I have a feeling...

[kiwi1960]

The OP has a right to his opinion.... I have the right to ignore it....

I'm not going to play the speculation game because its stupid. Its not like we are at version 0.0.1 or anything... the game has been around for 5 plus years now, people come and go... I could say that these forums are about to be closed down because the original members are not here any more...

(God forbid the speculation that would result if Red Iron Crown or Sal_Vager were to leave....)

I suggest everyone not panic till it actually happens... because it may NEVER happen... and all you are doing is sabotaging future sales... making your worst nightmare more possible... the only way this project would be abandoned if people lost interest in it.... right?

As for the console version.... I care not for an abomination known as a "console" ...

I'll bet KSP will be supported for as long as we here support the game.... now... lets move on.

[Snark]

5 minutes ago, vger said:

Say wha? Why are people buying a space exploration game and then not exploring space?

Take a look at this thread, it makes for very interesting reading and may broaden your perspective a bit on how people play the game.

I know that I was initially astonished at the idea, myself... but then I read through the various stories people posted there, and it really gave me a fresh appreciation for just how varied folks' play styles can be.  It's worth reading.

TL;DR:  Plenty of people don't go interplanetary, for a variety of reasons.  And if it works for them, there's nothing wrong with that.

[ZooNamedGames]

10 minutes ago, vger said:

Say wha? Why are people buying a space exploration game and then not exploring space?

They do explore space, just not beyond Kerbin. Most forget about Duna, or think it's too difficult a challenge or don't have the time or want to be bothered with a several hour long mission to Duna or beyond. Not to mention if they fail and explode it isn't a 10-15 minute setback like going to the Mun.

[Whirligig Girl]

On 7/13/2016 at 8:42 AM, Red Iron Crown said:

Sequels tend to do rather well in the video game industry, and are usually relatively low risk as there's an established fan base. Plus a new version offers some advantages:

- You can discard early design decisions that didn't work out well, or make big changes that otherwise wouldn't be feasible (like switching game engines).

- You can set a higher target for supported hardware.

- Most importantly, you have a large potential market, whereas the old game eventually saturates its market as the product enters the "long tail" phase.

Sequels are far more common than continuous development in video games for good reason.

A sequel could give Kerbals cylindrical helmets.

[vger]

36 minutes ago, ZooNamedGames said:

They do explore space, just not beyond Kerbin. Most forget about Duna, or think it's too difficult a challenge or don't have the time or want to be bothered with a several hour long mission to Duna or beyond. Not to mention if they fail and explode it isn't a 10-15 minute setback like going to the Mun.

If this comes across as condescending, its not my intent, but this is one of the reasons you can configure the difficulty to your personal liking. If you don't want to deal with the high risks of wasting an hour by flubbing a maneuver, quicksave/load is your best friend.

Anyway, if the devs have been aware of this for a long time, it makes me wonder even more why stock graphical enhancements haven't been a priority. If most players are hanging around Kerbin all the time, making it as pretty as possible seems rather important.

Edited July 15, 2016 by vger

[ZooNamedGames]

4 minutes ago, vger said:

If this comes across as condescending, its not my intent, but this is one of the reasons you can configure the difficulty to your personal liking. If you don't want to deal with the high risks of wasting an hour by flubbing a maneuver, quicksave/load is your best friend.

Anyway, if the devs have been aware of this for a long time, it makes me wonder even more why stock graphical enhancements haven't been a priority. If most players are hanging around Kerbin all the time, making it as pretty as possible seems rather important.

Many of said players either don't know of quicksave/quickloading or don't want to be bothered, granted many are focusing on career modes with reverting/quicksaving/quickloading off adding more unwanted risk.

[Alshain]

41 minutes ago, vger said:

Anyway, if the devs have been aware of this for a long time, it makes me wonder even more why stock graphical enhancements haven't been a priority. If most players are hanging around Kerbin all the time, making it as pretty as possible seems rather important.

Because higher priorities existed.  Did you play 0.90?  We didn't even have proper aerodynamics, which affects those hanging out around Kerbin all the time as well as those going to Duna, Eve, or Laythe.  We didn't have re-entry heating either, which is a rather large aspect of space travel.  Step back 2 versions, we didn't really have planes, I mean we did but it was around 10 parts and that was it.  It's not that the graphic enhancements haven't been a priority, it's that they aren't as high a priority as the game functionality.

[Arsonide]

4 hours ago, Snark said:

TL;DR:  Plenty of people don't go interplanetary, for a variety of reasons.  And if it works for them, there's nothing wrong with that.

This is something we have noticed, and no there isn't anything wrong with it. Kerbal Space Program is ultimately a game about player freedom. We give the player the tools, and he is free to do whatever he likes with them.

With contract objectives I try to gently encourage people to go interplanetary, but still cater to people that do hang around Kerbin and its moons. With planetary weighting that will be even more pronounced, as people that do things in that area will get contracts targeting that area.

[Starwaster]

This reminds me so much of those "DEVS READ THIS NOW! I KNOW HOW TO SAVE ULTIMA ONLINE! HERE'S WHY!" that were so entertaining back in the day...

[kiwi1960]

55 minutes ago, Starwaster said:

This reminds me so much of those "DEVS READ THIS NOW! I KNOW HOW TO SAVE ULTIMA ONLINE! HERE'S WHY!" that were so entertaining back in the day...

WHAT???? Do tell... I'm interested, even if I'm not the dev of the game... I would still like to know...

 

[Starwaster]

2 hours ago, kiwi1960 said:

WHAT???? Do tell... I'm interested, even if I'm not the dev of the game... I would still like to know...

 

Not much to tell, several times a week someone would post a pages long treatise on what was wrong with the game (in their view) and how to fix it. This was back when it first launched. Back when the internet was just going mainstream even! Friend of mine paid $200 to score a beta disk off of someone. Fun times... fun times.

[jwenting]

On 7/13/2016 at 3:35 AM, Vanamonde said:

I have a feeling that somebody starts one of these threads every few months. 

in every single community for every single game out there...

World of Warcraft has been 'near death" for over a decade if you believe the constant flood of doomsday predictions about it for example. It has over 10 million paying customers...

[Red Iron Crown]

12 hours ago, kiwi1960 said:

(God forbid the speculation that would result if Red Iron Crown or Sal_Vager were to leave....)

They'd have to hire me before I could quit.  

[Diche Bach]

Without any knowledge of their sales figures, I'd say everything is pure speculation. Having quit playing 3 years ago, and come back in the past week or so, I have to say: I AM ABSOLUTELY STUNNED WITH SATISFACTION AT WHAT THIS GAME HAS BECOME, AND IN PARTICULAR WITH SOME KEY MODS ADDED!!

I think some of you who have been playing it regularly over the years, and who may no longer appreciate it as much as you could, you should uninstall your most recent build (maybe just archive it): install something like 0.2 or older, basically go back before science and career mode, ca. summer 2013. That will put it into perspective I think . . . It was already an amazing game then (~8/10??), but it has most definitely been made better.

It isn't perfect, but it is amazing: 9.9/10 even without mods. I'd just say 10/10 but that suggests "perfection" and nothing is ever perfect in consumer software.

Hopefully, they've made good dough on this, and irrespective of people coming and going, will keep making good dough and making more game(s).

[Wjolcz]

On 13.07.2016 at 6:40 PM, Snark said:

Again, opinions vary.  KSP's manifestly not "broken".  A "broken" game doesn't acquire a big, enthusiastic fan base like this, and stay popular for years.  It's fine if you say "I don't care for stock myself, I find KSP unpleasant without a bunch of mods."  But to say that it's a "broken game" or that it's "nowhere near playable in stock" is an overstatement.  Sure it's playable in stock.  I played it happily in stock for months, myself.  Lots of people prefer stock-- I've seen plenty of posts in the forums for people with gameplay questions who have made it clear that they prefer not to use mods.  The person (other than myself) that I'm personally acquainted with who plays KSP the most is the teenage son of a friend of mine; this guy's been playing KSP fanatically for a couple of years now, and has been utterly disdainful of mods the whole time.  He's only just recently started to play with a few-- and even those are "new and shiny parts", i.e. parts packs, not MechJeb or KER.

Well, yeah, I think I got carried away a bit there. It certainly isn't "broken" or "unplayable" but it's really hard and, at least for me, not enjoyable to play it without having all the displays and options KER and KAC offer.

 

On 13.07.2016 at 6:40 PM, Snark said:

Some people just like mucking around with planes, and don't bother with space, much.

That's pretty much what I've been doing since 1.0. There's a reason for that (at least in my case): I've been to most of the planets/moons in KSP's sandbox mode (before the career update) already and I would like to do it again, but I'm not satisfied with the quality of the career mode. I would simply like to explore the solar system again, but the career mode doesn't offer a proper and enjoyable way to do it.

 

On 13.07.2016 at 6:40 PM, Snark said:

Some people are dedicated KSP players who really want to learn how to make all this work, and take the trouble to learn all the science and design details, but have trouble with interplanetary because they're missing a basic tool, such as a dV display.  So there's an argument there to "add a dV display".  But that's just "adding new and shiny parts to a broken game", or "releasing new things without fixing the old game mechanics," which you just mentioned as being not the right thing to do, so I don't see that this furthers the argument, there.

I disagree and I actually didn't mean it that way. I feel like I was misunderstood, but it's also my fault as I didn't express it correctly and used the wrong words. dV and TWR display is actually a tool not a new shiny part. It enables everyone WHO WISH TO LEARN using it to enjoy the game and build structures otherwise challenging to build (space shuttle for example) without going through the frustrating process of trial-and-error which becomes even more frustrating when performed in career mode save. I feel like it's the main reason why the career is so forgiving and not as interesting as it could be with a few simple tools like dV/TWR displays and some sort of alarm clock.

Regarding the "old game mechanics": What I meant here was the career mode and the way it works. IMO an addition of the aforementioned tools could enable drawing a clear line between the sandbox and career modes. There are also a few other things me and others would like to propose and can be found here.

On 13.07.2016 at 6:40 PM, Snark said:

So you'd prefer that they just abandoned KSP after 1.0?

I didn't say that and I actually wouldn't. What I meant is that during the 1.0 "release" the game still lacked a proper and enjoyable career mode and the look of the parts was clearly not consistent. Not to mention at least simplified KER and KAC tools. And yes, I know some players won't apprieciate having them, but I would. Anyway, they would be there to either be ignored or used. Choice of playstyles, I guess.

Eh, no more talk about KER and KAC, I swear.

On 13.07.2016 at 6:40 PM, Snark said:

My own interpretation of "feature complete" / 1.0 is that the major "bones" of the game are in place, that they interpret future work as being adding/enhancing how things work rather than completely overhauling existing stuff in a way that's not backwards-compatible and will badly break players.

And I'm going to disagree on this bit too. The so called "bones" are not what I would call bones. If I were to refer to biology a bit more I would call the science and career mode a bunch embryos of ideas bouncing around. They are simple, don't have any bones and can't be easily distinguished from each other and also I feel like I went way too deep with that metaphore.

On 13.07.2016 at 6:40 PM, Snark said:

Sure, I agree with that statement, which is hardly surprising because essentially what you're saying is "doing bad things is bad."  The question is simply "what's the right thing to do to the game."  It's the job of Squad devs to Make It Better, part of which consists of figuring out "what does 'better' look like."  They work on that.  They spend a lot of time thinking about it.  You'll agree with some of their decisions.  You'll disagree with others. 

Folks like us will post opinions in the forums, they'll get plenty of feedback from players, and that will inform their decisions, too.

I'm not too worried.  I think they've got a good dev team, I think they're working in good faith to try to "make it better", and by and large I think they're doing a pretty good job of showing good judgment and will continue to do so, and the game will evolve with plenty of input from the players.

Well, yeah. I don't want to sound like a whiny and ignorant child, but I think there's still room for improvement and I wouldn't mind if some things were almost completely scratched and rewritten (mainly talking about the career mode).

On 13.07.2016 at 6:40 PM, Snark said:

My own interpretation of "feature complete" / 1.0 is that the major "bones" of the game are in place, that they interpret future work as being adding/enhancing how things work rather than completely overhauling existing stuff in a way that's not backwards-compatible and will badly break players.  A good example of the latter category is the new aero.  Post-1.0 aerodynamics is completely different from pre-1.0 (I'm including reentry heating in that).  Moving to 1.0 requires playing the game in a completely different way, both in terms of designing rockets and in piloting them.  Anyone with a pre-1.0 career would find pretty much all their rockets to have horrible problems-- all their existing designs can't get to orbit.  Drag problems.  Stability problems.  Burning-up-on-reentry problems.  dV all out of whack from radically rebalanced Isp and such.  It was a huge, very "breaking" change, and it would be a lot harder for them to get away with something like that now, because "totally break pretty much every save game" is such a hurdle.

I was actually very, very happy about that. I don't care my saves got corrupted. It was a good change. It was a very Ragnarok-like experience. I would really like see another update like that focusing on redoing the career mode this time.

On 13.07.2016 at 6:40 PM, Snark said:

Seriously?  I mean, really?

A couple of questions:

• How many hours have you played this game?
• How much money did you spend on it?

First - hard to say. Been playing since 0.11. I also don't always play on Steam (that's why I can't check, but the last time I saw it was like 150 hours, or so since I've transfered the game to the platform) because of multiple game copies on my PC. I think it's enough if I say I consider myself a KSP veteran.

Second - 15 USD. Might not be much in the US, but where I live you can feed a family of four for two days having for that amount of money. I don't want to sound stingy, but yeah, there's your anwser, I guess.

I don't feel like it's the matter of that though. It's a great dev team and I enjoyed the game so far, but I'm a bit worried about the future. Someday the game will stop be profitable and will be abandoned. I am aware of that, but I have a feeling the development might end prematurely and the game will never fully bloom, which would be a real shame and a sad thing to witness.

[p1t1o]

39 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

Without any knowledge of their sales figures, I'd say everything is pure speculation. Having quit playing 3 years ago, and come back in the past week or so, I have to say: I AM ABSOLUTELY STUNNED WITH SATISFACTION AT WHAT THIS GAME HAS BECOME, AND IN PARTICULAR WITH SOME KEY MODS ADDED!!

I think some of you who have been playing it regularly over the years, and who may no longer appreciate it as much as you could, you should uninstall your most recent build (maybe just archive it): install something like 0.2 or older, basically go back before science and career mode, ca. summer 2013. That will put it into perspective I think . . . It was already an amazing game then (~8/10??), but it has most definitely been made better.

It isn't perfect, but it is amazing: 9.9/10 even without mods. I'd just say 10/10 but that suggests "perfection" and nothing is ever perfect in consumer software.

Hopefully, they've made good dough on this, and irrespective of people coming and going, will keep making good dough and making more game(s).

I cant speak for everybody else, but would imagine that a lot of people agree with you. Though a lot of them, including me would add a caveat - that some of the more serious bugs, prevent the game from reaching its *true potential*, that without those deficiencies (whether or not one is happy with how the problems are being dealt with is apparently another debate, I for one am reasonably happy. One will always wish for good things to happen sooner.) it could approach to within an arbitrary distance of "perfection" indedd, approach the theoretical limits of what current software/hardware can give us.

Paradoxically, this leads me to believe that if KSP was a bit worse, then the various problems would be easier for some people to bear. But it is this potential which seems to be always just out of reach which leads to increased frustration. Alas, KSPs quality works against it, socially. 

If that sounds weird, ask yourself this:

Which is more frustrating:

an 8/10 game, whose bugs bring it down to 7/10

or

a 9.5/10 game whose bugs bring it down to 8/10

[Snark]

2 hours ago, Veeltch said:

dV and TWR display is actually a tool not a new shiny part.

Thank you for clarifying (including additional context that for brevity's sake I haven't quoted above)... but I'm kind of confused about what exactly you want, here.  My impression had been that you were complaining that they've been adding new features (a.k.a. "new shiny parts") rather than ripping out and re-implementing existing ones (a.k.a. "overhaul").  Is this not the case?

As best I can tell, you appear to be classifying Squad's development work into three categories so far:

• "tools"  (a new feature that lets the user do some useful thing)
• "overhauls" (a breaking change to an existing feature to make it better in some way)
• "shiny new parts" (meaning... what, exactly?  Other than "something Veeltch doesn't like") 

I'm really having trouble understanding at this point just what you mean by "shiny new parts" in this context, other than that you think Squad is wasting time by implementing them.  Given the definition of "tools" and "overhauls", simply by exclusion I assume you mean "something that's not useful to the user and doesn't improve any existing features."  But I'm hard-pressed to think of examples of that myself, and I didn't see you list any.

What are some specific examples of things that Squad has done to KSP in the last few iterations, that you would classify as "shiny new parts" in this context?  i.e. something big, that occupied scads of Squad's time, that's not useful to (or improving the experience for) significant numbers of players?

On 7/13/2016 at 9:40 AM, Snark said:

My own interpretation of "feature complete" / 1.0 is that the major "bones" of the game are in place, that they interpret future work as being adding/enhancing how things work rather than completely overhauling existing stuff in a way that's not backwards-compatible and will badly break players.

 

2 hours ago, Veeltch said:

And I'm going to disagree on this bit too. The so called "bones" are not what I would call bones. If I were to refer to biology a bit more I would call the science and career mode a bunch embryos of ideas bouncing around. They are simple, don't have any bones and can't be easily distinguished from each other and also I feel like I went way too deep with that metaphore.

Sorry, I guess I should have been more explicit in the "bones" metaphor.  I suppose it's an occupational hazard of writing software for a living; easy to forget that not everyone sees software development through the same lens that I do. 

By "bones", I mean "major pieces of functionality, embodied in huge chunks of code that represent heavy investments of engineering time that have already been spent, such that replacing them would be expensive to engineer and disruptive to users."  Certainly, as a player, you're perfectly within your rights to say that you don't like the way they've done science and career mode, or that you think it's poorly thought out, or wishy-washy, or whatever.  But that doesn't change the objective fact that those features are there, they've already been written, the code's in the repository, and hundreds of thousands of KSP players have been using them and basing all their play on them for a long time.

These are not "embryos of ideas" that someone can casually discard on a whim and switch to something else.  To switch metaphors:  the foundation hole has already been dug, the concrete poured, the steel reinforcing beams inserted.  The building is built.  You can bring in a wrecking ball and demolish it and build a new building, sure... but it'll be time-consuming and expensive.

And, more to the point, it'll be pretty darn disruptive to the many people who moved in, have been living there a long time, and may not like the idea of being forced to move out when someone takes a wrecking ball to their home (even if they're promised that a new, different-looking home is going to be built instead).  Some people (such as yourself) may be unhappy with the building and would welcome such a change... but an awful lot of others would not be.

My interpretation of "1.0" is that it means that the building is basically built.  They'll still tinker with it-- add air conditioning, do some remodeling here and there, fix broken windows, etc.-- but not fundamentally alter the structure of the building in a way that would demolish anyone's home.  That's just my interpretation, though-- to the best of my knowledge, Squad has never explicitly gone on record on exactly what "1.0" means in practical terms, as in "we make a promise that we will always/never do X after 1.0" where X is explicitly specified.

2 hours ago, Veeltch said:

I think there's still room for improvement and I wouldn't mind if some things were almost completely scratched and rewritten (mainly talking about the career mode).

Maybe you personally wouldn't mind this.  I expect you've got company, and there are likely plenty of other people who would say the same.

Except that there are scads of people who would mind.  From reading the forums over the past year or two, it's clear to me that lots of players have been playing existing career mode themselves for a long time and wouldn't welcome having it yanked out from under them.  (I'm one such player.)

Doing that would also completely wreck all the players who like to have really epic, long-running careers.  I'm not one of those players, and from your comments I can tell you aren't one either, so we're on the same wavelength there.  But there are plenty of people like that, and they wouldn't welcome such a change.  Not only would they hate it, but I expect they'd feel downright betrayed:  "Hey!  This is post-release!  1.0 already shipped!  That's a promise not to totally break me, and you did it, so you lied to us!"  ...I'm not saying that "1.0" is in fact such a promise... but a really big part of the KSP community would certainly take it that way, and crossing that line is not something to be undertaken lightly.

Case in point:  the new aero that arrived with 1.0.  I used it as an example of a truly breaking, disruptive change that is the sort of thing you can get away with right up to release (because the game's not "released" yet, and there's no implied promise to keep everything backwards-compatible all the time), but which is a much harder sell post-"release".  As you say,

2 hours ago, Veeltch said:

I was actually very, very happy about that. I don't care my saves got corrupted. It was a good change. It was a very Ragnarok-like experience.

I totally agree with you.  I think KSP was made immeasurably better by that change; the old "placeholder" pre-1.0 aero was truly horrible.  It needed to be done, and they did it.  However, you go on to say:

2 hours ago, Veeltch said:

I would really like see another update like that focusing on redoing the career mode this time.

...and here's where I disagree, for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is that it would be a major disruptive change... which is fine pre-"release" but not to be undertaken lightly post-"release".  Squad could have called the game "released" any time they wanted to.  It's basically just drawing a line in the sand somewhere-- it's totally arbitrary.  My understanding about how they chose where to draw the line is basically that they just waited until they had implemented all the really big absolutely-must-have pieces of functionality that they intended to, and also that they had gotten those pieces into approximately the shape that they intended to be, with no really huge breaking changes planned to them.

So now, in a post-"release" world, I think that doing a total overhaul to a major aspect of the game, such as you're describing, is less of a viable option.

However, there's another (and much bigger) reason why I disagree:  Suppose that they actually did what you suggest.

What, then, would they actually DO?  What would the "new" science/career mode actually look like?

It's a very different situation from the aero change in one very important regard.  With aero, the "right answer" was completely clear, obvious, and unambiguous.  With science / career mode, that's blatantly not the case.

The old aero was clearly horrible.  It was incredibly unrealistic, it favored spectacularly illogical physical construction techniques.  Everyone recognized this, including Squad.  And it was that way for a reason:  it's not as though Squad designed that with the intention that it would stand the test of time.  No, it was clearly a placeholder:  Squad intended better aero all along, but implementing better aero is a very big-ticket item and they had other fish to fry before that.  So they banged out a placeholder, which wasn't great, but it was simple and cheap to implement, and served as a temporary band-aid while they worked on other stuff.  And then they finally got around to coming back and doing it right.

And the really handy thing there was that what "doing it right" means was pretty darn obvious.  Air, after all, really is an actual, real, physical thing.  Real objects moving through air behave in real ways, and people have a fairly good intuitive grasp of what those ways look like.  So there was a clear ideal to aim for, and that is hugely useful when trying to design something.

A side note:  That doesn't mean that they made it perfectly realistic-- or even that "perfectly realistic" is necessarily the right target to aim for.  There are plenty of reasons why one might choose not-quite-complete realism:  maybe going ultra-realistic would be too expensive in terms of coding it, or there may be gameplay reasons not to do it; e.g. the same sort of reasons that made them choose a 10x reduced scale for their solar system.  But at least they had a pretty clear goal to aim for, and I think they did pretty well.  There's always FAR, if someone wants more realism.  Lots and lots of people use FAR.   But the majority of KSP players don't, which to me is an indicator that Squad didn't do a terrible job of deciding where to draw the line, here.

With science and career, however, this is manifestly not the case.  It's different from the aero overhaul in two crucial aspects:

1. It's not clearly broken and horrible.
2. There's no clear "ideal" way for How It Should Be.

Sure, it may seem broken and horrible to you... but there are plenty of other players for whom it isn't.  Unlike aero, the current career mode isn't just a placeholder that Squad banged out because they didn't have the time to make something "real".  It's a large, expensive-to-implement feature that they put a lot of effort into, trying to design something that was their best effort to make a fun, engaging system.  That doesn't mean that they succeeded perfectly for everyone.  It doesn't even necessarily mean that they're perfectly happy with it themselves, or that they might not revisit it for some fine-tuning.  But it's an actual feature, not a placeholder, and not lightly to be thrown away.

And besides:  Even if we did grant the premise that "the current career mode is broken and needs redoing" (I don't, I basically like it how it is, but let's suppose, just for the sake of argument)... just what the heck should they replace it with?

Go out and find a dozen players who hate the current career mode.  (I'm sure that wouldn't be too hard.)    Asking "should it be replaced?" is easy-- they're unanimous on that point.  But if you replace it... you have to replace it with something, and what should that be?  It's far from obvious.  Unlike aero-- for which there is one clear, obvious ideal to strive towards, taken from the real world-- this is a completely arbitrary video-game concept and there's no obvious single right answer.  There are a thousand different ways you could do it.  Ask each one of those dozen current-career-haters "okay, YOU design the new thing", and that user will come up with something that will make that user happy.  And will likely have the other eleven users horrified, who would prefer something different.

For a major overhaul to something like career / science, Squad would have to come up with something that's unambiguously better than what they have now-- something that is guaranteed (or, at least, extremely likely) to please a much larger proportion of their audience.  Simply replacing a system that, say, 30% of the players like, with a different system that a different 30% of the players like, would not be any improvement:  it has to be higher.  Not just higher, but it has to be enough higher to justify the known large cost of completely demolishing the thousands of existing users who have built on top of what's there now and would be dismayed at being forced to switch.  And also, of course, the huge cost of implementing this new thing, at the expense of all the other features they'd have to give up to do this.

I can't speak for Squad, of course, since I don't work for them.  But just speaking as a software engineer:  Suppose someone came to me and said,

"Hey, you know that product that you've spent years developing and are still working on?  And it has this one really big, expensive feature, which basically works, and which you sunk a huge amount of time into, and which has been around long enough that it's nicely stable, and at great trouble and expense you've worked the bugs out of, and lots of your users depend on it?

And which a big part of your user base likes, but another part doesn't like so much?

Well, I'd like you to throw it away, and cancel all these other features you were planning, and write a brand new thing to replace it, and then go through the agonizing cycle of fixing bugs and taking all the flak from the users who are badly affected by those bugs.  And, of course, the huge amount of pain from breaking all the users who actually use that feature now.

The payoff that you get, for all of that guaranteed agony for you and a lot of your users, is that it is possible that the new thing might be liked better.  Or it might easily be liked less, but hey, we can hope, right?"

I'd laugh in their face, and so would any of the other software engineers that I know.  (That's why our employers generally don't put engineers on customer relations...)

So unless you can find such a total no-brainer, such a total bat-it-right-out-of-the-park, going-to-please-practically-everyone solution, and which isn't excessively time-consuming to implement... then it's simply a non-starter.  And I contend that no such design has yet been found.  It may not even exist.

[monstah]

1 hour ago, Snark said:

Go out and find a dozen players who hate the current career mode.  (I'm sure that wouldn't be too hard.)    Asking "should it be replaced?" is easy-- they're unanimous on that point.  But if you replace it... you have to replace it with something, and what should that be?  It's far from obvious.  Unlike aero-- for which there is one clear, obvious ideal to strive towards, taken from the real world-- this is a completely arbitrary video-game concept and there's no obvious single right answer.  There are a thousand different ways you could do it.  Ask each one of those dozen current-career-haters "okay, YOU design the new thing", and that user will come up with something that will make that user happy.  And will likely have the other eleven users horrified, who would prefer something different.

To me, this is the high point of this discussion.

I am in the group of people who dislike how career was implemented ("hate" is bit too strong in my case). I have been on discussions on how should it be done instead. It's hard.

I don't even know what this thread is about anymore, it started being about the staff leaving SQUAD, and leaving an unfinished game, but now it's about the features themselves. And, in both regards, I have very, very mixed feeeeeeeeeelings *ahem*. I like this game. I really do, and I have a hunch that everyone in this forum no matter how much they complain, also like this game a lot. As someone pointed out here, it was a fantastic game pre-science, and it has improved a lot since. But then, like I said, I don't like how career was implemented. I have to concede that, as @Snark said, it's not trivial to design one. Were I to make my perfect career (and even I don't know how that would be like, yet), I'm pretty sure many people would dislike it a lot.

 

I did feel worried when people started leaving SQUAD, but I understand now that it's probably nothing to worry about. I'm not worried that the game will be left 'unfinished' (whatever that means). My main issue is that I don't know where the game is heading, and in fact it seems (for me, as an outsider at least) that there isn't even a goal in mind:

When they were implementing science, we were heading toward a game where you progressed. When they were implementing a career, now there'll be maintenance apart from progression. Then new aero and heating, and we moved a bit toward realism, not for pure realism's sake, but because the difficulty of getting to space is a pretty important deal for space programs.

All of these features felt (to me, at least) like they were part of some grand design. ISRU? Well, it fit, but it seemed more like "hey, let's add this cool feature" than "what do we still need to do?". The classes and skills... well.. *sigh*. Telemetry? Again, it'll probably fit, but it definetely wasn't thought of from the beginning of the game, as made evident by the measures they're taking to not make it break saves when they implement it, and it doesn't feel like it points at a grander game, like career did.

And that's my issue with the current stage of the game. I don't think of it as "unfinished" anymore, simply because I can't imagine the "future better version" anymore. I can imagine a version with more stuff in it, but not a better, more complete one. I don't feel any joy in updating anymore. I just feel angry that my mods are broken, because other than that there's nothing to make me go "OOOH, new update!" anymore.

 

That and the fact that, despite a better performance overall, and a smaller memory footprint, I'm still crashing to desktop on the VAB.

 

My flame started to go out. I know that, after 3 years, that's only natural. It's actually remarkable that this is still my favourite game, and the amount of time so many players put into it says a lot about the quality of the game. But still, for most of the time, there was always the hype of what's to come, and nowadays I don't feel it at all anymore.

[Randazzo]

Kerbal Space Program is something almost unheard of  in todays video game industry - a unique concept. A step further than that, it's a unique concept that was executed well. Is it perfect? Of course not. But it is good, very good. Still, the cliché is old but true; You can't please everybody. There will always be those in favor of more realism or more sci-fi, but overall, Squad has absolutely nailed the fun-factor. KSP is without even a shadow of a doubt worth what any given individual paid for it. I picked it up for 25 US dollars, and have logged 1400+ hours in Steam. That comes out to 56 hours of play for every dollar I spent.  For a single player game, that's incredible.

Sure, players can nitpick back and forth about what they think doesn't work until the cows come home, but that's why these things aren't done by committee. There are dedicated decision making positions for a reason. Ultimately, if the game was terrible, nobody would care about these little nitpicky things at all.

So, anyway, KSP is great.

What the heck are we talking about?

 

 

 

[kiwi1960]

7 hours ago, Red Iron Crown said:

They'd have to hire me before I could quit.  

You can still quit your position as moderator... unpaid or not... and probably cause the same speculation.

[monstah]

36 minutes ago, Randazzo said:

Ultimately, if the game was terrible, nobody would care about these little nitpicky things at all.

Definetely agree. We hate because we love  

[Corona688]

19 hours ago, vger said:

Anyway, if the devs have been aware of this for a long time, it makes me wonder even more why stock graphical enhancements haven't been a priority. If most players are hanging around Kerbin all the time, making it as pretty as possible seems rather important.

1. The game is a memory pig already
2. Updating procedural terrain isn't as easy as painting on it
3. Not everyone has the best video card in the world, particularly their new console users
4. Better planetary graphics don't give us anything more to do on one than take samples and leave
5. They've got some critical bugs to squash

Edited July 15, 2016 by Corona688