Parts and Circumstance

[uglyduckling81]

New all time low player count today.

101.

The community did a good job this week stopping it from getting down to double digits.

[gussi111]

6 hours ago, uglyduckling81 said:

New all time low player count today.

101.

The community did a good job this week stopping it from getting down to double digits.

"Let's shoot for 90!"

[Meecrob]

15 hours ago, cocoscacao said:

If you mean bug reports to be feedback, those two are different things imo. Forum is a good place to cheer/boo some game mechanics, while bug reporting is nice, most of us probably can't do it in the same way QA team does. But even such reports can give them insights how often something happens. 

I know what you mean, but I chose to use the devs verbiage, since I am not completely sure what they want either. I was using the fact that Darrin wrote a lengthy post instructing us as to how to most effectively report bugs as an indication that they want bug reports.

 

This does not respond to @Periple's argument, here: 

On 5/31/2023 at 6:35 AM, Periple said:

...it would reveal way too much including information you might not be legally allowed to disclose (e.g. personal information of devs working on it).

Then please explain to me how it is necessary to release this information. If I am reporting a bug, why does IG need to tell me anything? Why would anyone have to release personal information?

[snip]

Edited June 1, 2023 by Starhawk
Redacted by moderator

[RocketRockington]

6 hours ago, uglyduckling81 said:

New all time low player count today.

101.

The community did a good job this week stopping it from getting down to double digits.

I don't think these numbers are at all meaningful anymore.  First, because now even a small group of players or developers could meaningfully impact the #.  IG leaving thier machines running it all night could be half that number though I doubt they're doing that.

  Second because clearly IG is going to keep KSP2 on at least some form of life support. It seems like they have another Kerbal project cooking so instead of a cancellation from low sales, which would abandon the IP and sabotage the franchise T2 paid for, we may instead see a stealth abandonment, with ever less work being done over longer time frames. 

[Periple]

41 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

Then please explain to me how it is necessary to release this information. If I am reporting a bug, why does IG need to tell me anything? Why would anyone have to release personal information?

Because that’s how bug trackers work. It depends on what you’re using of course but if you want to hide information selectively you might end up having to do a quite a lot of work, like coding up a whole new UI against the tracker’s integration API. Would you rather have the coders do that or work on the game?

You could set up something simple like an email integration that logs issues but then it wouldn’t be a public tracker anymore as you — the submitter — wouldn’t be able to see the status of the bugs you submitted. 

None of this is impossible but it does involve effort which could be more productively spent in other ways. 

Edit: What I'm pointing out is just this: running a public bug tracker for an EA is a quite a lot of effort for little return. Even if you solve the infosec issues, you're going to have to have someone do basically a full-time job going through the submissions and triaging them -- binning the completely useless ones that are just complaints or whining, identifying the duplicates and linking them up to the original issue, finding the ones that might actually be useful and then asking the submitters for more info, and finally flagging the issues that are actually good enough that the programmers can act on them and moving them to the internal tracker where they eventually land on their desk.

This individual needs to be a competent QA or they wouldn't be able to do this work in the first place. And if you took that competent QA and put them to work doing QA on the game, they would certainly be able to find and log a much larger number of more useful bug reports than they would by trawling through reports by the general public.

I.e. a public bug tracker is a really inefficient way to do QA. It only makes sense for the optics, to make fans feel like they're contributing. The occasional actually useful report is a bonus. 

Edited June 1, 2023 by Periple

[Bej Kerman]

56 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

  Second because clearly IG is going to keep KSP2 on at least some form of life support. It seems like they have another Kerbal project cooking so instead of a cancellation from low sales, which would abandon the IP and sabotage the franchise T2 paid for, we may instead see a stealth abandonment, with ever less work being done over longer time frames. 

No citation, as usual. Just blind fear-mongering speculation.

[PDCWolf]

1 hour ago, Periple said:

Because that’s how bug trackers work. It depends on what you’re using of course but if you want to hide information selectively you might end up having to do a quite a lot of work, like coding up a whole new UI against the tracker’s integration API. Would you rather have the coders do that or work on the game?

You could set up something simple like an email integration that logs issues but then it wouldn’t be a public tracker anymore as you — the submitter — wouldn’t be able to see the status of the bugs you submitted. 

None of this is impossible but it does involve effort which could be more productively spent in other ways.

The productivity gain from a proper bug reporting system is clearly superior to keeping everything hush hush, that's why platforms like gits and such use it. Being able to see your bug is reported, being able to add to a lackluster report, being able to interconnect bugs in ways the QA team haven't even been able to decipher but thousands (or well, a hundred) players can, is invaluable.

Assuming everyone is gonna make bad reports or that QAs are some sort of gods is just two sides of the same bad argument.

1 hour ago, Periple said:

Even if you solve the infosec issues, you're going to have to have someone do basically a full-time job going through the submissions and triaging them -- binning the completely useless ones that are just complaints or whining, identifying the duplicates and linking them up to the original issue, finding the ones that might actually be useful and then asking the submitters for more info, and finally flagging the issues that are actually good enough that the programmers can act on them and moving them to the internal tracker where they eventually land on their desk.

This is literally what they do internally already.

1 hour ago, Periple said:

This individual needs to be a competent QA or they wouldn't be able to do this work in the first place. And if you took that competent QA and put them to work doing QA on the game, they would certainly be able to find and log a much larger number of more useful bug reports than they would by trawling through reports by the general public.

This individual might be better at formulating reports, but will never be able to reach the same capacity for finding bugs that three-or-more-digits number of players would have.

 

[Periple]

20 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

This individual might be better at formulating reports, but will never be able to reach the same capacity for finding bugs that three-or-more-digits number of players would have.

Suppose they're able to go triage, connect, and flesh out 20 public bug reports a day, out of which 1 will be actionable*.

Suppose the same individual is able to log 5 actionable bug reports a day if they're doing QA.

Which of these activities yields more actionable bug reports, triaging the public bug tracker, or doing QA?

*actionable means (1) not a duplicate and (2) well-enough written that a programmer is able to work on it.

[RocketRockington]

33 minutes ago, Periple said:

Suppose they're able to go triage, connect, and flesh out 20 public bug reports a day, out of which 1 will be actionable*.

Suppose the same individual is able to log 5 actionable bug reports a day if they're doing QA.

Which of these activities yields more actionable bug reports, triaging the public bug tracker, or doing QA?

*actionable means (1) not a duplicate and (2) well-enough written that a programmer is able to work on it.

Except someone can read through and triage 100's of user reported bugs in a day (I know, I've done it before for a live services title). 

And some of those bugs will be something only the community might generate, because users have a wider range of system specs and play styles than a small internal QA team.

It of course depends on just how buggy the game is - if the game is extremely buggy like KSP2 is currently, I agree its not that productive because the bugs are very apparent and the bottleneck is more on fixing them and regressing the game.  But when the game gets more stable, it can be of use.

Edited June 1, 2023 by RocketRockington

[darthgently]

What if QA, devs, and other bug reporters could rate the quality and importance of a bug report and the bug reports could be sorted by QA rating, or dev rating, or other bug reporter rating, or overall rating? 

This would make it more manageable in finding good reports and give feedback to reporters about how helpful their report appears to others

Edited June 1, 2023 by darthgently

[PDCWolf]

1 hour ago, Periple said:

Suppose they're able to go triage, connect, and flesh out 20 public bug reports a day, out of which 1 will be actionable*.

Suppose the same individual is able to log 5 actionable bug reports a day if they're doing QA.

Which of these activities yields more actionable bug reports, triaging the public bug tracker, or doing QA?

*actionable means (1) not a duplicate and (2) well-enough written that a programmer is able to work on it.

So, we're assuming the bugtracker produces no actionable reports, subpar reports get ignored (instead of being used as guidance for QA routines), no investigation is done, and such. To put it another way: Yes, if you ignore every benefit, I can 100% agree that private QA will be better.

In real life however, having 200 people running the same product (PD is about 20 people, how many of them do QA? how much is outsourced?) will yield a much higher number reports, a much higher chance of finding interconnected issues, a priceless resource to guide QA on the creation of testing routines and investigation pathways, and a huge timesaver when those reports are useful, which is infinitely more likely when thousands of people play your game vs 10 or even 100 QA people that, judging by the present bugs, don't even leave Kerbin without the debug menu.

[Spicat]

31 minutes ago, darthgently said:

What if QA, devs, and other bug reporters could rate the quality and importance of a bug report and the bug reports could be sorted by QA rating, or dev rating, or other bug reporter rating, or overall rating? 

This would make it more manageable in finding good reports and give feedback to reporters about how helpful their report appears to others

Some changes are being made to the bug reports forum section, ask it there:

 

Edited June 1, 2023 by Spicat

[Sylvi Fisthaug]

[snip]

Ok, sorry for making you feel this way. 
Feel free to highlight sentences or something else about my post where I make you feel this way.
I always like learning new things, and I try to strive for being better every day. 
I have no idea if my post encourages healthy debate [snip]. 

Anyway... feel free to quote my posts! Didn't see your reply before now, as I didn't get any notifications. 

5 hours ago, Meecrob said:

Then please explain to me how it is necessary to release this information. If I am reporting a bug, why does IG need to tell me anything? Why would anyone have to release personal information?

Here I agree with you wholeheartedly. In my opinion, a "like" from anyone of the community managers would make wonders in the bug section.
Does not take any time what so ever from importan game dev work.
Also means that they have read your post, and does not give any information regarding which dev doing what work. 
A community manager reading my post would at least make me happy.

Edited June 1, 2023 by Starhawk
Redacted by moderator

[cocoscacao]

5 hours ago, Meecrob said:

I know what you mean, but I chose to use the devs verbiage, since I am not completely sure what they want either. I was using the fact that Darrin wrote a lengthy post instructing us as to how to most effectively report bugs as an indication that they want bug reports.

There have been a couple of counter args to that post from some  "prominent players". I'm not gonna discourage anybody... Do keep trying to meet that standard, but the fact is, most of us, casual players, once we encounter a bug, can't figure out the frequency, nor the exact steps required to reproduce it. We are not the QA team, and we're playing for our own entertainment.

Quote

Are you not entertained!? Are you not entertained??? - Maximus Decimus Meridius

Edited June 1, 2023 by cocoscacao

[RocketRockington]

2 hours ago, darthgently said:

What if QA, devs, and other bug reporters could rate the quality and importance of a bug report and the bug reports could be sorted by QA rating, or dev rating, or other bug reporter rating, or overall rating? 

This would make it more manageable in finding good reports and give feedback to reporters about how helpful their report appears to others

That already happened with the KSP public bug tracker.  People would upvotr and comment on bugs.  And like all big trackers, when you triage them, you mark bugs with various statuses - priority, severity, what state they are in the pipeline, whether they need more info, etc.  None of this was rocket science.  

[Pthigrivi]

I'm very lucky. I've worked for very small companies my whole life (5-15 employees). I know the world of quarterly reports and investor meetings 2'nd hand from clients. Its hard to imagine the pressure on middle-management, but damn, middle management is where the world happens for good or bad. Someone should have postponed this game till June or September so that the bug-shock wasn't so high. I'm sure that would have been hard for a zillion reasons. But this can't be the optimized outcome from literally any perspective. Whoever it was, probably someone high up up at T2, to force an alpha release in March was cruel, irresponsible, and shortsighted. I love Nate. I love Shana and the folks from Squad and everyone who poured their souls into this thing over the last several years. They got done dirty and I hate it. 

Edited June 2, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[RocketRockington]

38 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I'm very lucky. I've worked for very small companies my whole life (5-15 employees). I know the world of quarterly reports and investor meetings 2'nd hand from clients. Its hard to imagine the pressure on middle-management, but damn, middle management is where the world happens for good or bad. Someone should have postponed this game till June or September so that the bug-shock wasn't so high. I'm sure that would have been hard for a zillion reasons. But this can't be the optimized outcome from literally any perspective. Whoever it was, probably someone high up up at T2, to force an alpha release in March was cruel, irresponsible, and shortsighted. I love Nate. I love Shana and the folks from Squad and everyone who poured their souls into this thing over the last several years. They got done dirty and I hate it. 

I think they should have just kept updating KSP, not announce KSP2 until it was genuinely 6 months from a solid 1.0  release (so... maybe 2028 or so) and we'd have KSP version 1.30 + a couple more good DLCs + even more and better mods as the community interest in KSP1 wouldn't have declined - and then KSP2 would be this awesome new thing.

Unfortunately, T2 wouldn't go for not booking revenue on a project for 10+ years.

[Meecrob]

3 hours ago, cocoscacao said:

There have been a couple of counter args to that post from some  "prominent players". I'm not gonna discourage anybody... Do keep trying to meet that standard, but the fact is, most of us, casual players, once we encounter a bug, can't figure out the frequency, nor the exact steps required to reproduce it. We are not the QA team, and we're playing for our own entertainment.

I totally get it. Maybe I'm about to sound like a noob, but like maybe they could say "we are trying to squash X bug. Everyone if you want, try this and tell us what you get, and post it in Darrin's format"? I dunno, I just find this argument that all players are too stupid to make bug reports is not um...progressing the discussion. We want a better game. Some think a public bugtracker would help. I think everyone just wants this game to be better.

 

Or if public bug reports are so bad, then stop the (hypothetical) charade, if you can't use them.

Edited June 2, 2023 by Meecrob

[Pthigrivi]

59 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

I think they should have just kept updating KSP, not announce KSP2 until it was genuinely 6 months from a solid 1.0  release (so... maybe 2028 or so) and we'd have KSP version 1.30 + a couple more good DLCs + even more and better mods as the community interest in KSP1 wouldn't have declined - and then KSP2 would be this awesome new thing.

Unfortunately, T2 wouldn't go for not booking revenue on a project for 10+ years.

No, and I'm sorry I have been in and out on the board recently but the fundamental code for KSP1 was deeply borked in ways that made (seemingly) simple things like deep subassembly management, interstellar scales, multiplayer, and axial tilt nearly impossible. I'm all for the ground-up rebuild. It needed to happen. And all of the basic design ideas we heard from Nate and Crew about how KSP2 could be were 100% on point. I think a lot of people honestly just underestimated how much Squad accomplished. So many people were like "Oh finally a 'Professional development team' will finally solve these insanely hard problems that Squad in their naive bravery just dove into to mixed but amazing results. There are two separate questions here: what is KSP2 meant to be? and how long will that take? I think everyone from Intercept answered the first question in all the right ways. The vision and roadmap are perfect. I can't say because I don't know, but I bet the latter question just wasn't up to them for a few very important reasons: 1) KSP as an idea: infinitely reconfigurable Lego machines operating on interplanetary/interstellar scales  presents about a thousand unique fundamental mathematical problems and UI challenges that take a long, long time to solve no matter how you slice it. 2) Unsolved problems take unknowable time to solve. 3) Capital idiots and quarterly returns rule the financial world right now. Investors by nature want fast returns even if it kills the company and the people who produce it. They don't care about value. They don't care about sustainable growth. The investor zeitgeist is suck the money out as fast as you can before the world burns. The game is in the state it is not because Nate is a liar, not because all of the incredible people buried under a mountain of bug reports don't care, but because vampires need to suck money out of the system faster than it can live. 

Edited June 2, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[Periple]

6 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

And some of those bugs will be something only the community might generate, because users have a wider range of system specs and play styles than a small internal QA team.

It of course depends on just how buggy the game is - if the game is extremely buggy like KSP2 is currently, I agree its not that productive because the bugs are very apparent and the bottleneck is more on fixing them and regressing the game.  But when the game gets more stable, it can be of use.

This is true, if the game is stable and most bugs are hard to find edge cases, a public bug tracker will have a radically better signal to noise ratio and will be much more useful.

[Meecrob]

9 minutes ago, Periple said:

This is true, if the game is stable and most bugs are hard to find edge cases, a public bug tracker will have a radically better signal to noise ratio and will be much more useful.

What game are you playing? The overriding feedback for KSP2 is bugs. Too many threads I have read have something said about how someone encountered a bug. Like, c'mon.

Edited June 2, 2023 by Meecrob

[Periple]

2 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

What game are you playing? The overriding feedback for KSP2 is bugs. Every thread I read has something said about how someone encountered a bug. Like, c'mon.

Yes! This is why a public bug tracker for it makes no sense, it will just be full of raging and duplicates!

[Meecrob]

7 minutes ago, Periple said:

Yes! This is why a public bug tracker for it makes no sense, it will just be full of raging and duplicates!

This is not a bug tracker thread, if that is your assertion.

Please understand that I agree with you that a flood of bad bug reports is worse than none at all.

I just don't get why it would not be advantageous to centralize bugs. if only to encounter one, go to report it, and see its already reported, so you can just click on the hypothetical button so the devs can see the rate each bug is encountered. Like I said, maybe I'm a moron, I dunno.

Edited June 2, 2023 by Meecrob

[RocketRockington]

32 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

No, and I'm sorry I have been in and out on the board recently but the fundamental code for KSP1 was deeply borked in ways that made (seemingly) simple things like deep subassembly management, interstellar scales, multiplayer, and axial tilt nearly impossible.

Have you played any KSP mods?  This narrative of how broken KSP1 was and that we need clean code for the future is both clearly falsified by all the mods that have managed to do so many more things with KSP - plus the fact that Squad was constantly adding new features on a relatively fast clip given their team size - and by the fact that the 'pro devs' (poorly) copied most of Squads solutions, borked up half the things that they tried to do over, and generally did not come up with a better code base per the people who have data mined it - despite all the time and advantages given to the project.  

The overall assessment of T2 = bad, Intercept =  good always baffled me as nothing seems further from the truth.  What exactly do you base that on?  What would a good publisher have done with a developer that was delaying over and over?  What would a bad developer look like that is worse than what Intercept has managed?

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, RocketRockington said:

Have you played any KSP mods?  This narrative of how broken KSP1 was and that we need clean code for the future is both clearly falsified by all the mods that have managed to do so many more things with KSP - plus the fact that Squad was constantly adding new features on a relatively fast clip given their team size - and by the fact that the 'pro devs' (poorly) copied most of Squads solutions, borked up half the things that they tried to do over, and generally did not come up with a better code base per the people who have data mined it - despite all the time and advantages given to the project.  

The overall assessment of T2 = bad, Intercept =  good always baffled me as nothing seems further from the truth.  What exactly do you base that on?  What would a good publisher have done with a developer that was delaying over and over?  What would a bad developer look like that is worse than what Intercept has managed?

Dude I have about 6k hours into KSP1 experimenting in most mods you can imagine. I love mods. They’re great. But not one nor any combination are able to overcome KSP’s foundational limitations nor deliver a cohesive, fully considered set of mechanics that turn KSP from a fun and interesting simulator into a truly great game. Can intercept do that? It remains to be seen, but all of the conceptual statements they’ve made seem pretty damned smart. A lot of the ways they’ve approached subassembly management and UI are pretty smart too. Its just just a buggy mess, because instead of being patient, instead of taking 3-6 mo to present the initial release in a more playable state, it was rushed out as promising hot garbage. 
 

In 5 years no one will remember that a project was delayed 3 or 6 or even 12 months. No one will care. What they will remember is the quality of the experience. Thats what builds the most important thing in the world, more valuable than hype, or a quick buck, or even time. The most valuable thing in the world is reputation.