how squad will handle 1.1 download traffic?

[DuoDex]

The question in the OP has been answered - releases will be handled as usual.

We are degenerating into off-topic, insults, and general mudslinging, so the thread will be locked. 

[KasperVld]

10 hours ago, omelaw said:

wouldn't the server explode?

1.1 experimental and 1.1 release will have nearly same size, so traffic would be same. if not higher

As several people noted we use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) around launch dates to make sure that everyone can download their updates as fast as possible. Back in my day (oh dear), the website and forums used to be unreachable for several days after a patch was released while the servers were working so hard that they almost had to be cooled with liquid nitrogen. Renting traffic on a content delivery network is surprisingly cheap but does cost money. And when you combine that with the massive amount of traffic a KSP update generates the costs do add up to many thousands of dollars.

The volume we expect for this opt-in pre-release branch is huge: the KSP store is not set up to provide itinerary updates like Steam is: Steam only re-downloads the files that were changed between builds. Instead on the KSP store, every user would have to download an archive that is about 1.1GB, and that could happen once or twice per day just to stay up to date. Imagine that 5000 users download on average 10 builds of KSP over the two weeks. A quick amount of math indicates that we're dealing with 5000 * 12 * 1.1GB = 66 TeraBytes worth of bandwidth, and that is a very conservative estimate if you ask me.

I completely understand that some of you are disappointed, I would be too, but there is simply no reasonable way in which we can support this amount of traffic on our website. The alternative would be to have no pre-release branch available at all, which would mean we'd tack on at least one more week of experimental testing, and the release would most likely be buggier. Of course, only a handful of mods would have been updated by the time the update was released, too.

It's important to make a clear distinction between this pre-release branch, which is not a finished product, and update 1.1 itself. The final version of 1.1 will be available to everyone at the same time. The pre-release branch really is a work-in-progress: it may break your savegames, crash your graphics card drivers or do all sorts of other, unexpected things.

@Elway358 I understand your disappointment, but honestly my personal opinion is that your rant is misplaced. You paid for the game as-is, which you received and which is working. You're also getting free updates with 1.1 and possibly further down the line 1.2 etcetera. These updates are expensive for us, but the community is what has made KSP the game it is today and we like to give something back to them. When you paid for the game you were never promised any access to development builds or even these future updates. I think your rights as a consumer are not being harmed here. If anything unethical is going on, I think that it's that you're rationalizing a way to get out of paying for the game that I assume you're having a lot of fun with, and denying the people who made that game their end of the deal.