Career contracts keep getting even worse, please stop already!

[Rejected Spawn]

I've been bringing this up more than once but since it seemingly falls on deaf ears every single time you leave me little choice but to reiterate: Adding MORE contract types WITHOUT adding any way for the player to STOP the undesirable ones from respawning endlessly is a nightmare. With the addition of EVA contracts in 1.11 things have gotten near unbearable, my career profile now has horrible reputation because the game keeps shoving contracts in my face that I either hate so much that I'd rather not even play the game or ones that I can't even complete due to lack of flight skills. Numerous suggestions for improvements to the contract system have been made numerous times, at this point I don't even have the patience left to be polite about this and list the best ones.

Additionally the tourism contracts are still bugged, the ones that generate when other contracts complete (not the ones that generate when you decline a contract) have roughly a flat 1% probability of not spawning one of the tourists if you accept the contract.

Also, anyone about to say "there's a mod for that" please just stop. I don't want to play modded and I don't need to justify this to you.

[jimmymcgoochie]

How about you either a) don’t play career mode (no contracts, no problem), b) turn off contract decline penalties (no penalty, no problem) or c) just do what everyone keeps suggesting, and use the mods that will stop those contracts appearing. Or you can d) just keep on complaining about the problem instead of lifting a finger to fix it, your call.

Edited February 21, 2021 by jimmymcgoochie

[paul_c]

There is also the option to "git gud" and learn how to do those contracts you find "undesirable".

It is not a race, there is no timer - you can spend a day, or 2 minutes, on each contract and achieve something you want to.

[swjr-swis]

To quote directly from your own words:

12 hours ago, Rejected Spawn said:

the contract system

12 hours ago, Rejected Spawn said:

is a nightmare.

Unfortunately that's what we're stuck with in stock. It's an understandable construct to provide the game with some procedural content and variety, and with some workarounds one can avoid/correct some of the biggest annoyances of it and still enjoy what it provides. Ultimately though, it really needs replacement by a fundamentally different system. I don't think we can expect that in KSP anymore; KSP2 will be different, but that will be its own game.

I play pure stock, too. Personally, I have long ago decided that to keep using contracts and still enjoy a career game without undue frustrations, and regardless of any other difficulty setting, 'Decline Penalty' needs to be 0. Nonsense or futile contracts are bound to happen from time to time, and I have to be able to dismiss them without penalty or having to wait for them to time out on their own. In addition, I have no qualms about using the Contracts tab in the mod-F12 menu to clear a particularly bad set of contracts and generate new ones. This way, I keep the frustrations to a minimum without having to resort to mods.

 

[Rejected Spawn]

1 hour ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

How about you either a) don’t play career mode (no contracts, no problem), b) turn off contract decline penalties (no penalty, no problem) or c) just do what everyone keeps suggesting, and use the mods that will stop those contracts appearing. Or you can d) just keep on complaining about the problem instead of lifting a finger to fix it, your call.

To adress this in turn. (A) I don't want to be handed infinite resources for free forever, only one game mode offers this. (B) You do realise that this section of the forum is for suggestions of improvements and fixes to the actual game itself, right? (C) Not even gonna comment on this, also see point B. (D) See point B.

1 hour ago, paul_c said:

There is also the option to "git gud" and learn how to do those contracts you find "undesirable".

It is not a race, there is no timer - you can spend a day, or 2 minutes, on each contract and achieve something you want to.

Yeah I still have under 2000 hours of play time in KSP but oh so luckily they give me decades to complete a task I would hate every second of doing for the 50 attempts it takes me to actually complete. Maybe you need to take a good long moment and think about players who are stuck in front of games all day because of disabilites, are we supposed to git gud at medicine and surgically alter our bodies until we can play the game as amazingly good as you clearly can? For the record I don't feel inclined to read and much less respond to any further comment down this path so don't trouble yourself.

42 minutes ago, swjr-swis said:

-- it really needs replacement by a fundamentally different system. I don't think we can expect that in KSP anymore; KSP2 will be different, but that will be its own game.

I play pure stock, too. Personally, I have long ago decided that to keep using contracts and still enjoy a career game without undue frustrations, and regardless of any other difficulty setting--

 

Agreed that a different system would be an ideal solution but there's still enormous room for improvement and not all of it is particularly hard to implement, but I get the impression that career is "unpopular and therefore does not get improved" while being "unpopular because it needs to be improved"... Anyway since KSP2 is still at least a year away and they claim to want to keep supporting KSP1 even after that point I think it's still highly relevant to request improvements and provide feedback on things that really get on players nerves. Not to say I'll ever waste another second on KSP1 after KSP2 finally drops but some players still will, not everyone is after the futuristic stuff and not everyone painlessly spends money on games so there will surely be some that stick around for years.

I'm tempted to dump the penalty as well, though it would pain me since I couldn't then claim to be strictly sticking to the difficulty setting I've chosen, there should be some way to take a one time massive reputation penalty for blocking any specific contract type instead. Alternatively just offer a lot more contracts (about 100-200 of them split into multiple tabs) or maybe do a PR campaign through the strategy interface to explosively increase generation of specific contracts while taking a penalty to their profitability. There's no shortage of solutions, many of which don't even involve much effort at all compared to how much goes into improving random little bits all over the game, I'm seriously just baffled by the development focus being so averse to doing even the slightest bit of work to alleviate the worst issues.

[king of nowhere]

2 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

b) turn off contract decline penalties (no penalty, no problem)

8 minutes ago, Rejected Spawn said:

 (B) You do realise that this section of the forum is for suggestions of improvements and fixes to the actual game itself, right?

does it really need to be fixed, though? just because you, personally, do not like it, and do not like any of the suggested solution, it does not mean the game should be changed. as suggested, you can turn off decline penalties, and this way you won't have any problem rejecting those contracts.

admittedly i have not followed the discussions on reforming the contract system, as i stopped playing career six months ago. still, i am pretty sure there must be people enjoying the current contract system, and randomly changing it would liquid those people.

I will also point out that you don't even need to decline a contract. just wait a few days without accepting it, and the contract will disappear by itself, without any penalty. and the game will gradually stop giving you contracts if you stop accepting them.

Frankly, i don't see the problem with contracts. you are 100% free to pick the contracts you want to pick. you are free to decline them without penalty, you are free to let them expire without penalty. if you still decide that you want to get penalties for declining them, that's on you. in which case, though, you cannot complain that the game is broken.

[Rejected Spawn]

To follow up on that: the contract system keeps geeting even more contracts with major updates (hence the titel of this thread) and they already overwhelm the contract system, plus they never go away, they drop in number to a quite noticeable degree when declined enough (not enough to not just check them) and contracts that keep getting accepted will increase in number but this is only a moderate increase. The problem is that once you go literally anywhere or do literally anything the entire contract list explodes with stuff that individually drops in recurrence but the sheer number of different ones that vye for attention is causing the pathetically tiny number of contracts on offer at any one time to simply not list much of any desirable type for any player not interested in being a slave to insane irrational randomness. Personally I like to do tourism contracts and a few more types but it's not even profitable to send a rocket with just the tourists from a single contract so of course I try to get more of them... I've had instances where I spent more time declining other contracts than acually flying the tourists. Not even kidding. This was after trying as hard as possible to drop the recurrence of verything else to rock bottom and raising the tourism contracts as high as possible by never declining any contracts (except the 1% that gets bugged) and I still got dozens of identical "plant a flag on Bill's forehead and take 86000 temperature measurements for each micrometer as he falls from an altitude of 3000 above that one speck of dirt to the left of a tree up the mountan in the distance" and it's absolutely maddening.

I can very much state that the game is broken, when I get the same contract I've never once accepted in 1000+ hours respawning in my face 6 times in a row after I already declined it a few dozen times in the last hour.

[swjr-swis]

A way to directly pick which types of contracts we want or not to be generated would certainly be a welcome addition, and might alleviate most of the aggravation you mention. If there is any (development) room for such a thing to still appear in KSP, I'd be all for it.

[Guest]

Why not just ignore the contracts you're not interested in, and wait for better ones to pop up? There's no decline penalty for that.

[king of nowhere]

19 hours ago, Rejected Spawn said:

To follow up on that: the contract system keeps geeting even more contracts with major updates (hence the titel of this thread) and they already overwhelm the contract system, plus they never go away, they drop in number to a quite noticeable degree when declined enough (not enough to not just check them) and contracts that keep getting accepted will increase in number but this is only a moderate increase. The problem is that once you go literally anywhere or do literally anything the entire contract list explodes with stuff that individually drops in recurrence but the sheer number of different ones that vye for attention is causing the pathetically tiny number of contracts on offer at any one time to simply not list much of any desirable type for any player not interested in being a slave to insane irrational randomness. Personally I like to do tourism contracts and a few more types but it's not even profitable to send a rocket with just the tourists from a single contract so of course I try to get more of them... I've had instances where I spent more time declining other contracts than acually flying the tourists. Not even kidding. This was after trying as hard as possible to drop the recurrence of verything else to rock bottom and raising the tourism contracts as high as possible by never declining any contracts (except the 1% that gets bugged) and I still got dozens of identical "plant a flag on Bill's forehead and take 86000 temperature measurements for each micrometer as he falls from an altitude of 3000 above that one speck of dirt to the left of a tree up the mountan in the distance" and it's absolutely maddening.

 

ok, for the part that some contracts never go away, do you mean that you keep getting contracts of the same type, or that the very same contract stays there? in the second case, it could very well be a bug. i read some other bug reports from contracts in the last version. in the first case, ok, we have pinned on something you'd want that would be ok with other players: a possibility to switch off completely some kind of contracts. yes, i agree it would be a good thing.

anyway, you can also use the alt-f12 debug menu to delete contracts or create new contracts. but it's harder work, and some may consider it cheating.

I still think, though, that you're using the wrong options for this game: you say that there are very few types of contracts that you like, yet you want to keep playing career. well, the moment i was in a similar situation as you, getting bored by most regular contracts, was the moment i stopped playing career and went looking for more stimulating stuff. career is great to gradually introduce new players to gradual complexity, but once one is experienced, it's basically the same old stuff over and over. perhaps it is time for you too to make the transition to challenges?

[Kerbal game lover]

Hi, I have a problem with the world record breaking contracts. I don't like the ideea of docking in orbit as a world record breaking contract. That should be connected to fly by, orbiting or landing on planets or satelites. And also I think those kind of cotracts need to be arranged in the order of difficulty. They can't ask you to land and return from Eve immediatly after you landed on Minmus.

Edited February 22, 2021 by Kerbal game lover
forgot a word

[AlpacaMall]

49 minutes ago, Kerbal game lover said:

They can't ask you to land and return from Eve immediatly after you landed on Minmus.

While this is off topic, this. Eve is always the first place I'm sent out of Kerbin's SOI, and an Eve return is completely impractical for someone who's being guided along by the contracts.

[Krazy1]

IMO turning off the contract penalty is not cheating; it's a bug workaround. 

On 2/22/2021 at 4:03 PM, AlpacaMall said:

While this is off topic, this. Eve is always the first place I'm sent out of Kerbin's SOI, and an Eve return is completely impractical for someone who's being guided along by the contracts.

I'm annoyed by all the Eve contracts I'm getting. I've got 84% rep doing Kerbin SOI stuff and unlocked the tech tree, now ALL of the interplanetary missions are to Eve. Why? In the last 30 contracts offered I probably got 8 to Eve and the rest around Kerbin. I'm nowhere close to an Eve launch window. I would be OK with completely random contracts to all locations.