Let's appreciate what we have

[Klapaucius]

With the announcement of the new DLC a lot of positive discussion has emerged, but a lot of negative has been rehashed. So, I'd like to officially throw my 2 cents into the opinion well.

 

KSP folks: you have got it good!

 

Think what you have...

 

Yes, there are bugs, but I spend my time building cool planes, enjoying  a fun community and getting to scratch a creative itch with a game that does for me now what Legos did when I was 12.  BTW, when I was a kid, Lego was a big gift at Christmas. I do remember once going with my parents and spending my saved money on the Expert Builder Crane set. That was $30 in 1982!

 

* I paid full price for this game and full price for Making History and I will pay for the new DLC when that comes out. I think that is $60??? Okay, not super cheap, but consider:

* I spent $100 to ski one day at Sugarbush when I was back in New England visiting.

* I currently live in New Zealand. Filling my car costs $NZ80.

* It costs me $NZ70 for subscription fees to play in my community brass band.

* I spend $NZ900 per year to have the Adobe Creative Suite (and let me tell you, it is NOT bug free) and if you think Squad does not listen, try Adobe...

* I just replaced my PC (NZ$2700) which includes a new OEM copy of Windows 10. Uh, bug free???? Not. (And unfortunately, Adobe does not work on Linux).

* I bought Assassin's Creed II on sale for $10. I put in 70 hours. So, 14 cents per hour with minimal replay value. (Not bad, by the way.) I have 1000 hours in KSP.  That's .06 per hour.  If movies were as good a value as KSP, I would've paid 13 cents for the latest Star Wars.

* I just finished Homeworld Remastered. A brilliant game, but already pretty much dead.  Like KSP, it has a devoted following but it is a niche game now.  Gearbox is not doing much of anything with it, and it is pretty much as is.  KSP is still adding content and still supported.

 

So, $20 for a DLC is dirt cheap.  If you can't afford it, well... to be honest, oh well. We all have to prioritize and budget. Skiing, kayaking, trumpet, travel and certain little green aliens are important to me, so I spend money on them. I also live in a very small house, drive a 22 year old car, do not own a cell phone and I rarely go to movies anymore.  We all have to make choices.

 

The fact is, the DLCs are gravy. With no DLCs and no mods, KSP is still very playable. You can still build amazing craft and still experience the joy of discovering the mechanics of space flight. It's not like the core game has been locked behind a paywall, nor is there any pay to win (since there is no win in KSP) going on here (which understandably, is a problem in other games).

 

None of this means we cannot be constructively critical, but making unfounded assumptions about Squad when one is not privy to the inner workings of the developer is not constructive: it is idle speculation with no empirical foundation.  In college I had a professor who delighted in writing ASSERTION in red ink on any sentence in a term paper that was not backed up.  Unless you have hard evidence, don't make assertions.  Some of us have red pens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 8, 2019 by Klapaucius

[RealKerbal3x]

@Klapaucius Agreed! KSP is fantastic value for the amount of fun you get out of it. All told, I've paid about £29 for the game and Making History (because I got a discount when I bought it off GoG.com). I'm going to be paying another £12 for Breaking Ground as soon as I can, so that's £41 for hundreds of hours of gameplay. 

Plus, I can't thank SQUAD enough (no matter how much flak they get with every announcement) for creating and maintaining what is most certainly my favourite game of all time. I'm more than happy to throw some money in their direction every now and then to support continued development of Kerbal.

[Gustone]

It's not the price that matters, but what it does. I'd like to see stock hinges (hopefully without that iva bug) and deployable experiments.

[RizzoTheRat]

KSP cost me less than I paid for 1 beer in Norway.  Admittedly it was a bloody nice beer but it didn't last me anywhere near as long as KSP has.  Dread to think how much beer I've drunk while playing KSP though.

[Xurkitree]

I have it even cheaper, since I live in India. It costs about 12 dollars, quite less than 40 atleast. And the MH Dlc is half that!

I do not regret just leaving Pokemon for nearly a year to just play this. Its been fun.

[Xavven]

Well, I'm sure I'm making some enemies by saying this, but I can't help but notice a sickening sense of entitlement from posts that ask for the DLC to be free, or for the devs to make its features stock at no charge. The devs don't owe us that. They could walk away from KSP, never patch it again, and not even make a sequel. I for one am thankful as &#$% that this game is getting regular updates and DLC, and if I don't like the DLC then nobody is taking away the base game and forcing me to pay for the DLC to keep playing what I've got (but seriously, there is a 100% chance I'm buying Breaking Ground).

[Epicdreamer]

Very nice and a very welcome post Klapausius. Thanks for that. I very much agree about looking at KSP the same way. For the playtime I got out of KSP allready (and not planning to put it away) 'worth the money' is an understatement. KSP is probably the cheapest hobby I ever had! 

[steve_v]

On 5/9/2019 at 1:31 AM, Klapaucius said:

Yes, there are bugs

Bugs happen, that's fine. It's bugs still not getting attention several releases on and improperly squashed bugs recurring repeatedly that pulls my chain.

 

On 5/9/2019 at 1:31 AM, Klapaucius said:

BTW, when I was a kid, Lego was a big gift at Christmas.

Likewise, and it probably still is to some extent. Last time I looked it was still silly expensive (for some cunningly shaped bits of plastic) too...
But let me ask you, how many bugs did your crane kit have? Did it ever crash? I never saw any with my lego sets, even after the dog got a couple of pieces. Not a single CTD.

 

On 5/9/2019 at 1:31 AM, Klapaucius said:

I currently live in New Zealand. Filling my car costs $NZ80.

Likewise, and likewise. Then again, my car is user-serviceable, reverse engineering is not prohibited by some silly licence, it doesn't report my use of it to it's manufacturer, and it has no noticeable bugs at all. A comparison to KSP is a bit of a stretch, IMO.

If you're suggesting that ongoing costs like fuel and subscriptions are a more apt comparison, I have to disagree there as well.
KSP is not a subscription, it's a packaged product sold for a one-off price - like my car, my toaster or that CAD software I bought 15 years ago which still works perfectly to this day.
When buying something on that basis you naturally expect it to work properly from the moment you take possession, without hotfixes, mods or workarounds.
When I have faith that the latest DLC will work properly (as shown by the core game working properly), I'll buy it.
 

On 5/9/2019 at 1:31 AM, Klapaucius said:

I spend $NZ900 per year to have the Adobe Creative Suite

Not likewise. $900/year is ridiculous. I wouldn't pay that for any software, especially not an ongoing subscription.

On 5/9/2019 at 1:31 AM, Klapaucius said:

And unfortunately, Adobe does not work on Linux

Perhaps this ridiculously expensive software is essential to you, but I would most certainly be looking for an alternative, were I in such a position. Frankly, I'd take paper and crayons over having to run Windows all the time.

 

On 5/9/2019 at 1:31 AM, Klapaucius said:

I just finished Homeworld Remastered. A brilliant game, but already pretty much dead.

I have played the original, but last I checked the remaster was incredibly buggy and didn't run on GNU/Linux. Has it improved?

 

On 5/9/2019 at 1:31 AM, Klapaucius said:

So, $20 for a DLC is dirt cheap.

Indeed it is, but for me price is not the issue.
I would love to buy the DLC, but I'm simply not going to until SQUAD fix the GNU/Linux input support regressions they introduced in 1.4. Hell, I'll buy both DLCs at that point.

 

On 5/9/2019 at 1:31 AM, Klapaucius said:

drive a 22 year old car,

Mine are 24 and 58, respectively
I didn't have to pay Jaguar Land Rover Automotive PLC a cent for additional features on my landy though, that's the reverse-engineering bit again.
 

On 5/9/2019 at 1:31 AM, Klapaucius said:

It's not like the core game has been locked behind a paywall, nor is there any pay to win

Indeed
Since 1.4 however, core input support has been locked behind a mod-wall, and SQUAD has done absolutely nothing to fix it properly. I'd do it myself, but there's that licence thing again.*

 

On 5/9/2019 at 1:31 AM, Klapaucius said:

making unfounded assumptions about Squad when one is not privy to the inner workings of the developer is not constructive

I do try to avoid that in my grousing, with mixed success.
On the other hand, I will extensively criticise failures to fix bugs that SQUAD or their associates and upstream suppliers introduce - those involve little speculation, and the longer they go unfixed the greater the criticism. This game is not in beta any more and I do expect it to work properly.
 

*No, mods are not the answer, this should be fixed at the source. I can dismantle the engine in my car and make improvements, but with KSP all we are allowed to do is strap things to the outside. Our only recourse for internal fixes is to pester SQUAD.

-----

 

On 5/9/2019 at 9:08 AM, Xavven said:

I can't help but notice a sickening sense of entitlement from posts that ask for the DLC to be free

Agreed. I have suggested that the DLC ought to be free for a select few though, namely those who bought the defective console port in good-faith. I don't own a console, so... Entitlement by proxy?

 

Edited May 10, 2019 by steve_v

[Klapaucius]

@steve_v

 

All very good points well argued and well-reasoned. I think I was really responding to the "I want everything free" or "Squad is awful" crowd. I just don't think the extreme positions are warranted.  I should also point out that @Gameslinx's original post, while I disagree with many of his points, was also rationally and reasonably put forward.  It was just some of the gripefest in the comments on his thread and underneath the announcement thread were a bit much.

 

At the end of the day, I probably would like a concerted effort to create a KSP II, where they start from scratch and can sort many of these issues out rather than continually patching what they have. Whether that is economically viable is a good question, and I'd probably have mixed feelings about it if there was not a way to have craft from the current version supported in the new.

 

To answer your other question re Homeworld: I did not find too many bugs except one annoying "access violation error" which to be fair, I think is as much a registry issue in Windows as a problem with Homeworld.  It affected saves, so if I loaded a mission from the beginning or usually from an autosave it was not an issue.  I have not played the originals yet, so I cannot compare the gameplay and tactics, and I had never played an RTS prior to these so I am quite the noob.  I did really enjoy Deserts of Kharak.  It's worth at least giving that one a whirl.  

Edited May 10, 2019 by Klapaucius

[steve_v]

8 minutes ago, Klapaucius said:

re Homeworld: I did not find too many bugs except one annoying "access violation error" which to be fair, I think is as much a registry issue in Windows as a problem with Homeworld. 

It was a mess when I tried it, but to be fair it was also in beta. Good to know it came out all right.
I'm still not going to buy it though, due to the lack of a GNU/Linux native port. It would have to be an utterly incredible game for me to break that rule, especially as I already have the original.

 

11 minutes ago, Klapaucius said:

I have not played the originals yet, so I cannot compare the gameplay and tactics

From what I saw in early versions of the remasters they're pretty true to the originals, and the originals were excellent.
 

[MiscelanousItem]

On 5/8/2019 at 3:31 PM, Klapaucius said:

but a lot of negative has been rehashed.

Just to clarify my point in that discussion, I think that Squad is a great developer. However I also think that it would take minimal effort to integrate the terrain scatterers in the vanilla game, and it would make a great difference !

BTW I love your planes @Klapaucius

[Adenosine Triphospate]

I think Squad is actually a pretty good developer, in my experience. For one thing, a lot of suggestions by the community are actually added pretty soon: this is unheard of in some (even more popular) games. I come across comments that say 'why has this update not come out already' or 'just add this and KSP should be instantly better', but really, its so easy to say what could be added and when to add them; I'm sure we all have a small wishlist of changes we would like to see. I don't think many people appreciate how good Squad is in actually coherently listening to the community.

I also don't think its fair to criticise Squad for adding it as a DLC. Firstly, Squad has already been doing us favours by regularly updating the game, but also, as a company, Squad has to find ways of making money off of existing players. Experienced players makes up a huge proportion of the player base (partly due to the rather steep learning curve) so its makes sense to cater for us by releasing a DLC. Also, the amount of hours I have in KSP compared to the money Ive spent works out as about 4p (around $0.06) per hour, I agree that its completely justified to spend a little extra on this amazing DLC.

[Klapaucius]

53 minutes ago, MiscelanousItem said:

 

BTW I love your planes @Klapaucius

Aww shucks....

[Kerbart]

I like the other thread more. It’s given me a large pool of names of people I can contact. I need a cleaner, a baby sitter, a landscaper and someone to clean my pool. And all those folks think it is an outrage that people ask money for doing work; so I assume they all want to volunteer for me! I just have to find out which ones live nearby... Although I’m sure they’re happy to pay travel expenses out of pocket.

On a more serious note, $15 is very little money to support the game. If there were a yearly voluntary funding campaign asking that money for continued development, I’d happily fork it over. Now I get some great content in return.

If people feel “mods can do this,” fine, use those alleged mods instead, but personally I think they are cheap and profiting from others to have 1.8, 1.9 and 1.10 developed. Those updates alone make it worth for me to buy the DLC.

[Gameslinx]

On 5/8/2019 at 2:31 PM, Klapaucius said:

Homeworld Remastered.

Ignoring the tag because I've already expressed my points and here isn't the place to.

Homeworld was/is an awesome game. I played it a lot in my childhood and I probably easily have thousands of hours in it. Sadly, nobody has the time anymore to play Homeworld Remastered. You usually had to shell out an entire evening for a good skirmish. Good memories, though. I still play it on and off. 

[Rocket In My Pocket]

To touch on both points in this thread;

Yes, we should be thankful for what we have, KSP has managed to stay "alive" for far longer than it had any right to, and the dev's need more money if they intend to continue, which means they need to produce and sell more content. This is a given.

Homeworld, it's sequel, and Deserts of Kharak are all awesome. (The original Homeworld is still my favorite though.)

[Mikenike]

On 5/8/2019 at 10:16 AM, RealKerbal3x said:

@Klapaucius Agreed! KSP is fantastic value for the amount of fun you get out of it. All told, I've paid about £29 for the game and Making History (because I got a discount when I bought it off GoG.com). I'm going to be paying another £12 for as soon as I can, so that's £41 for hundreds of hours of gameplay. 

Plus, I can't thank SQUAD enough (no matter how much flak they get with every announcement) for creating and maintaining what is most certainly my favourite game of all time. I'm more than happy to throw some money in their direction every now and then to support continued development of Kerbal.

When (if) is the new KSP DLC coming for EE version of KSP? And yes @RealKerbal3x I agree with you I would gladly throw some money in to get some new things for KSP (last night I built a Saturn 5 mock up with a few changes. I will dicuss that on my status feed I am working on) and I would really like to se new robotics features added to Xbox and Playstation because you PC players ( I find nothing wrong with PC player or game play, I play STORMWORKS on STEAM) have gotten more features because you have a PC with a group of people who let you share things and Microsofts strict limits on mods and sharing things. Besides, you  guys have had it longer.

4 hours ago, Kerbart said:

On a more serious note, $15 is very little money to support the game. If there were a yearly voluntary funding campaign asking that money for continued development, I’d happily fork it over. Now I get some great content in return.

I competely agree with you @Kerbart. I would happily fork money over because I know it would be a good ivestment with an even better return.

[Xavven]

4 hours ago, Kerbart said:

If there were a yearly voluntary funding campaign asking that money for continued development, I’d happily fork it over. Now I get some great content in return.

Honestly I think I would too. I can't say that about any other game in my library....

I pay $300 per year for an archery club membership and I still feel that's a good deal. Video games are just so damned inexpensive.

Edited May 10, 2019 by Xavven

[Mikenike]

@Xavven That is completely true.

[MR L A]

On 5/10/2019 at 7:37 AM, steve_v said:

it's a packaged product sold for a one-off price - like my car, my toaster or that CAD software I bought 15 years ago which still works perfectly to this day.
When buying something on that basis you naturally expect it to work properly from the moment you take possession, without hotfixes, mods or workarounds.

This would be valid... except we're talking about software so it is entirely invalid. You find me one piece of software without bugs even after years of updates and I'll find you a unicorn. Having said that, your point is kind of silly anyway... find me a car that doesn't have weird hardware bugs like a specific tire that wears quicker than the rest, or a wiper that doesn't work as well as the other, vents that don't blow equally etc etc. You're suggesting something that is naive and fantastical AND ignores the reality of the world we live in.

[linuxgurugamer]

On 5/10/2019 at 2:37 AM, steve_v said:

Since 1.4 however, core input support has been locked behind a mod-wall, and SQUAD has done absolutely nothing to fix it properly. I'd do it myself, but there's that licence thing again.*

Really?  Then how do you explain AdvancedFlyByWire?  I'll admit it's having an issue on Linux, but that's because I don't have a linux box to test on (or time)  But it works fine on Windows

[steve_v]

14 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

Then how do you explain AdvancedFlyByWire?

Fix != work around with a mod. 
I can't have the source for Unitys input stack, so I can't fix it. I'm not allowed to decompile or reverse-engineer it either, apparently.

Mods are all well and good, but USB HID support is a core game-engine function. It should be fixed in the game engine, or failing that, by an official workaround shipped with the game.
Expecting users to install 3rd-party mods to fix a regression in basic engine functionality is ridiculous.

 

14 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

But it works fine on Windows

That's nice.
I'm not running windows, and frankly I'd rather delete the game and forget about it than go there.

Evidently SQUAD likes the "but it works fine on windows" approach too... Even when it doesn't really "work fine" there either.

Edited May 13, 2019 by steve_v

[KerikBalm]

On 5/10/2019 at 10:01 AM, Klapaucius said:

To answer your other question re Homeworld: I did not find too many bugs except one annoying "access violation error" which to be fair, I think is as much a registry issue in Windows as a problem with Homeworld.  It affected saves, so if I loaded a mission from the beginning or usually from an autosave it was not an issue.  I have not played the originals yet, so I cannot compare the gameplay and tactics, and I had never played an RTS prior to these so I am quite the noob.  I did really enjoy Deserts of Kharak.  It's worth at least giving that one a whirl.  

I played the original, hw2, and briefly the remastered. I was pretty dissapointed that HW1 was redone in the HW2 game engine... while I liked HW2 as well, HW1 just felt wrong in the HW game engine. HW2 just "rolled" numbers to see if there were hits (guns had a fixed chance to hit fighters, for example), in HW1, they actually calculated the trajectories of projectiles, so you could micro the heck out of fighters (rapidly switching formations, and formations had a much bigger impact than in HW2, especially for fighters) to cause incoming fire to miss. You could buy time for reenforcements putting your fighters on evasive (where they do random evasive maneuvers that had the effect of maxing them harder to hit), you could minimize the amount of fire that lands by not having your fighters approach head one... etc.

HW2 simplified the strike craft mechanics a whole lot. Gone were the Corvette walls backed by a support frigate (or even earlier, repair corvettes), the taii defense field frigate acted completely different... Each game had their strengths, but HW1 is not HW1 when done on the HW2 game engine

... just remembered another cool thing from HW 1, The way ion cannon beams caused electrical storms when they contacted gas/dust clouds. Normally an ICF had no chance against fighters, but if it was at a resource node with those around ,you could manually target them, and start frying the fighters from environmental damage... nothing like that in HW2...

 

Anyway, KSP is a great game, its given me a lot of value for the cost. I'll buy the DLC

[Klapaucius]

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

I played the original, hw2, and briefly the remastered. I was pretty dissapointed that HW1 was redone in the HW2 game engine... while I liked HW2 as well, HW1 just felt wrong in the HW game engine. HW2 just "rolled" numbers to see if there were hits (guns had a fixed chance to hit fighters, for example), in HW1, they actually calculated the trajectories of projectiles, so you could micro the heck out of fighters (rapidly switching formations, and formations had a much bigger impact than in HW2, especially for fighters) to cause incoming fire to miss. You could buy time for reenforcements putting your fighters on evasive (where they do random evasive maneuvers that had the effect of maxing them harder to hit), you could minimize the amount of fire that lands by not having your fighters approach head one... etc.

HW2 simplified the strike craft mechanics a whole lot. Gone were the Corvette walls backed by a support frigate (or even earlier, repair corvettes), the taii defense field frigate acted completely different... Each game had their strengths, but HW1 is not HW1 when done on the HW2 game engine

... just remembered another cool thing from HW 1, The way ion cannon beams caused electrical storms when they contacted gas/dust clouds. Normally an ICF had no chance against fighters, but if it was at a resource node with those around ,you could manually target them, and start frying the fighters from environmental damage... nothing like that in HW2...

 

Anyway, KSP is a great game, its given me a lot of value for the cost. I'll buy the DLC

I'm planning on playing the classic at some point.  BTW: I started a Homeworld discussion--mostly factfinding before I ever bought the game, but it has expanded a little bit: