Why is this game still on the market place?

[Just Jim]

9 minutes ago, juanml82 said:

I'm not talking about building ships. I'm talking about, for instance, sending a fleet to Dres without mods to fine tune the maneuver node, without mods or outside tools to find out when the transfer window is up and without mods to handle multiple simultaneous missions

We're getting a little off topic, but what's so hard about doing it without mods? I do stuff like this all the time. Just a couple months ago I sent a fleet of over 20 ships to Duna, no problem. Granted, it took some planning, and I had to pay close attention to what I was doing... but that's the fun part!  

You may want all those mods added into the game to make it really easy (and boring). But many of us like doing it the hard way!  Personally I would be furious if they added all that stuff and took the challenge out of the game.

Edited August 25, 2016 by Just Jim

[Corona688]

21 minutes ago, juanml82 said:

Squad decided to port the game to consoles, outsourcing part of the job, and they ended up with a severely faulted product. I don't think this is up for discussion at this point. How did it happen, how to fix it, how long it takes, that's not relevant to the business - not development, business - decision I'm questioning. The decision is this: "The product we are selling is severely faulty. What do we do about it?"

You are assuming choice.  Neither Flying Tiger nor Squad have an enormous amount -- that gets lost when you distribute your game through someone else's channels, particularly slow, picky, international corporate giants like Sony and Microsoft.  Any change to the product becomes onerous.  They could force a "warn people about bugs" moratorium through Sony and Microsoft in a few weeks so it warns people when they try to get the game, and a few weeks after that, an "actually fix the bugs" update.  Or they could just fix the bugs faster and avoid the extra few weeks the bugs will exist.  Either way there will be a period of problems.

An embarrassing situation for Squad, but I think they're moving the right direction to rectify it.  It's not like they're pretending it doesn't exist, either, they've posted statuses about when console bugfixes can be expected.

Edited August 25, 2016 by Corona688

[FullMetalMachinist]

2 hours ago, juanml82 said:

Squad decided to port the game to consoles, outsourcing part of the job, and they ended up with a severely faulted product. I don't think this is up for discussion at this point.

I actually agree with you on this, but we disagree on the amount of blame. As @Snark said earlier, bad luck just happens sometimes. In fact, they've said publicly that their internal QA missed it.

2 hours ago, juanml82 said:

The decision is this: "The product we are selling is severely faulty. What do we do about it?"

You're assuming that either Flying Tiger, or Squad, or both, knew about this bug before shipping, and decided to ship anyway. There is no evidence of that.

2 hours ago, juanml82 said:

If the decision is "We sell it anyways and pretend there is nothing gamebreaking on it" then you'll face complains. And selling a game with gamebreaking bugs without warning the customer beforehand is the very definition of a scam.

Is it a little hard to believe that their QA team didn't find such a bad/big bug? Sure. But is it possible? Adsolutely. And I find it even harder to believe that they knew about the bug and shipped anyway. Again, there is zero evidence of that. If the past few years have been evidence of anything it's that the developers at Squad care deeply about KSP. It's not just a job, they are truly passionate about it and want it to be the best game that it possibly can be. I find it extremely hard to believe, without actual evidence, that they knew about a bug that would so badly effect players and decided to ship anyway.

Edited August 25, 2016 by FullMetalMachinist

[cfds]

4 hours ago, FullMetalMachinist said:

You're assuming that either Flying Tiger, or Squad, or both, knew about this bug before shipping, and decided to ship anyway. There is no evidence of that.

I believe his point is: "Now they know that there products contains a game breaking bug but they still continue shipping it". And knowingly selling faulty products is (at least in German law) grounds to void the whole contract.

 

Regarding QA: it looks like the went their "traditional" route of "check that everything a reviewer would do [fly a rocket to the Mun in sandbox mode at absolute maximum] works correctly, for the rest there are hotfixes" and did forget that there are no (easy) hotfixes for consoles.

[Curveball Anders]

I have a theory (dinosaurs was very thin at one end, fat in the middle and then thin again, but it's my theory and I'll defend it).

Software that suddenly fails without any common interaction that triggers the fail is thread/multicore desync.

I've had KSP crash in space, in VAB and while left to it's own in the background while yapping on forums,

Tracking down that kind of bugs isn't very easy.

It's strange for most people that a bug that causes a game to crash every time they try to start it can't be tracked down and solved.

The problem is that the same software is running perfectly for 100.000+ other users reporting exactly the same environment.

So finding out what is causing the crash is tricky, and not down to Squad devs being clueless clowns.

(They might be clueless clowns anyway, but that's their choice ;)).

[juanml82]

12 hours ago, Just Jim said:

We're getting a little off topic, but what's so hard about doing it without mods? I do stuff like this all the time. Just a couple months ago I sent a fleet of over 20 ships to Duna, no problem. Granted, it took some planning, and I had to pay close attention to what I was doing... but that's the fun part!  

You may want all those mods added into the game to make it really easy (and boring). But many of us like doing it the hard way!  Personally I would be furious if they added all that stuff and took the challenge out of the game.

Offtopic: And how do you go about it?

First, you need to find out when the transfer window is up, or you'll be wasting a lot of fuel. You can't do that in-game and checking online resources is pretty much equivalent as modding - as in "stock doesn't provide me the necessary resources, so I look non stock alternatives"

All your ships will then need mid-course adjustments. The most efficient nodes won't happen in the same order as the ships departed Kerbin, but let's asume you don't care about that. The ships won't enter Duna's SOI in the same order they've departed Kerbin. How do you handle that? Writing down the date they'll enter Duna's SOI in a sheet of paper, thus replacing KAC with pen and paper? Painstakingly renaming each and every single one of them with the date they'll enter? And what happens if you have an ongoing mission going to Eve in the meantime? Or you want to capture an asteroid which happens to enter Kerbin's SOI around the same time half your ships are approaching Duna? And if instead of Duna you're sending twenty ships to Jool, where you need to dance around the three inner moons for gravity assists, so you need to keep juggling around plenty of maneuver nodes and SOI changes happening within in-game days, if not hours?

[Just Jim]

 

2 minutes ago, juanml82 said:

All your ships will then need mid-course adjustments. The most efficient nodes won't happen in the same order as the ships departed Kerbin, but let's asume you don't care about that. The ships won't enter Duna's SOI in the same order they've departed Kerbin. How do you handle that? Writing down the date they'll enter Duna's SOI in a sheet of paper, thus replacing KAC with pen and paper? Painstakingly renaming each and every single one of them with the date they'll enter? And what happens if you have an ongoing mission going to Eve in the meantime? Or you want to capture an asteroid which happens to enter Kerbin's SOI around the same time half your ships are approaching Duna? And if instead of Duna you're sending twenty ships to Jool, where you need to dance around the three inner moons for gravity assists, so you need to keep juggling around plenty of maneuver nodes and SOI changes happening within in-game days, if not hours?

That pretty much sums it up.  But I see now what I find fun, you find to be a chore, so let's just agree to disagree and get back on topic.

[damerell]

On 25/08/2016 at 3:23 AM, juanml82 said:

I'm not talking about building ships. I'm talking about, for instance, sending a fleet to Dres without mods to fine tune the maneuver node, without mods or outside tools to find out when the transfer window is up and without mods to handle multiple simultaneous missions

You're intentionally making things difficult here. I'm modded out the wazoo, and if I wanted to send a fleet to Dres, I'd bolt it all to one transfer vehicle - and it's not like stock's career or science modes incentivise sending fleets.

On 24/08/2016 at 5:21 PM, juanml82 said:

Second, listening to customers mean implementing the features the customers want, if they are to implement features, that's it. No, they don't have to implement all suggestions. But if there are a lot of suggestions about adding KAC and dV and TWR readouts and we don't even have official word about adding KAC after Squad hired the developer who made that mod, well, it's hard to argue they listen to their customers as opposed to having a suggestion subforum.

I think in fact hiring the developer of a popular mod, something they keep doing, strongly suggests that Squad are not only listening to the users but spending nontrivial amounts of money based on what the users seem to like.

[ChillingCammy]

Another day, another corrupt save. 

 

@nestor feeling talkative there bud? The silence is killing us.

[Aethon]

Sorry to but in to this thread.  

I don't play the console versions and I have no real evidence of this being true, but I read somewhere that the console file corruption starts when you have more than 10 saves.  Someone suggested overwriting old saves so as to limit the game recording on save slot #11.

I'm sorry you're not able to enjoy playing.  I offer this in the hope that it will help.

[chimpbone]

1 hour ago, Aethon said:

Sorry to but in to this thread.  

I don't play the console versions and I have no real evidence of this being true, but I read somewhere that the console file corruption starts when you have more than 10 saves.  Someone suggested overwriting old saves so as to limit the game recording on save slot #11.

I'm sorry you're not able to enjoy playing.  I offer this in the hope that it will help.

Wish it was that easy... not the case though. I have deleted my saved game data twice now. No real desire to play anymore. 

 

1 hour ago, ChillingCammy said:

Another day, another corrupt save. 

 

@nestor feeling talkative there bud? The silence is killing us.

All they have done is ignore us dude. It's easier for them to ignore us than to treat us like actual people. They have the power here, not us. We already gave them our money. Tried to get a refund weeks ago and was denied. 40 dollars is not cheap. That is the price for a premium, AAA game. I could have bought plenty of other games that I could be playing right now. Instead, I am stuck wasting my time in here, trying to get a game I bought to actually work. 

[Leopard]

Deleted a few of my orbiting craft, de-orbited station K1 (have a contract to replace it), got down to 14 in flight or deployed - seemed to cure the constant locking out problems, down to only _near_ constant...

Used the brief gap for my third Minmus lander mission for science, error on landing and ended up in midlands area again so the science was reduced - still first ground sample so worth the trip. sixth Mun lander mission, aborted in low Mun orbit when I realised I'd forgotten the solar panels.. Made it home though.

Also a Duna probe launched, after the others were back home, so only one new item in flight keeping the flight number below 16 (only had to reboot three times...). Built as a lander just in case so I could suicide it - it made a safe landing.. cleaning up a nice 'explore tuna' contract, soft landing by parachute at 11m/s, just a touch of its engine using a drag of fuel to get it to 8m/s for touch down.. safe landing, beam back of science, and a pathfinder for a larger probe to follow.

Control issues becoming a real issue, the Duna probe lost the ability to use manoeuvre nodes as it approached, mitigated the controls locking me out of KSC by reverting there after each manoeuvre burn - so as to make the inevitable roll back smaller.

Seems to be tied up with the amount of craft in flight, seems ridiculous the issue occurs with such a small number of craft but there you go.

[Bandus]

2 hours ago, chimpbone said:

Wish it was that easy... not the case though. I have deleted my saved game data twice now. No real desire to play anymore. 

 

All they have done is ignore us dude. It's easier for them to ignore us than to treat us like actual people. They have the power here, not us. We already gave them our money. Tried to get a refund weeks ago and was denied. 40 dollars is not cheap. That is the price for a premium, AAA game. I could have bought plenty of other games that I could be playing right now. Instead, I am stuck wasting my time in here, trying to get a game I bought to actually work. 

They have acknowledged the issues, indicated that a fix is in testing, and have hired external QAers to prevent this type of thing from happening again. I feel like that is the opposite of ignoring.

[Sonny_Jim]

I'm a KSP PC player (since 2013ish) and I bought the game when it was pre v1.0, so I wasn't expecting a 'complete' game by any stretch of the imagination, but like a lot of people I was hooked on it, putting hundreds of hours of gameplay into it and understandably getting incredibly frustrated when bugs stopped me from enjoying the game I loved.

One of the major problems I see with the KSP community is that we've spent so long putting up with the inevitable bugs we've become almost blind to it.  As other posters have pointed out, it's almost a KSP mantra to say 'Put the pitchforks away, SQUAD will fix it eventually', because we've all got so used to bugs being present for extended periods of time or bugs that plainly should have been caught in testing. 

I think one of the problems is that currently, bug tracking is incredibly haphazard and has seemed to be implemented 'organically' rather than done right in the first place.  Right now, as far as I understand, to report a bug you must do so through the forums, which boggles my mind.  I can't see any complicated piece of software being debugged properly by having to go through forum reports.  To make matters worse I believe I read recently there's upwards of *10* different bug reporting systems and the public facing one is in such a mess that 90% of the reports are just being auto-closed.

Whilst I applaud their recent efforts to get on top of the bug reporting system, it sadly doesn't surprise me in ANYWAY WHATSOEVER that the console ports were released with a game breaking bug so bad that save files are being corrupted.

If this were any other game, my mind would be boggled to know that it managed to pass through the hands of 3 different Q&A teams without picking up this bug, but seeing as it's SQUAD, like I said, it's not that surprising.

I nearly recommended this game to an Xbox owning friend, but sadly I'll be telling them not to bother.  I'd like to be able to tell them "Wait until it gets patched, then get it" but I fear that the patch is going to be a long time coming and will probably introduce other problems as well.

[Corona688]

3 hours ago, chimpbone said:

All they have done is ignore us dude. It's easier for them to ignore us than to treat us like actual people.

It takes geologic ages to push ANYTHING through Sony and Microsoft.  After the release fiasco, when Sony held them up weeks for literally no reason, they learned not to make promises on when.  The "when" is something they no longer have control over, not for anything but PC.

There's nothing to say which hasn't already been said in their official releases:  The bugfixes are in with Sony and Microsoft and hopefully they'll let them through eventually.

Edited August 28, 2016 by Corona688

[chimpbone]

46 minutes ago, Bandus said:

They have acknowledged the issues, indicated that a fix is in testing, and have hired external QAers to prevent this type of thing from happening again. I feel like that is the opposite of ignoring.

The game was released on 7/14 on Xbox One. A little earlier on PS4. That's a month and a half ago. What we have heard from Squad is that they are "working on a fix" and that it will be coming "soon". There are a lot more issues with the game then the corrupted save. What we have is a broken game that Microsoft and Sony won't let us return. 

39 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

It takes geologic ages to push ANYTHING through Sony and Microsoft.  After the release fiasco, when Sony held them up weeks for literally no reason, they learned not to make promises on when.  The "when" is something they no longer have control over, not for anything but PC.

There's nothing to say which hasn't already been said in their official releases:  The bugfixes are in with Sony and Microsoft and hopefully they'll let them through eventually.

Other games don't seem to have the same issues. Not sure why you think Squad or Flying Tiger are exempt for any kind of responsibility to put out a reliable, working product. I can't think of a game that released on console in this state and didn't get torn apart by critics and consumers. I personally was not aware of and did not expect to see so many bugs and bad performance overall on console. I thought the game was going to release into the preview program. I have been waiting for it ever since it was announced for console over a year ago. It didn't release into the preview program, it just all the sudden appeared. I bought it day one. The game has a lot of potential to be a lot of fun. And you know, for Science!

The problem is that me and many others feel that KSP in it's current state on console is very lacking, and that it probably shouldn't have been released in it's current state. I personally think it should have released into the preview program where they could have taken their time to develop it for consoles and work out all the bugs and such. That's what most games from smaller companies did that and with great success. That's probably what KSP should have and could have done. Then the customers wouldn't be so upset that they bought a work in progress. 

[ChillingCammy]

1 hour ago, Sonny_Jim said:

 

I nearly recommended this game to an Xbox owning friend, but sadly I'll be telling them not to bother.  I'd like to be able to tell them "Wait until it gets patched, then get it" but I fear that the patch is going to be a long time coming and will probably introduce other problems as well.

I'd say that makes you a good friend. Any one buying this on console will face disappointment. 

 

As I originally asked...

 

Why is this game still being sold on console.

[Corona688]

6 minutes ago, ChillingCammy said:

As I originally asked...

Why is this game still being sold on console.

As originally answered, It takes geologic ages to push ANYTHING through Sony and Microsoft.

Is this making it faster? No.  It doesn't work that way.

Is this shaming Squad into working faster?  No.  It doesn't work that way.

Is there anything we can do to make them faster?  No.  It doesn't work that way.

Does this thread actually help anyone or anything?  No.  It doesn't work that way.

Life doesn't work that way.

We're not there yet.

We're not there yet.

We're not there yet, stop asking.

We'll just have to wait.

Edited August 28, 2016 by Corona688

[ChillingCammy]

This isn't an amusement park. I didn't pay to wait in line. 

 

We will be lawn bowling geriatrics before squad gets their act together... and there will still be those who will put up with the medocreocie!

[Sonny_Jim]

8 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

Is this shaming Squad into working faster? 

Maybe.  As evidence they've purportedly brought in an outside Q&A company, it's threads like these that make Squad sit up and notice that something needs to be done.  As I said before, all the 'old timers' will just sit back and shake their heads as bugs are practically a way of KSP life.

9 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

Does this thread actually help anyone or anything?

Certainly helped me decide not to recommend it to my console owning friends.

 

11 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

We're not there yet.

We're not there yet.

We're not there yet, stop asking.

Funny, you are railing against people who are repeating their same point over and over because of their frustration, yet here you are doing the exact same thing?

12 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

It takes geologic ages to push ANYTHING through Sony and Microsoft.

Because it takes so long to get anything pushed through, this just makes it even worse for me.  They would have known it would take a long time for code to be accepted, yet they decided to submit broken code anyway?

[Corona688]

Just now, Sonny_Jim said:

Maybe.

The bug tracker helps them.  This is just a distraction at best.

[ChillingCammy]

2 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

The bug tracker helps them.  This is just a distraction at best.

 

1 hour ago, Sonny_Jim said:

To make matters worse I believe I read recently there's upwards of *10* different bug reporting systems and the public facing one is in such a mess that 90% of the reports are just being closed.

Which one?

[Corona688]

Even there, people need to hurry up and wait unless they actually have anything to add to the conversation except anger.  If you're not The Hulk, anger doesn't help.  90% of requests are closed because 90% are duplicates and whining.

Edited August 28, 2016 by Corona688

[Sonny_Jim]

1 minute ago, Corona688 said:

The bug tracker helps them

Not really.  As I said before, the bug reporting system is an absolute mess at the moment, so much so that the devs have finally thrown their hands up and said (effectively) that they are just going to mark all the bugs in the current tracker before a 'certain date' as 'solved' unless people actively pursue them to get it fixed.  The bug tracker is a useless way of getting squad to notice problems, as even a cursory glance will show you that very little developers actually look at it.

Here's an example, look through the list of 33 the reported Xbox bugs and see if you can find a single instance of a developer acknowledging a *single* bug:

http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/projects/ksp/issues?utf8=✓&set_filter=1&f[]=status_id&op[status_id]=o&f[]=cf_8&op[cf_8]=%3D&v[cf_8][]=XBoxOne&f[]=&c[]=tracker&c[]=priority&c[]=status&c[]=cf_7&c[]=cf_8&c[]=subject&c[]=assigned_to&c[]=updated_on&c[]=done_ratio&c[]=fixed_version&group_by=

In a way, this announcement is a very good thing as it highlights the fact that the current bug reporting system is not working and desperately needs fixing.  We can both agree on one thing here, which is the current state of bug tracking is poor and needs improvement.

 

2 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

90% of requests are closed because 90% are duplicates and whining.

I see very little in the way of whining in the bug reports, tbh.  Most of the 'whining' goes on in a more publicly accessible place, like this forum or Reddit.  You are trying to blame the users of KSP for something the developers should have sorted out a long time ago, namely the bug tracking process.

[chimpbone]

One really shouldn't have to do work as an investigative journalist before buying a video game, but it seems that there were people worried about this port, and in specific Flying Tiger, at least 9 months ago. I was just looking around the KSP subreddit for anyone talking about anything relating to KSP on console and this is one of the first things I found: Concerns about KSP's console porting/Flyiing Tiger.