Would you have preferred Squad go on a 3-week vacation without releasing 1.1.2 at all?

[Superfluous J]

Try to be honest here about both sides. I'm trying to determine what people would have actually preferred here.

Feel free as well to comment incessantly about how much better my options could have been.

[Kerbart]

Is it perfect? Far from that. But it's just silly to wait three weeks and then come out with the game in its current state. And not releasing at all... too many benefits when it comes to performance to do that.

[The Optimist]

I don't have 1.1.2

[marce]

I'm missing the "Would you have preferred SQUAD finishing 1.1 before releasing it, not needing all those half-baked hotfixes and going on vacation whenever the individual people want to instead of all at once at the worst possible time" option. I pick that one.

[Skorpychan]

I don't get why you people don't understand the word 'BETA'. It's still in testing. This is the testing stage.

[Kerbart]

39 minutes ago, marce said:

I'm missing the "Would you have preferred SQUAD finishing 1.1 before releasing it, not needing all those half-baked hotfixes and going on vacation whenever the individual people want to instead of all at once at the worst possible time" option. I pick that one.

Ah, Professor Kano strikes again!

[marce]

19 minutes ago, Skorpychan said:

I don't get why you people don't understand the word 'BETA'. It's still in testing. This is the testing stage.

I might be missing your point here, but KSP has been released a year ago. This is not a beta despite the early-beta quality.

Actually, that's the whole point: community says "we love KSP, but it has still a long way to go before release, please take your time", SQUAD says "naaah, it's fine, we'll release it anyway". Then the community demands release quality and people are surprised, because they look at the product and think "this has to be in beta still, what are those guys complaining about?" while in fact customers demand what the publisher promised (=release quality).

Frankly, imho companies like SQUAD are one of the reasons software quality is broadly considered a bad joke nowadays.

/rant end

[Mike Mars]

I paid $17.99 for this game two year ago.

I have enjoyed 1,050 hours of game play.

That works out to less than $.02 per hour.

For that kind of value, I will take the occasional inconvenience caused by upgrades.

MM

[Snark]

50 minutes ago, Mike Mars said:

I paid $17.99 for this game two year ago.

I have enjoyed 1,050 hours of game play.

That works out to less than $.02 per hour.

For that kind of value, I will take the occasional inconvenience caused by upgrades.

MM

^ This.

This right here.  My only regret is that I can "like" Mike's post only once.

Yes, KSP has bugs.  Yes, there are problems.  And of course it's not fun when you bump into a problem.

But consider what KSP has given you (probably hundreds, even thousands of hours of entertainment), and what you have given KSP (probably US$20, plus or minus a few dollars).

Unless you're asserting that this is not a fair trade of value for money... why such vehement complaints?

Maybe my perspective is skewed, since I've been a professional software engineer shiping products for companies large and small for over 20 years, and therefore have some idea of what's involved in shipping software.  For anyone who isn't professionally involved in shipping commercial software, it's worth noting a few things.

It's really hard.  And it takes enormous amounts of work and time, both to create it in the first place, and to find/fix bugs in it.  It's not free.  There's no magic wand you can wave to make it perfect.  And the world won't stand by and wait for you to spend a decade polishing the product-- you have to ship.  And that means it's mathematically impossible to put software out the door without bugs in it.

Just how many bugs are in it will depend a lot on how big your staff is.  If you've got a couple of hundred engineers working on it, and a comparably sized full-time professional QA staff, then you can really go to town on it and make a seriously polished product.  But if you're a tiny indie company with only half a dozen or so developers and a small testing staff, you simply can't deliver that same amount of polish.  It's not as though you can take 20 times longer to ship in order to make up for having 1/20th the staff.  You just have to go out the door and accept that the edges are going to be rougher than if it were a product from one of the major heavy hitters like EA or Blizzard.

When you purchase a product from one of the big AAA producers, you're getting enormously more engineer hours per dollar than you get from Squad, and it shows.  They can do that because they work with economies of scale.  If you're selling a product for US$50 or more, and you've got a target market of tens of millions of people, and you charge cold hard cash every time you ship a new update, then you can afford to throw a lot of engineers at it.  But when you're only selling a tiny fraction of the number of units, and the per-unit price is a lot cheaper, and you keep producing updates and upgrades for free... you can't go out and hire a hundred engineers.

Like or not, what you're getting when you purchase KSP is an artisanal, hand-crafted product.  It's the equivalent of buying a handmade pottery mug in a local craft store rather than picking up a slick factory-produced product at a major department store.  It's not really any cheaper to you, and it has some rough edges.  But you get it because it's appealing and quirky and you like it, and you like having a direct personal contact with the artist who's right there to answer your questions about it and listen to you, and the rough edges are the cost of doing business.  And what you're receiving is the result of a handful of incredibly hard-working, dedicated, passionate people who are pouring their heart and soul into trying to delight you.  Trust me, software development is hard, thankless work.  You don't do it unless you really care about it and believe in what you're doing.

That's not to say that Squad is perfect or never makes mistakes.  Everybody does.  Just... try to be a little realistic, folks?  And when you yell at them for shipping 1.1 too early, consider all the people who were yelling at them for shipping too late.  And remember what it is that they have to work with.

And maybe tone down the rhetoric, just a little?

[Findthepin1]

I never complained. See, what's funny is that I keep hearing about problems with 1.1.x, but I don't usually notice a difference in performance between the versions (save the 1.0.5-1.1 loading speed increase). Basically these problems usually don't seem to happen to me, and the game works fine. Like, I used to send rovers to Minmus all the time, and I never had any problems with them. In fact it was only after a whole bunch of them had been sent and used that I discovered through the forums that Minmus rovers were supposed to be difficult. 

[ag3nt108]

Of the plethora of early release dross Steam has some how convinced me to buy KSP is the one that stands out (with Darkest Dungeon a close second).  After 406 hours played I still keep coming back, few video games released in the last decade can make that claim. 

[sormi]

I mean, if the game works for me why should I care about countless of other people who can't play the game at all right? If the game is working for me, why should I care, I'd just keep playing. Essentially this poll is asking whether the game works for you or not.

Then there's this pointless value for time spent argument again. Most of you who are posting on these forums have thousands of hours game time, not all of us have that. KSP is nowhere near the most best value product I have on my steam account and I can say to you there's no other game in my library I have spent nearly as much time debugging the game as I do with KSP.

Edited May 29, 2016 by sormi

[Waxing_Kibbous]

I bought 1.04 for $40 and it has been a great deal, and to me any new versions are all bonus goodness. But, there is the side of the coin where people have bought 1.1x as their first version, which may or may not help the cause depending on their particular experience.  I think it was a bad management decision to release it the way it was. I wish I knew how much input the developers had in this timeline as opposed to the mgmt., not sure how it works at Squad, but from what I've seen in my software travels developers don't like to release buggy versions, it drives them crazy- they have a ton of pride in what they do and want to make something awesome. And I think the community was incredibly willing to wait for a nice solid version. This release reeks of an artificial self-imposed deadline as opposed to When It Is Ready, and I feel for the team in the trenches who has made my favorite game and has to weather this particular s#!tstorm. But hey, a year from now nobody will give a crap. Hopefully mistakes were learned from and things will even out soon.

[ag3nt108]

The thing about opinions is, everyone has one.

[Glaran K'erman]

They should have taken this 3-week vacation about two months before release and then worked through the problems. This was handled like most of my college papers, think about it really hard and come up with a "good" outline well in advance. Then actually try to write the thing a few days before.

[Pecan]

Buying high-cost and -budget software from EA (especially) or other big publishers usually doesn't give you a less buggy product unfortunately.  Then you wait months or years for a patch that fixes a few things while paying another fortune for DLC that, as often as not, introduces more problems.  So far, I've paid for KSP once and huge additions have been made to it for free, even after the official launch of 1.0, when Squad had more than delivered on their side of the early access bargain.

Like Snark, I'll also put in the software professional side of things and say we've been treated very well by Squad.  While frequent (several times a year) releases such as we used to have are common in alpha/beta there comes a time in every project where you have to slow things down.  The change of engine to Unity 5 was a major piece of work that wouldn't have made sense to release without completing and it should be no surprise that were bugs in it.  We then got two patches quickly - compare again with how long the first Sims (2, 3 or 4) patches took despite it being the highest-earning game of all time and buggy as hell.  As to the three-week holiday - why should any of us care?  If we had, say, a release schedule that said the next release would be in another year should anyone care how Squad manage their time during that year?

After such a big project as the engine-change I would be surprised if the team wasn't a bit burnt-out and in need of a break.  Considering that having half the team absent at a time can result in miscommunication, stress and even more bugs it may have been a very good idea and time for everyone to have a rest at once.  During my career I specialised in mission-critical, high-value projects that had to be completed quickly and accurately.  We were well rewarded for it but only about half of the people who asked to join my team could stand the pace, despite the fact we worked 3 months and then had 1 month off*, so they went back to more normal projects and teams.  Neither do top sports teams or individuals keep up the same pace all the time; there is a season to most sports for that reason.  In team sports it is also common for the whole squad (no pun) to spend some time 'on retreat' together during the relative down-time.

[* not all holiday, but also training and practice time; anything less intense than 'competition']

[Renegrade]

Where's the "I really miss the PreRelease cycle.  Bring that back plox~" option?

Also - the premature conclusion of the PreRelease cycle kinda renders any 1.1.x stuff moot in my eyes.  If the PreRelease had been carried forth until the simugamulator (or whatever it is) had reached an acceptable level, we could have avoided this "hotfix dance" entirely.

It felt like there was some sort of deadline looming...
 

2 minutes ago, sormi said:

KSP is nowhere near the most best value product I have on my steam account and I can say to you there's no other game in my library I have spent nearly as much time debugging the game as I do with KSP.

Oh, really?  What are these high value products that have otherwise evaded my notice on Steam?  I have a fair sized library, and none of the others are over a thousand hours, let alone FOUR.  I could definitely use another couple of really long term games to play with..

[Armisael]

@Snark I think the big reason for the complaints is that they broke a lot of what we already had. No one would object to the current branch being available as an alternative to the 1.0.5, which if nothing else didn't really have game-breaking bugs. The problem is that they knowingly replaced 1.0.5 with a hot mess. It isn't a surprise to anyone that wheels are broken, or that the game is practically unplayable for large fractions of linux users - these issues were well known in the prerelease testing.

Good value in the past doesn't excuse deliberately screwing the current game up (and no, being able to make a backup of old versions of the game is not an acceptable way to push that on the users, especially not when so much of the userbase lets steam autoupdate). I agree with @Renegrade; what we have now should still be 1.1 prerelease.

24 minutes ago, Renegrade said:

Oh, really?  What are these high value products that have otherwise evaded my notice on Steam?  I have a fair sized library, and none of the others are over a thousand hours, let alone FOUR.  I could definitely use another couple of really long term games to play with..

I can't speak for him but I have 8x as many hours in TF2 as KSP - and that was part of the orange box.

Edited May 29, 2016 by Armisael

[ZooNamedGames]

I don't have KSP on steam, but I must have 10000 hours in KSP, and that is neither a joke or an exaggeration.

[Renegrade]

3 minutes ago, Armisael said:

I can't speak for him but I have 8x as many hours in TF2 as KSP - and that was part of the orange box.

Meh.  I don't play multiplayer games unless I'm close enough to punch the other players.  Keeps civility up (see 'Greater Internet F-Wad Theory'), and is a far more effective anti-cheat method than VAC or EAC or PunkBuster or whatever

So I haven't played Team Fortress since it was a Quake mod, and thinnet LAN parties were a thing... and not sure it's really fair to compare a multiplayer-oriented game's time to a singleplayer's, either.

[SorryDave]

I don't care when they decide to take a vacation. I just hope they keep producing updates with more frequency than the last one.

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, marce said:

I'm missing the "Would you have preferred SQUAD finishing 1.1 before releasing it, not needing all those half-baked hotfixes and going on vacation whenever the individual people want to instead of all at once at the worst possible time" option. I pick that one.

My poll specifically assumes - as do I - that that was not an option. Also, when I wrote it I specifically left out "what should they have done" type things. What would YOU have done, is the question.

Generally when you go on a 3-week vacation, you make plans that are difficult to change. Let's assume as that deadline approached they had 2 options. We know how we reacted to what happened. How would you have reacted in the other case?

[Renegrade]

3 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Generally when you go on a 3-week vacation, you make plans that are difficult to change.

Y'know, (random aside incoming!) I don't think I've ever been on a 3-week vacation aside from layoffs heh.  That'd use up most or all of typical vacation time around these parts, and most companies I've been with would never approve such a thing.

[fourfa]

4 minutes ago, Renegrade said:

Y'know, (random aside incoming!) I don't think I've ever been on a 3-week vacation aside from layoffs heh.  That'd use up most or all of typical vacation time around these parts, and most companies I've been with would never approve such a thing.

You know this is how much of the world works, right?  Ever been in Europe in August?  US/Canadian workstyle is very atypical, globally speaking

[Superfluous J]

3 minutes ago, Renegrade said:

Y'know, (random aside incoming!) I don't think I've ever been on a 3-week vacation aside from layoffs heh.  That'd use up most or all of typical vacation time around these parts, and most companies I've been with would never approve such a thing.

Hear, hear. Last time I was on a vacation that long I was making minimum wage and didn't care if they fired me for it. These days, 2 weeks of vacation is a luxury.

That said, I have also never worked the kind of hours the Squad devs did. I suspect if I had, my boss would be amenable to it.