Contract Decline Penalty should be solved in a more sane manner.

[regex]

Noticed this in the patch notes:

Contract Decline Penalty: A small reputation penalty is incurred when a contract is declined, to prevent Mission Control from being abused as a slot machine.

A better way would have been to generate and organize contracts by celestial body, and generate more contracts. This would enable the player, giving them more options and ideas for things to do rather than constrain them or penalize them for trying to find something they actually want to do.

[BudgetHedgehog]

Yeah, I was a bit disappointed when I read this. If you're heading to Duna for the first time and you're being offered nothing but Eve or Kerbin contracts, it seems unfair to be punished for wanting to do stuff relevant to what you're actually doing.

Especially seeing as the contracts are regenerated every few days with no penalty as well. Just seems a bit unnecessary :/

[Arsonide]

Noticed this in the patch notes:

A better way would have been to generate and organize contracts by celestial body, and generate more contracts. This would enable the player, giving them more options and ideas for things to do rather than constrain them or penalize them for trying to find something they actually want to do.

The penalty is fairly light by default, so it isn't going to punish people too much that are just declining things they really do not want to do. It is there to prevent board clearing.

For players that would like the freedom to choose their own path, the Leadership Initiative strategy is available. It couples with the new passive reward system to increase your income for doing whatever you like, and gives you extra science from field research, that you can utilize with other strategies to generate funds or reputation if you like.

The contract system is for people that want more direction, and the contract decline penalty solidifies this. Generating specific, custom tailored missions is not what Mission Control is for, though this is a nice idea. For now, luckily, the decline penalty is a difficulty option if you do want to custom tailor missions out of Mission Control by repeatedly generating them.

Edited November 9, 2015 by Arsonide

[regex]

For players that would like the freedom to choose their own path, the Leadership Initiative strategy is available.

Right, but early on, when you need the rewards from firsts the most, you can only get so much benefit from it. E: Also, what's the cost to set it up?

For now, luckily, the decline penalty is a difficulty option if you do want to custom tailor missions out of Mission Control by repeatedly generating them.

Well, that's nice. I would have modded it out otherwise. Edited November 9, 2015 by regex

[mattinoz]

This is so very wrong.

[Jim DiGriz]

Just started playing KSP again and stumbled across this.

I would also vote that this is currently a step in the wrong direction, @Arsonide

The way that I like to play is semi-self-directed.  I do not want the Leadership Initiative Strategy, but I do want to pick the contracts that I want to do now.  Previously I would decline a lot of contracts until I got the ones that I wanted to do, which was annoying enough.

The gameplay that I would *like* is to have a lot of the contracts be permanently and always available once they are unlocked.  So all of the RemoteTech contracts, all of the ScanSat contracts, all of the Base Contracts, etc.  Ideally these would be under their own tabs or trees or buttons of some sort, since otherwise the list of available contracts will get long and messy.  Would also be good to be able to select to filter on body (like @ObsessedWithKSP wanted and similar to filtering the science results by body).

There could still be support for entirely random events showing up -- like needing to evacuate the KSS, or special rare events if you like.  But I'd really like to be able to say "today I'm going to launch some RemoteTech satellites, lets grab some contracts" and be able to play that way.  And really the random number generator for contracts has no idea how I'd like to play today--some times I sit down and I want to send kerbals somewhere, sometimes I want to build communication arrays, sometimes I want to map, sometimes I want to mine, sometimes I want to send probes and landers, sometimes I feel like trying to accomplish science, etc.

The gameplay behind contracts has always been irritating, and this is a step in the direction of making it even more irritating.  I repetitively hit decline and get new contracts so that I can 'find' the ones that I want to do right now.  Now you are punishing me for doing that, which is exactly the opposite of what I want, which is an easier way to get to the contracts I want without waiting for the random number generator to give them to me.

If the 'slot machine' problem is people declining contracts until the random numbers they get back for science/funding/reputation on a certain contract is high enough, then just solve that by having fixed contract values--I've never see much utility in the random numbers that get given out here.

[tater]

The simple solution short of removing the penalty in the career setup is to time warp until the unwanted contract offers expire. Squad won't add time mechanics because it will cause people to time warp (to get budget funds,or whatever is proposed), but they WILL make you time warp to avoid a penalty due to refusing awful contracts (that would be most contracts, BTW).

[Snark]

I have to say that I'm not a fan of the "decline" penalty myself-- I tend to keep various difficulty settings turned up high on career, because I like a challenge, but this one I turned off.

I understand the desire not to have people spam the "decline" to get just the contract they want-- but IMHO the solution to that is not to punish them until they accept contracts they don't want.  A better solution would be to fix it so players can get contracts they do want more readily.

What would that look like?  I dunno, I'm not the game designer. 

One idea would be to organize contracts by category ("Rescue kerbals", "build and expand stations", "explore new places I haven't been", "get science from places I've been", that sort of thing), and give players a certain amount of latitude to request the kinds of contracts they're interested in.

 

[regex]

16 hours ago, Snark said:

A better solution would be to fix it so players can get contracts they do want more readily.

Apparently this will sort of be a thing in 1.1, where the player can weight the contract system towards certain types of contracts by accepting them more often.  Unfortunately, this runs into several problems:

• There are an average of ten contracts available at any one given time, meaning the player still has to get lucky enough to generate enough of their desired contract type to start weighting the system.  This limit is a real issue with the system to begin with but will exasperate things when weighting is available.
• Certain types of contracts are very beneficial early on in the game but not later in the game, and vice versa.  This means that, for instance, when I start weighting early on for rescue and satellite contracts because they're lucrative I am also weighting those for later on in the game when I am bored with those and might instead want tourism and gather science contracts.
• The player still has to find a way to clear out the undesired contracts to help weight the system ("play the slot machine", as it were).

It would be better, IMO, to use the Strategy system to set the types of contracts that the player wants to accept; they'd actually be guiding their space program in that case.  Unfortunately the Strategy system is less than useless in the early game due to generally prohibitive setup costs and returns on those costs, and I imagine that Squad would end up implementing any sort of guidance system with setup costs to ~increase tedium~ or some such.

Speaking of which, the Strategy system needs a major rethink (the setup costs on Leadership Initiative are downright stupid, by the time I have those resources available I'm well past needing world firsts to power the space program), but that's a thread for another day.

Edited January 17, 2016 by regex

[Pthigrivi]

Yeah its come up a couple of times but Im with Regex on this one. I think across the board what almost everyone really wants is the ability to chose which world to go to next, and this usually means the Explore contracts. Passive rewards and World Firsts are fine but without them being visible in Mission control and understanding the risks and rewards ahead of time they end up feeling pretty opaque. The simplest solution it seems to me would be to just combine these contracts and make them available from the outset, or perhaps allowing them to unlock in some predictable fashion. 

Edited January 17, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[r_rolo1]

Well, beside the fact that most contracts are still nonsensical enough ( that I can live with, since contract proposals are ... contract proposals. In RL some proposals will be downright stupid as well and you're free to acept them or not ), I think the issue behind this is, like regex points above, the fact that the devs are trying to balance the gains you have from contracts via the numbers of contracts the game offers you.

Given that the game already balances ( or atleast tries to ) the contract gains via the Tier system, this is somewhat not necessary. But worse, given that rather low hard cap on the number of contracts the game is allowed to propose to you at any point ( "You can have unlimited contracts, but we'll stop proposing new ones as soon as you accept 15 ..." ), you can easily get stuck with a handful of downright bad or atleast not really feasible due to context contract proposals. And then you punish the player for wanting to clear those unwanted contracts out ...

My proposal would be something like this:

- Limit the number of contracts only via tier system ... if needed add more tiers or coumpound this with tech levels. And be very clear about that number: don't say unlimited when you are only going to give 15 ... leave those tricks to unscrupulous mobile phone service providers

- Have atleast a couple of contract proposals at all times for every body in the game. Don't try to force me to go to Duna before giving me contracts for Moho ..you don't know if I want to go to Duna

- Have a more sensical rating of the contracts. No, gathering 400 ore from the Mun and deliver it to Kerbin ( a one star contract ) is not in any sense easier than a good ol'"Explore Duna" contract ( a three star contract ). This will help the newcomers making more based decisions and will also remove some assumptions about gameplay order that might make no sense depending of gameplay style.

TBH if those above were implemented, I would even understand  more stringent penalties for contract rouletting. But as it is now, the devs are punishing the players for some incongruent design decisions they themselves did...

 

BTW someone pointed out above another reason to have this made in a saner fashion: the current solution promotes timewarping. Timewarping is  a necessity in this game, it is nothing that needs further encouraging ( the lack of a KAC.styled agenda in stock already promotes timewarping by promoting having a single ship in air doing anything relevant at all times ). Or the devs want to pass the message that zapping through the game in time warp is the way to play? ... That would be a strange proposition  

[tater]

I actually have no issue with time warping. Squad claims they DO, yet implements things like the Rep hit which encourage time warping. Embrace time compression. Use it to set annual budgets that pay out XX,XXX funds per Minmus month (50 days) or something. Run out? Warp to the next Minmonth. This would make your launches actually spread apart in time, instead of inventing rockets on day 1, and landing on the Mun on day 4.

[MaxL_1023]

I turn off the decline penalty and use the contract configuration mod. Why? Because I am asked to follow up my Minmus lander by completing contracts such as "test a Skipper on an escape trajectory over Minmus." 

Who in their right mind would haul a 3 ton rocket engine to Minmus, then activate it through the staging sequence while on an escape trajectory. Come on Squad!

[r_rolo1]

Well, I do not think timewarping is a bad thing ... it is just that is not a good thing either in game terms. In a game like KSP timewarp is something that needs to exist, because, well, space is large even on KSP scales. But actually promoting timewarp can be interpreted like the intended way to play the game is basically not interacting with the game barring at select points, a  position that I think is not the devs one.

[Laie]

On 11/9/2015 at 10:44 PM, Arsonide said:

The penalty is fairly light by default, so it isn't going to punish people too much that are just declining things they really do not want to do. It is there to prevent board clearing.

The way reputation works, this isn't exactly true. Once you have a good reputation, it takes a lot of effort to increase it a little more; while the slightest mishap will have a noticable effect. Which makes sense, overall, but it means that the 1-point reputation hit is not negligible.

More generally, is SQUAD so convinced of their contracts that they can't understand why someone would want to clear the board? Are you so proud of "take six tourists to eleven destinations" that declining the offer has to be a punishable offense?

Snark aside, many contracts are standing on their heads. The player should at the very least be able to filter by body, effectively saying: "There are no upcoming missions to Moho, thanks but no thanks".

 

[DrMarlboro]

What really bothers me about the current contract system is it looks like this

- ferry kerbal

-ferry two kerbals

-ferry kerbal

-ferry kerbal

-test part (even though you have no hopes of getting an excape out of kerbin yet)

-test part

-ferry kerbal

-test part

- launch sat to something that has a transfer window a year away

then you complete seven of them, and you get almost the exact same list of contracts just with different parts and different tourist names. You almost HAVE to treat it like a slot machine to get anything new.

Edited January 17, 2016 by DrMarlboro

[tater]

2 hours ago, r_rolo1 said:

Well, I do not think timewarping is a bad thing ... it is just that is not a good thing either in game terms. In a game like KSP timewarp is something that needs to exist, because, well, space is large even on KSP scales. But actually promoting timewarp can be interpreted like the intended way to play the game is basically not interacting with the game barring at select points, a  position that I think is not the devs one.

Then ALL time warping is bad, even warping to Eeloo, instead of laying in real time. The bottom line is that the entire "Apollo" time period in KSP "career" happens in a few days. In career this is absurd, and makes it have no sense of being a "career" to me.

Time warp is just fine. If it's fine to warp to a transfer window, SoI encounter or maneuver node, it's fine to warp for construction to complete (a more KCT mechanic) or to the next fiscal month to get new funds. It's all the same.

Designing is "interacting with the game" and takes no game time (?---might take 1:1 game time, never checked), but easily could. There is no reason why VAB/SPH time could not take 1 Kerbin day for every 10 minutes or whatever (just warp the clock by whatever when the player is inside). Piloting, etc, is "interacting with the game," but DOES take game time (sometimes 1:1, often times heavily warped). There is a button to warp to dawn right now, it would be trivial to have it warp 6 days (there would be 71 such 6 day weeks per Kerbin year), or 71 days (6 "months" like this per year), or whatever. Warping is warping, it's a tool, and if it's good for one part of play, it can be good for another.

[r_rolo1]

@tater

I think you're misunderstanding me. I do not think that timewarping is bad, but I do not think it is good either. It is just a necessity of a game like this one. I am also not against what you're proposing, because in there time warping would make sense. I'm just against the game encouraging timewarping just because #reasons ( that normally resume to bad UI or coding , or worse, some design decisions that were probably not intended to produce that result , but do ), because I think it is a bad design decision to encourage the player to just pass at high speed through the game by no particular good reason ...like avoiding bad contracts that the game is stuffing your not unlimited  contract proposals roster with  

Edited January 18, 2016 by r_rolo1

[tater]

No, I agree completely. It's just that time-based mechanics are ruled out by Squad because warping is "bad," when they have other times it's required, and times like the dumb contract rep hit when you are encouraged to warp. 

My point is if they are going to add a mechanic that encourages time warp just to advance time X days, they might as well make it useful

[Francois424]

I'm still waiting for the "Jool-5" contracts.  In many saves I'd be able to get contacts to get stuff from Eve, Val, Jool, and maybe a 4th one.
I never could build the Jool-5 contract by cancelling all the old ones... with this new rep hit each time, not doinf that anymore.

What I really wanted is "Explore the Jool System"
 - Send science in orbit high above Jool
 - Send science in orbit low above Jool
(Repeat these 2 lines for every body in the system)
 - then add lines for landed on X, such as collect samples, eva's, "in Laythe's atmosphere" and so on.

The mother of all contracts as far as exploration goes.  You don't have to take it, in case you only want to do say, Pol. But I'd love such contracts.
Could be done for every bodies out there.   Getting one like this for Sarnus/Urlum/Neidon and Plock if you have OPM installed would simply rock !

[Violent Jeb]

On 11/9/2015 at 4:04 PM, regex said:

Noticed this in the patch notes:

A better way would have been to generate and organize contracts by celestial body, and generate more contracts. This would enable the player, giving them more options and ideas for things to do rather than constrain them or penalize them for trying to find something they actually want to do.

+1 agreed. Have discussed how this mechanic is illogical elsewhere

general consensus, use mods, stock system is infallible. Contract configurator is a great one.
Why decline the same contract 100 times and demolish your rep, when you can save wear and tear on your mouse & brain by toggling them away!