, of a higher quality, but the main issue is that takes time, energy, and resources away from dev ops, (if you want comms from the dev team) which as CM's, we are not. We're not in the editor making the game (some of us might know it well enough thanks to being taught by our team so we can answer questions) but it's not our job. Our job is to be out here with you all so the team can focus and work. Those people in dev ops, DO NOT owe you anything, but going in to work and doing their jobs giving their best and making the best quality game they can. It's up to the CM's to relay what they're doing to the Community and senior leadership like Nate. Any "Beef" should always be directed at people like me, the forward facing Community and Media Relations People, the PR people, and Leadership. Never the rank and file dev-ops person coming in to work today to work on some models, textures, sounds, animations, what have you. Even then, keeping your disappointment directed, reserved, and polite is possible while still getting across how disappointed and upset you are. Which, again, you're allowed to be...no one has ever said and will ever say that you're "not allowed" to be disappointed with the state of the game, the state of communication, or be worried about future updates and content. You have that right as a consumer who spent their own hard earned money on this product. We're simply saying, you can get all that across without being toxic and abusive (not that I am accusing of being either of those things, please don't take it that way.) In short, to end my rambling, be vocal, outspoken, and yes, demand better, ask for answers, etc, but do so realizing these are still human beings that make mistakes, and don't just stop being human beings because they sold you a product, good, or service.

To use your analogy though typically folks who get served a bad meal send it back, talk to the waitress about it, or if its really bad maybe they leave a nasty review. They don’t typically return to the same restaurant day after day for months on end to harangue other costumers about it. That would be seen as a bit weird.

I've been pretty vocal regarding science mode. I'm willing to give him (Chris) the benefit of doubt on the responses as I've got no reason to assume he is being disingenuous. I'd love to think a lot of people here are in the exact same place, I don't think *most* people in the forum want to see the game fail (although I question a few if I'm honest). So where do we go from here? Well, we do all we can do, talk amongst ourselves and wait. Wait to see what 0.1.5 brings and wait for @Nertea Dev Blog regarding science is released. I mean if one of the lead developers can see the benefit of doing that, then I think as a community we to listen. Maybe some really interesting stuff is buried in whatever form that takes. I'd be more than willing to listen provided that some tangible information as to what is going to be going on in science is shared. I can't believe at this point that science isn't a finalised thing, just going through the later stages of its inception. As soon as science and progression drop, the game changes and takes an immediate step forward so I can't imagine it isn't high on the list of things to do.

each day i live, i grow more and more concerned about the future of our species, i firmly believe were not thinking hard enough as a species about where we want to be in 100 years, weve made it so far, weve modernised to a point that its possible no other species in the universe has yet reached our level of advancement, we were fortunate enough to evolve higher than average intelligence in the mess that is the evolution of life, and yet we choose to destroy our planet without thinking about where were going to go next when the planet can no longer support us, were well aware of the effects we have on it, and that were relying on outdated and non renewable methods of obtaining energy, so we cant be a stay at home civilisation as it stands, and were not certain such a civilisation is even possible, we fight each other, hunt species to extinction, and have extremely closed minded thinking when it comes to our view of the world. im going to get to the point now, if we are to continue surviving as a species, we need to leave the planet, this is extremely clear at this point and yet people only think of themselves and what the taxes they pay to the government can do for them personally, at this point theres probably a few people who think im a hypocrite for saying these things but let me make it very clear, i want the taxes they pay to go to turning us into a spacefaring species, not into weapons to wage war, not into a health care system ill only take advantage of later in my life, and not into construction projects to create jobs, none of these things matter while the clock counts down to the time when we run out of non renewable resources and no longer have a way to leave the planet weve now destroyed. if we invest in our space programs, things will be rough for a long time im not going to deny this truth. people in first world countries who dont have jobs will still not have jobs, the national debt in the case of the united states will still be there, people in first world countries will still starve and have no access to clean water, but with the population growth running as rampant as it is, we do not have the means to solve those problems directly no matter how much time and resources we put into it, but if we had access to the solar system weve been ignoring for next to no reason other than the general public isnt interested in "that waste of money, build more weapons to keep us safe, and my brother johnny still has no job", we would have the resources to solve all those problems and more, and the economy would enter a boom for the next couple of thousand years. my personal feelings are that we need to stop giving government run space programs pocket change that they can barely do anything besides send a small probe to some place with, and start giving them large amounts of money they can actually make some progress with, commercial spaceflight shouldnt just be about touring low earth orbit, it should be about settling humans on other worlds, we have access to so many asteroids we could gather valuable resources from, and use as space colonies using the rock of the asteroid to shield us from radiation extremely close to us on a cosmic scale, were missing out on a very powerful kickstart to completely solving the problems we have here on earth just because we feel we should focus on them right now, but the direct approach is not always the best as weve proven countless times throughout history and appear to be proving yet again anyway that was my real talk, feel free to add your thoughts

The devs are under no obligation at all to talk to us. If they do so, it’s a courtesy, and we are under the obligation to treat it as such. If we don’t, you shouldn’t be surprised if they choose not to.

The game must have problems because of the community, not because of the developers. And then these people talk about the toxic atmosphere

Which rule are they breaking? If you're mentioning the "playable game", yes ksp2 is playable, it's not bugs that make it not a game. A not "playable game" would mean a tech demo where there is no gameplay, like if the only thing you could do is observing a menu or just looking at Kerbin. It's not "rocket wobble, literally unplayable", people can still have hours worth of gameplay in ksp2. Either way, I don't want to start a semantic argument. What I was trying to talk about initially is YOUR responsibility. YOU should not buy games on promises. YOU should not preorder. Yes games can be scummy, and that's why people shouldn't preorder anything or buy a game without knowing what they are going into, like by seeing reviews. That's my point. I see too much people preordering thinking, "This time it's different", it never will.

It only renders the thread useless for discussion of war mods, or at least that's what my intent was. We shouldn't go right to "we only talk about war mods here" when the topic of the thread doesn't mention war a single time, yet that's exactly what happened with the past few pages of posts. So I suggested that those who wish to discuss such things take their discussion to their own thread. My approach with these kinds of things is often "start off with a blunt instrument, and hone it as needed". So I started off with something very general, to avoid people trying to weasel their way out of it with the old "this isn't that, so it still belongs here" kind of thing. Same reason a lot of places that have need for a moderation team have a rule that goes something like "If you're trying to explain how you're not breaking the rules, you're breaking the rules". But really what I was trying to see no further discussion about in this thread was "war mods and if they're workable and how they'd work and blah blah blah", I won't get into it again. It's not that I'm trying to globally stifle that discussion. I'm just saying that there's too many posts about war mods in this thread within the past few pages, compared to how many people have or will actually install and use war mods in KSP 1 or 2. So I suggested creating a new thread for that thing. If I sounded like I wanted ALL discussion of how a specific kind of mod would work to go to its own thread, that's not what I intended. It's pretty much just the talk about war mods that was bothering me. But I guess if it gets too involved and "stuck" on any one type of mod, I'd probably get a little irritated. Same with how I get irritated when talk about how time warp works seems to be the only thing that ever got discussed in the multiplayer discussion thread. I'm not interested in what everyone's stuck on, no matter what it is. I probably formed my opinion about that subject in a few minutes, and it's gonna stay that way, and I see no need to discuss it further, so the thread should probably move on to another sub-topic of whatever it's about, and yet it gets stuck on one subject for MONTHS. It's like nobody can tell when someone's not willing to be convinced, and so the discussion just goes endlessly in circles, occasionally devolving to less-than-civil discourse. That's how the multiplayer discussion thread died. It's quite irksome to me. I don't like seeing threads die like that. And it's irksome enough that it's the kind of thing that makes me stop browsing the forums for that day. But I don't just stay perturbed at a problem and not try to solve it. So that (thread specific) rule is what I came up with so far to potentially prevent this thread from circling the drain.

I realized I never shared my actual thoughts on this thread. Yeah the communication slowdown sucks, I think its a reason for a lot of tensions. I don't think its because the devs are too scared to speak or whatever (honestly the cms talk about as much in the forums pre comm slowdown). If you want the offical CM answer, check below, if you want my analysis I think its pretty explainable by two things. 1. The CMs have been down a member for around two months now, the most drastic slowdown compared to the time of weekly upnates was right after the CM left the team. Having a third of your team leave will seriously mess up your workflows. 2. The CM team is switching to a new format for large scale communications. I think the call to switch to a video format is a good one, the recent reentry video was pretty well received, however the swap to a different workflow will slow you down a lot. I think in retrospect not doing a fullswap from "upnates" to videos wouldve been good that way natural delays and the like in videos dont get seen as the devs abandoning all communications. Both of these fortunately are temporary things, but both hiring a new CM and being able to better regularize video production will take a while to happen. (btw we got a minor update on the getting a third CM back today see below) Mildly off topic but also not, for my take on the interplatform communication, its fine. I think there's a fundamental disconnect between "What we (involved community members) would like to know" and "What's actually productive to broadcast out" that I generally try to fill. For example, the unity change wasn't highlighted a lot, it was only posted in the modding discord and the modding subforum on here. I think a lot of people would want to know that the unity is changing as we are a curious bunch, but if you just put something out like that on the unity change, even if you specify its just a change that effects modders, people will either go "Okay and?" or "This means that hdrp is happening in 1.5!!", both of which arent good responses from your community. I do think where interplatform communication could improve is 1. Communicating the mild scales news gap that dev tracker fills to reddit and twitter feels lacking (disclaimer, I dont use either of these platform for ksp), I think a link to dev tracker or something like that in the reddit header would be neat. 2. I think that casual communication is inherently hard on the forums because threads are very focused and formal (compared to the more branching and casual discord conversations), however I still think some casual communication would be nice. Like, I dont think there's any thread to where you could go @ dakota hows the hunt for the new cm going? And it wouldnt be off topic for the thread. But I do think there are times where a cm can casually interject in a thread and add a bit more context. For example I think a tiny two-three sentence comment like the first discord image (would probably have to be worded differently to account for cultural differences) would do a lot for this thread. I think just casual clarifications and microscale news here on the forums would do a long way in the perceived communications gap.

cloud talk can stay, we can talk about the plane could be the engines are spooled down, but i cannot wait to see what horrible things we can build and call it an ssto SSTO B-2 bomber, "but can build mini space station in the bomb load"

And when I have a question about my milk, the supermarket can answer it, they don't give me some lame excuse like "oh, tempers are high that we gave you expired milk, lets talk about it later" I'm done here. Mark me down, one for the "where the comms at?"

If that's the case, why would they pre-emptively disappoint everybody by talking about it? Better to shut up, release it, and let the chips fall where they may. And if it's not the case, why try to describe it to a public that's not receptive to anything they say? Once again, better to shut up, release it, and give everybody a pleasant surprise. I think it's pretty obvious — the mood right now is such that anything they say will be used against them. Game systems are especially tricky because really often something that sounds fun on paper, isn't, and conversely, changes that sound bad on paper actually improve the experience (or have other benefits). Look what happened with the dev update on heating — a bunch of people immediately started screaming about dumbed-down streamlined systems that totally ruin the experience, without ever having actually experienced how it works in practice and in which situations it even makes a noticeable difference. (My suspicion is, "almost none." As in, if you did a re-entry with the old thermals and the new thermals and asked the player to guess which is which, most players wouldn't be able to tell. While on the upside it makes it much easier to compute equilibriums and handle high time warp factors.) And if they say it's deep in production and close to QA, many of you will loudly say "LIES!" and hate them even more. Summa summarum, I think it's pointless of them to even try to talk to the fans right now. Get the game right first, release a solid roadmap update or two, however long it takes, then start communicating again. The fans are going to vent their outrage regardless of what they say.

With all the talk about mk2 landers, would it be possible to use the robotic parts to incraese stability/footprint? I don't have the DLCs, but maybe it is possible for at least some extra landing legs and equipment to telescope or fold out from the fuselage