Venting the 1.0 launch

[r4pt0r]

If you need to vent I’d rather see you direct your anger at me or even the developers

As the community criticism in the direction of the QA & exp testers thread was locked because people kept derailing the thread to talk about how its not the QA/EXP teams fault, but rather Squads poor decision making, the "Is it ready for 1.0" thread is proof to Squad:

We tried to warn you.

We understand that this update brought the game to a point where the devs feel it is complete. But at that point it should have been KSP .95 "Coming in hot!".

Why? All the new systems you added were never subjected to a proper public beta. Thus your untested new features required 1.0.1, 1.0.2, and very likely will get 1.0.3. This is a result of the decision making, and is by no means the QA/EXP teams fault. Again, this not the testers faults. The last release should not have tons of brand new content.

Yes I also understand that many games have patches and bugfixes post 1.0. The point is it was not ready for that.

This most recent update should have been your Apollo 10. A dress rehearsal before the real deal. Then once everything has been assessed, tested, polished, balanced and bugfixed, then you can do your Apollo 11.

But more than a few view this as more of an Apollo 13. Sure you fixed/are fixing it, and everyone will make it home safe eventually, but what was supposed to be a crowning achievement has been tarnished.

KSP is still fun, we love the game, and everyone here will still play it, but you cant take back what I view as a bungled 1.0 launch.

Just wanted to say my piece on this, goodnight all.

[Aerindel]

But more than a few view this as more of an Apollo 13.

No, Apollo 13 was a minor defect that resulted in a disaster that nobody could have predicted.

I was watching a documentary last night on the US space program and I couldn't help but think this is more like the Challenger disaster where you had many people reporting a problem and issues warnings that where ignored by the people in charge who where more concerned with deadlines and budgets than with stopping and listening to what people where saying.

I'd say more, I was actually just about to start a thread just like this, but I've said what I wanted to say many times in the other thread and I'm burning out on this so I will just say besides replacing the apollo 13 analogy with challenger, I agree with everything r4ptor said.

[Alshain]

What is really so "bungled" about it? There were a few bugs, but got quickly patched away. There is still one memory leak with the temp gauges that NEEDS to be fixed before 1.1. And then there are a lot of things that some people (including myself) don't like. Now, just because I don't like them doesn't mean I think it needs to get patched ASAP. Despite the fact that my way is ALWAYS the right way... I don't expect everyone to have the same vision I do. Only the bugs and memory leaks do I expect to be fixed immediately. They quickly got rid of most of those and added one more they need to look at, but I would hardly call it a bad launch.

[baggers]

I find that 1.0 lauch very Kerbal.

[KAP1985]

I completely agree. heck, I havn't even seen anyone blaming the testers.

1.0 really should have waited for a couple months, and they should hav released another .9something in between

[Cebi]

@raptor: May i ask why are you beating this dead horse so vigorously? Is your frustration realy that high you need 100+1 thread about it? Look around you and get some perspective from real life. Nothing is ever perfect.

[Corw]

@raptor: May i ask why are you beating this dead horse so vigorously? Is your frustration realy that high you need 100+1 thread about it?

This. 1.0.x is out, for good and for bad, time to move on.

[Aerindel]

Well, this has been discussed extensively in several threads, and they did fix much of it in 1.02, but for those who are late to the party.

Re-entry:

Pods with heats shields where not stable and without SAS, they flipped over and orientated nose first, the exact opposite of how they should work and how they used to work. This was fatal to the missions.

Parachutes where invincible and could be opened at any speed or temperature and even in their partially deployed state causes craft to almost instantly slow at even very high altitudes* This is contrary to how they worked in some previous version where they would be torn from the pods if deployed at too high of speeds.

Atmosphere was very thin, allowing jets to hit mach speeds before the end of the runway and shortly after reach speeds so high they burned up and exploded. It should be noted that some airplane flyers thought this was a improvement, but this caused:

Pods that did not deploy parachutes at high altitudes would not slow to terminal velocity before hitting the ground on most descents and would either burn up or still be traveling at very high speeds at low altitude and could only be saved by deploying parachutes at completely unrealistic speeds.

None of these are what I would call bugs but rather fairly egregious gameplay failures given that every one of them could be (and was) discovered on a players very first suborbital flight. They all also represent a radical departure from .90, which we where told was the game with all major parts in place.

Heating:

1.0 introduced heat as a new component to be managed. In theory this was a good thing but it was poorly implemented.

The LV-N, the most important engine in the game once players begin to leave Kerbin's SOI overheated very rapidly with most builds and still fairly rapidly even when designed around. If this was just one random engine this wouldn't have been a big deal but as the only practical engine for interplanetary flight in the game this suddenly made the Kerbol system exploration very tedious as you now had to make all your transfer burns in very short bursts to avoid overheating. This was both unrealistic and un-fun. (Some people have tried to say that the game balances realism and fun and that is why everybody can't be happy but making things BOTH unrealistic and not fun is not the solution, if something is not fun it should be at least be realistic and vise versa) Unlike many other parts of KSP, this was not a challenge as there was no way to design around it as there are no heat management parts (unlike the mods with parts that need cooling) It was simply a big nerf back to the stone age.

The ISRU mining system overheated very quickly, reducing its yield to almost zero. This was unrealistic and useless as a no matter the heat level a player could simply warp speed through the extraction, making the heat system irrelevant as anything but an irritation, much like the re-entry model.

Numerous bugs and crashes which I will not mention as those are not really the heart of the matter except to say that gamers used to expect more out of a 1.0 release. My game does at least load much faster which makes recovering from a crash less of a chore than it used to be....so yay?

1.02 brought some fixes but also some new problems.

LV-N's no longer overheat if properly mounted, but they only consume liquid fuel and so can now only be practically used with spaceplane fuel tanks, severely limiting the design freedom we once had, this is very odd because again, these are an extremely important engine in the game and should have had a whole new array of tank parts to go with them now that the way the work has changed.

Mining heat has been completely removed....yay? or not depending on how you feel. One hand a problem is gone, on another a potentially interesting challenge was removed.

The air is now thick enough for a realistic re-entry, and parachutes are destroyed by high speeds and heat...but, re-entry heating is such that now you don't need a heats shield or to really every worry about most parts overheating on re-enty as only a few small parts are really effected by heat, so again, what could have been an interesting mechanic was nerfed to oblivion instead of actually being fixed. As with everything else, this is something that careful testing should have been able to balance but which it seems was just thrown in as an emergency fix to a problem that shouldn't ever have existed.

The following are cosmetic problems but which seem to be widely disliked by most players and have yet to be fixed or even addressed.

Fairings explode in a confetti like cloud of parts that is unattractive and unrealistic.

Functional Space planes, I am told, now look like hotdogs. (I don't personally care but some people are really upset about it)

I'm sure their are other problems, and there are countless bugs, but these are the big gameplay decisions that it seems where never tested.

This. 1.0.x is out, for good and for bad, time to move on.

Thats what we are trying to avoid. Moving on from a broken game would mean moving to a different game. We still want to play Kerbal, we just want to play the real Kerbal and not this broken beta thing we have right now.

Edited May 7, 2015 by Aerindel

[stibbons]

Oh good. It's been hours since somebody started a new thread with the same pointless griping.

[Starwaster]

No, Apollo 13 was a minor defect that resulted in a disaster that nobody could have predicted.

Not quite. There were issues with that O2 tank that were missed. The heater thermostat fused in the 'on' position during ground testing and the O2 boiled off much faster than it should have but nobody noticed or they didn't realize the implications.

[Aerindel]

Oh good. It's been hours since somebody started a new thread with the same pointless griping.

That has yet to be determined. If squad sits back and says "we have your monies already, suck it" then it will indeed be pointless. If they fix these problems in 1.03 then it will have done its job.

- - - Updated - - -

Not quite. There were issues with that O2 tank that were missed. The heater thermostat fused in the 'on' position during ground testing and the O2 boiled off much faster than it should have but nobody noticed or they didn't realize the implications.

That is my point, those issues where missed, they where not noticed, understood and then denied the way the crack O rings where on Challenger.

[Renegrade]

I was watching a documentary last night on the US space program and I couldn't help but think this is more like the Challenger disaster where you had many people reporting a problem and issues warnings that where ignored by the people in charge who where more concerned with deadlines and budgets than with stopping and listening to what people where saying.

Someone suggested the subtitle of "Go Fever" in the thread about launch subtitles some time back. I forget who though. I thought it was apropos... especially given that Squad always had this "it's ready when it's ready" business, and then they suddenly switched over to a deadline model after four years of NOT practicing it.

What is really so "bungled" about it? There were a few bugs, but got quickly patched away. There is still one memory leak with the temp gauges that NEEDS to be fixed before 1.1. And then there are a lot of things that some people (including myself) don't like. Now, just because I don't like them doesn't mean I think it needs to get patched ASAP. Despite the fact that my way is ALWAYS the right way... I don't expect everyone to have the same vision I do. Only the bugs and memory leaks do I expect to be fixed immediately. They quickly got rid of most of those and added one more they need to look at, but I would hardly call it a bad launch.

Well, I was puttering around KSC in a basic rover, and it suddenly accelerated to about 60m/s in reverse and exploded. Not sure what caused that, but I'm not especially pleased by it, it was fatal. Was mucking around with a fairing the night before, and the craft started nullref'ing magically, causing lots of lag and nearly destroying that craft file. Later ran into an issue where parts couldn't be added or removed from a craft at all. Had one craft just randomly explode on the launchpad (re-launching the same craft did not result in an explosion the second time either). The 1.0 issues with parachutes and heat-shielded craft not re-entering correctly was pretty embarrassing, especially as DRE and FAR had already dealt with problems like that historically and come up with decent solutions. Still not enjoying how you can't make maneuver nodes without a quickload from time to time, or the fact that the Mun overrides Minmus intercepts even when the Mun intercept happens afterwards, or the fact that the timewarp downshift is broken. Still rocking that stupid radial symmetry bug too!

That's just 1. the things I remember off the top of my head and 2. from very limited playtime as I've been busy moving of late and 3. doesn't include non-bug items, such as the lack of cost-balance or weirdnesses in the tech tree etc.

"bungled" may be too strong a word, but it certainly wasn't a "flawless" or "masterpiece" release.

[ColourOfFire]

Well, I'm sure they're thankful for your warning, of course this 1.0 doubling the amount of players and getting rave reviews is an absolute disaster.

Seriously, development is going to continue, business wise it's a good thing they got rid of the early access stamp and the game has massively improved. There have been slight mistakes, but no major errors. There's very few actual bugs, most of the things that people see as a problem are very subjective.

[RobotsAndSpaceships]

inb4 thread locked due to criticism.

[andruszkow]

By the power of Thor, enough already!

[Chruschtschow]

I cannot help but think of this release as Rosetta / Philae, where lots of people have lots of fun. The mission was a great success. All those stuff that Rosetta did on the way to 67P, a freaking rendezvous with a comet, a lander on a comet, even most experiments on the comet were successful. But a few claim everything was a disaster because there was some trouble with the lander that was a really small part of the whole mission... more of a bonus.

Same here. Lots of systems added. Lots of stuff done right. Personally, I haven't been troubled by any bugs yet, but that might have to do that I cannot play 24/7. Or there were bugs and I just ignored them because they vanished under all the white noise of trouble that my flawed constructions produce all by themselves. Also I have yet to meet a new feature that I don't like. Most stuff - except the aero - is can-do stuff, not must-do. Don't like it? Don't do it. That's what sandboxes are for. And the new aero feels so much better than 0.90. Did everything work? No. Should it be evaluated? Yes. Should the next lander bring bigger harpoons? For sure! Harpoons! Was it a fail? No.

[fairytalefox]

Come on. We're not teenage schoolboys (well, maybe some of us are, my apologies then, didn't mean to insult anyone). We do understand that 1.0 contains a bunch of completely new and not completely tested things. We also understand that there were other factors besides programming theory that forced the devs to do what they did. We also understand that the devs, just like ourselves, aren't teenage schoolboys and are aware of all these things, too. We all know the world is quite far from being perfect. We totally can deal with it. So let's do it. Period.

Also #deadhorse.

[Aerindel]

Just in case people don't understand why 1.0 was a problem, they should remember that WE were not the ones that defined what it should be.

These are squads own words:

Kerbal Space Program 1.0 is what we envisioned when development of the game started four years ago: we set out to make a game in which the player is given ultimate control over the exploration of space: from designing their rockets to launching and flying them to their destinations, in a universe that was modeled to be realistic, but at the same time still be fun to play in.

However, our 1.0 release is more than just a new version number. It’s also the biggest update to the game we’ve ever done, and contains many new and updated features, plus improvements to just about every game system, which we’re sure will appeal to both newcomers and seasoned veterans. These are the highlights:

If this is to believed that means the game we have now is the endgame. Its the goal they where looking for. No, that doesn't mean there won't be more bug fixes but it means that fundamentally, this is what they want us to have.

So I ask you now, does anyone here feel that Kerbal is fundamentally finished? That it is a complete game that only needs some bug fixes?

I don't think many do. I think that most people feel this is just another pre-release update. The difference between the camps seem to be wether that bothers people or not. Personally, when the Devs say something is done that means they are planing on walking away. Maybe not all at once but it means its basically over, they are happy, fix a few bugs and move on, and if this is where kerbal ends I find that really disappointing especially when just another month or so of community wide testing could probably fix all the gameplay issues. (nothing is ever going to fix all the bugs, the game is fundamentally unstable on my computer at least and always has been but I can live with that)/

Someone suggested the subtitle of "Go Fever" in the thread about launch subtitles some time back. I forget who though. I thought it was apropos... especially given that Squad always had this "it's ready when it's ready" business, and then they suddenly switched over to a deadline model after four years of NOT practicing it.

Thats a great term. I really wish I could have been a fly on the wall at Squad HQ when they decided that this release was going to be 1.0, and that it wasn't going to have a beta.

[Linear]

Come on. We're not teenage schoolboys (well, maybe some of us are, my apologies then, didn't mean to insult anyone). We do understand that 1.0 contains a bunch of completely new and not completely tested things. We also understand that there were other factors besides programming theory that forced the devs to do what they did. We also understand that the devs, just like ourselves, aren't teenage schoolboys and are aware of all these things, too. We all know the world is quite far from being perfect. We totally can deal with it. So let's do it. Period.

Also #deadhorse.

Just annoying, i'd have been shot if i said 'here, this is finished' in my previous job and gave them something with a similar bug-feature ratio.

[Temeter]

Most of the complaining is hysterical, self righteous and melodramatic. I don't like personal examples, but this thread is perfectly fitting. It's a pointless bunch of complaints with no relevanve to the actual things going on.

How terrible was the launch of KSP1.0? That terrible. As it turns out, you're wrong, releasing the game was the correct decision, or at least didn't have any repercussions. It's state was serviceable for launch. It's a fact now.

[Aerindel]

Wow...27 user reviews...more people than that probably work at squad.

And how many game reviewers really have the time to truly understand KSP? or have clue one when it comes to realistic spaceflight?

That means nothing. The measure of success is not how well you fool the ignorant but how you are viewed by your friends, and yes, thats what we are, only people who love(d) KSP would be here at all.

[Axder]

I dont know, there were few bugs, like flipping of pods but it was super quickly removed. So I am happy and having a blast playing KSP again. I dontr realy get the drama there are always bugs in release versions of every game ever.

[andruszkow]

I can't help but cringe at stuff like "The measure of success is not how well you fool the ignorant but how you are viewed by your friends" when we're talking about the computer game that is Kerbal Space Program. The flipping drama!

Is this seriously adults discussing a game this way? It has come to a point where I think it's downright embarrasing. Even rude. Some of the things being said are so embarrasing that it almost has a physical effect on me.

It's just... Wow.

[Octa]

I'm quoting myself from another thread:

It's not that surprising that adding so many new features/fixes in one release causes new bug or flaws in blanace. Really, it's not.

No one would've been bothered if this was 0.98 or 0.99 ("final delivery"), maybe even with full price since it's near feature completion. But then again, releasing 1.0 with following changelog may have seemed boring to squad:

KSP 1.0:

- several bugfixes

Beta suggests feature completion. Sure, most of the features/mechanics were in 0.90, but there were also new ones (ore, heat management), the aero got a massive overhaul and some tweaks to existing parts really changes the game mechanics and usage in the game for them. I'd even consider the new aero as a new feaure, as the old one was a placeholder.

The existing community would have happily volunteered as beta testers for 1 week before the launch. Heck, we even paid you to be beta testers.

[andruszkow]

I'm gonna quote myself as well:

I can't help but cringe at stuff like "The measure of success is not how well you fool the ignorant but how you are viewed by your friends" when we're talking about the computer game that is Kerbal Space Program. The flipping drama!

Is this seriously adults discussing a game this way? It has come to a point where I think it's downright embarrasing. Even rude. Some of the things being said are so embarrasing that it almost has a physical effect on me.

It's just... Wow.

TL;DR: You have most likely owned this game for a long time. Be glad work is still done on it. You probably spent more than 500 hours playing the game. If you're stuck in this "Lé critique de la KSP 1.0" mindset, you probably should go outside and do something else for a while. All of the sudden, a few minor bugs doesn't seem like such a big deal after all.