KSP2 EA Grand Discussion Thread.

[Bej Kerman]

[snip]

7 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

You're still only talking about the very first sentence of the message and not the rest. The message is right there for you to read.

They're right. Is that why you didn't want to read what they said?

Edited August 13, 2023 by Vanamonde

[VlonaldKerman]

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Repeating those opinions hundreds of times into most of the threads on a message board with the deliberate intent to clog all discussion and get attention from the devs is just run of the mill trolling

I think that’s an exaggeration.

Also, I just looked at the KSP 2 discussion thread repository, and there are many threads about substantive things with minimal ranting which have had no replies for days or weeks. People can have those discussions, they just aren’t. There are a few threads with “ranting”, but their names are like “Player count halved after release”, “Another tweet by the team,” or “How should rockets flex”, which are either explicitly about the KSP 2 dev team/development problems, or about a game breaking bug, etc. 

By contrast, discussions about features or game systems, such as “Kerbal Mortality” haven’t seen replies for days or more. I don’t think those were polluted with discussion about the games busted development, though I may be wrong.

So I think there’s a little bit of exaggeration on the part of those who want to posture themselves as “above that”. I’m not necessarily accusing you- you’ve made many posts on substantive threads. But if every time a user accused me or someone else of being non-thoughtful or repetitive, that person also posted a productive comment on a substance-based thread, the forum would look more like it sounds like you want it to.

[RaBDawG]

NO Reentry Heating, Wobbly Rocket fix, Orbital decay fix, or roadmap content.  Like what man?  Its been over 6 months, lol.  How is this remotely acceptable for a $50 game?

[Alexoff]

Heating will only be with science. They will only be released when developers hit the quality and level of polish it deserves. So better look forward and be patient. And you also need to monitor your health, because you need not to die of old age before the release of 1.0

[Kerbart]

1 hour ago, RaBDawG said:

NO Reentry Heating, Wobbly Rocket fix, Orbital decay fix, or roadmap content.  Like what man?  Its been over 6 months, lol.  How is this remotely acceptable for a $50 game?

Even more riddling, nobody realizes this, or gets upset over it. Amazing! [/s]

[Kerbart]

[snip]

You only have to hit the “ignore” button about a dozen times here (ask me how I know .)The core of toxic users who can't have a civilized conversation is quite small. As for Reddit, it seems like they're celebrating over there that the rating on Steam went from “Mixed” to “Mostly Negative,” so yeah.

I don't think there’s a lot of reason to be happy about the product, and there’s clearly a good reason to be critical about the lack of pace of fixing the bug, or the apparent lack of concern that the bugs are there in the first place. But being toxic about it, and calling names and slinging insults towards the devs is not going to improve things either.

Edited August 13, 2023 by Vanamonde

[Periple]

More seriously? I would like to have respectful discussions between people with different opinions. Like I’ve had with you, @moeggz.

What I don’t like is listening to the same people snipe at each other with the same things over and over again at every opportunity.

I especially don’t like that these same people swarm every thread where the devs post with the same complaints every time. Yes it costs 50 dollars, yes it was repeatedly delayed, yes it was supposed to be a full release but they turned it into EA, yes the EA was an alpha rather than a solid, stable beta they led us to expect, yes it’s been more than a short while and there’s still no heating, yes the rockets are too wobbly, yes the orbits decay. WE KNOW. Everybody knows. Repeating it at every opportunity adds nothing of value, but it does crowd out actually interesting discussion about whatever the devs were posting about that time.

It’s tiresome and I wish they’d do it somewhere else!

Edited August 13, 2023 by Periple

[Alexoff]

It is strange that the main defenders of the developers of KSP2 sit on the forum, and not in the game

[PDCWolf]

32 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

You only have to hit the “ignore” button about a dozen times here (ask me how I know .)The core of toxic users who can't have a civilized conversation is quite small. As for Reddit, it seems like they're celebrating over there that the rating on Steam went from “Mixed” to “Mostly Negative,” so yeah.

Oh no, a community that was insulted by the CM after having its complaints unanswered for 6+ months is now against the game, unimaginable.

[modus]

6 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

I mean we literally have a whole new game with new UI and updated planets and all kinds of things, plus Science and colonies and interstellar are all on their way. Id love to talk about those things.

Isn't that because it's very hard to actually enjoy all those things? 

[Vanamonde]

More personal comments removed. So we're all agreed that we hate each other and the other side is wrong. Now please talk about the game rather than each other. 

Meanwhile, overlapping threads have been merged. 

[TwoCalories]

2 hours ago, Alexoff said:

It is strange that the main defenders of the developers of KSP2 sit on the forum, and not in the game

Being on the game or not doesn't change that certain users seem to only see negative things in the dev's actions (which usually have good intentions).

Take one of the recent Twitter X posts. The KSP2 devs announced the release date for Patch 4 and said it would fix all the major bugs and issues of the game. You'd think that people could finally realize that the devs are dedicated and that they actually listen to the community, right?

Well, no. Now people are complaining about the devs lying to us and making poor apologies. Can we, for once, actually acknowledge the good things about KSP2?

And I know someone will point out that the devs took this long to fix the bugs. Well, fixing these huge game-breaking bugs while also working on major roadmap milestones like the Science Update takes time. I'm sure even updates for KSP1 weren't coded overnight.

Edited August 13, 2023 by TwoCalories

[Infinite Aerospace]

5 hours ago, Alexoff said:

Heating will only be with science. They will only be released when developers hit the quality and level of polish it deserves. So better look forward and be patient. And you also need to monitor your health, because you need not to die of old age before the release of 1.0

Thing is, when is that? There's not even a ball-park date as to when we should expect science. What I'd love to know is taking so long with regards to implementing the very first roadmap step.

 

Nothing overly critical (there's enough toxicity as it is) here but I feel as a community who is supporting the game, we deserve some official input on that question. Why can Nate, or Dakota, or whoever come out and at least help us all fill in the dots? 

 

The game has 'so much' potential but the whole disingenuous 'being worked on' answer to things like the question above is pushing those who are positive supporters (like myself, I enjoy the game and try to get in some regular play) away and driving an even bigger wedge between the developers and the negative crowd.

 

Also I think the whole 'What the hell happened?!' question is a perfectly valid one, given that the game has spent so much time in active development at this point, how have we ended up with such an incomplete product. Again this isn't finger pointing, just a genuine question I feel (as a paying customer) warrants a no-frills answer.

 

I'd end with this, players take a step back and accept delays happen in all industries (hell, we've had some mega delays on some of our projects) and 'try' our best to remain positive, no-one benefits from a toxic community space. 

31 minutes ago, TwoCalories said:

Being on the game or not doesn't change that certain users seem to only see negative things in the dev's actions (which usually have good intentions).

Take one of the recent Twitter X posts. The KSP2 devs announced the release date for Patch 4 and said it would fix all the major bugs and issues of the game. You'd think that people could finally realize that the devs are dedicated and that they actually listen to the community, right?

Well, no. Now people are complaining about the devs lying to us and making poor apologies. Can we, for once, actually acknowledge the good things about KSP2?

And I know someone will point out that the devs took this long to fix the bugs. Well, fixing these huge game-breaking bugs while also working on major roadmap milestones like the Science Update takes time. I'm sure even updates for KSP1 weren't coded overnight.

Thing is, with regards to that last part. Most of that could be ironed over by just talking to the community. I am personally in a place where I enjoy the game enough to remain optimistic regarding the future and there's been some really big improvements in performance. The main issue I have is not so much in terms of communication but more in the area of 'what' is being communicated. 

Edited August 13, 2023 by Infinite Aerospace

[Alexoff]

10 minutes ago, TwoCalories said:

The KSP2 devs announced the release date for Patch 4 and said it would fix all the major bugs and issues of the game.

This is not so, orbit decay, wobble and craft dissasemble are the main problems of the game and they have not been resolved. I didn't see anyone write - we don't need your fixes! The attitude to the patch is - and that's it? Six months have passed and the game will remain indefinitely a remaster of early versions of KSP1 with clouds and an active pause? Was it worth it then to hype with the game? We just remember a little what the developers said in previous years, we were promised something else. It will take many years for developers to bring the game up to standard at such a pace, which is why people feel cheated.  They would promise a remaster right away, T2 is a remaster professional.

20 minutes ago, TwoCalories said:

making poor apologies

Has anyone apologized? It seems that no one apologized, the recognition of the state of the game as not meeting the expectations of the fans is not an apology.

23 minutes ago, TwoCalories said:

working on major roadmap milestones like the Science Update takes time

We didn't see science, just a couple of animations. To convince that the work is going on, the developers could show us something more substantial.

23 minutes ago, TwoCalories said:

Can we, for once, actually acknowledge the good things about KSP2?

Certainly! Active pause is a great thing! I don’t know what else to write, from a gameplay point of view, many of the new decisions are quite controversial. I don't like the single crafting menu. As for graphics, it's quite difficult to surprise me with graphics on the one hand, and on the other hand, once I put the scatterer on KSP1, it's unbearable to play without it. In general, that's all, what else to discuss in the current game? We can draw the future gameplay only in our imagination, but there I can also invent KSP5.

5 minutes ago, Infinite Aerospace said:

Thing is, when is that? There's not even a ball-park date as to when we should expect science. What I'd love to know is taking so long with regards to implementing the very first roadmap step.

I think it will happen closer to Christmas. There will be a sale and PD managers will probably want to lure new users into the sale with science. If they rush by this date, then I would be preparing for a terrible amount of bugs.

[Infinite Aerospace]

Just now, Alexoff said:

I think it will happen closer to Christmas. There will be a sale and PD managers will probably want to lure new users into the sale with science. If they rush by this date, then I would be preparing for a terrible amount of bugs.

That is perilously close to a year after initial release. Was anyone expecting Science and progression to be missing for ten or more months?

I think that'd be a pretty bitter pill to swallow if I'm honest. It'd be a pretty easy recommendation with the game in its current state, with science and career. But as a buggy sandbox, it's a hard sell TBH.

[Guest]

7 hours ago, Periple said:

I especially don’t like that these same people swarm every thread where the devs post with the same complaints every time.

[...]

WE KNOW. Everybody knows. Repeating it at every opportunity adds nothing of value, but it does crowd out actually interesting discussion about whatever the devs were posting about that time.

It’s tiresome and I wish they’d do it somewhere else!

The simple reason is numbers. Lets say 100k people did buy the game. Every now and then someone who was "optimistic" at the start switches to "negative". That happens from time to time and since there are a lot of people there are also a lot of people which switch from "hopefull" to "negative" every day. And they voice there opinion. Then watch the forums for a while, comment on "white knights" and then leave.

I am doing the exact same thing right now and I am sure there were a lot of people before me and there will be a lot of people after me doing the exact same thing.

It is logical that something like that happens if a company is doing the thing which they are doing right now. I don't understand why someone would expect any other behaviour by a group of costumers which are not satisfied with their product and the development speed compared to other EA games.

Furthermore it doesn't help that they merge every thread which discussed negative things like that into this thread.

So from my opinion what you are seeing right now totally makes sense. I wouldn't expect it any other way.

[Periple]

48 minutes ago, running_bird said:

So from my opinion what you are seeing right now totally makes sense. I wouldn't expect it any other way.

I agree! But that doesn’t mean I have to like it!

[Periple]

7 hours ago, Infinite Aerospace said:

Thing is, when is that? There's not even a ball-park date as to when we should expect science. What I'd love to know is taking so long with regards to implementing the very first roadmap step.

Nothing overly critical (there's enough toxicity as it is) here but I feel as a community who is supporting the game, we deserve some official input on that question. Why can Nate, or Dakota, or whoever come out and at least help us all fill in the dots? 

The trouble is that from their PoV it’s a lose-lose proposition.

Suppose they’re really careful and decide to go with “under-promise and over-deliver.” That means that they’ll give their internal milestone date plus so much extra that they’re confident they’ll make it even if something goes horribly wrong like a key developer quitting or what not. That means they’ll give a date that feels absurdly far in the future, say, March 2024.

You can guess what the reaction to that would be.

The other option is to give their internal date plus a little bit of slack. The problem is that even that may be far enough out that it’ll provoke a backlash, plus there’s a genuine risk that it’ll slip, which means yet more backlash and damage control.

That means that the best strategy is to say what they’re saying — that most of the team is working on it and it’ll be ready when it’s ready.

As to the other question — why it’s taking so long — that’s impossible to answer without throwing somebody under the bus, and decent human beings just don’t do that.

[VlonaldKerman]

39 minutes ago, Periple said:

The trouble is that from their PoV it’s a lose-lose proposition.

Suppose they’re really careful and decide to go with “under-promise and over-deliver.” That means that they’ll give their internal milestone date plus so much extra that they’re confident they’ll make it even if something goes horribly wrong like a key developer quitting or what not. That means they’ll give a date that feels absurdly far in the future, say, March 2024.

You can guess what the reaction to that would be.

The other option is to give their internal date plus a little bit of slack. The problem is that even that may be far enough out that it’ll provoke a backlash, plus there’s a genuine risk that it’ll slip, which means yet more backlash and damage control.

That means that the best strategy is to say what they’re saying — that most of the team is working on it and it’ll be ready when it’s ready.

As to the other question — why it’s taking so long — that’s impossible to answer without throwing somebody under the bus, and decent human beings just don’t do that.

I think there’s a third option:

Many other EA games have devs that are much more transparent about the state of their features, especially games that are in alpha (like KSP 2 actually is). 

When you resign yourself to only revealing features once they are “ready” or “when we have more to show you” (that is, except for the actual release of the game, which did not meet those criteria) or through polished dev blog videos or trailers, you tie one hand behind you’re back because you have to set dates and the community reacts blindly due to a lack of information. Set a date and end up late? Bad! Underpromise? Bad! How else are we supposed to react?

Instead, they should call a duck a duck, and say, “this is a true early access, which means we are letting the community into our development process”, and give us an actual appraisal of the state of each of the planned features as they stand today. Then there would be no need to set dates- and the community’s reactions would be less severe because they have visibility into what is actually going on instead of being left to wonder for long periods of time.

For example, let’s apply this principle to an alternate universe version of the initial EA release, to see why it would have seen a better community response:

Instead of promising the game to be released in 2020, they could have been honest about the state of the game. This is probably too early to be super transparent about the game, but there is a basic level of honesty involved in setting a release date.

Fast forward to the years of several delays. Instead of delaying the game and blaming COVID, they could have been transparent about which technical feats were proving challenging, where the features stand, and if they had to start over and why. In this universe, the KSP community, many of whom have tech jobs, would have understood that KSP 2 is a technical game requiring many complicated systems and even innovations. There would have been no swings of high expectations, then letdowns in the face of delays, because just as development flows slowly but surely, so too would the communication, and the community would see in real time what was happening, rather than building up anticipation only to receive a vague message about delaying the game for quality’s sake.

In this universe, when the EA released, the community would already know exactly what to expect, and people who weren’t interested in that level of bugginess and poor performance wouldn’t have found themselves feeling scammed out of $50.

Fast forwarding to today, we wouldn’t be speculating on the forums about whether or not the game will be completed, because we would see how advanced each of the features are, and I’m sure we would all be satisfied (right?). Science update would not be a mystery, and there would be no pressure for them to set a date, because the community of thousands of people who spent each $50 on the game would know what was still left to be done for science before the update.

All of this assumes, of course, that if we were suddenly able to peel back the curtain and see what the devs are doing, and see the state of the game, that our concerns for the future of the game would be alleviated. The flip side of the transparency game is that if the team is incompetent and if the game is as much of a mess as we’re worried it might be, then that would become apparent, too.

 

So my question to the devs is this: why not take this approach? The optimistic view is that they still want to act like how they think a AAA studio is supposed to act, and be secretive about game features so that we wait with baited breath. But I’m that case, they shouldn’t have released such an undercooked, broken game! You can’t have your cake and eat it too, release into super early access and ask for community feedback, and treat new features with the type of secrecy one would expect from a game that doesn’t even have an early access, only a full release. That ship has sailed.

[Infinite Aerospace]

1 hour ago, Periple said:

The trouble is that from their PoV it’s a lose-lose proposition.

Suppose they’re really careful and decide to go with “under-promise and over-deliver.” That means that they’ll give their internal milestone date plus so much extra that they’re confident they’ll make it even if something goes horribly wrong like a key developer quitting or what not. That means they’ll give a date that feels absurdly far in the future, say, March 2024.

You can guess what the reaction to that would be.

The other option is to give their internal date plus a little bit of slack. The problem is that even that may be far enough out that it’ll provoke a backlash, plus there’s a genuine risk that it’ll slip, which means yet more backlash and damage control.

That means that the best strategy is to say what they’re saying — that most of the team is working on it and it’ll be ready when it’s ready.

As to the other question — why it’s taking so long — that’s impossible to answer without throwing somebody under the bus, and decent human beings just don’t do that.

Well you could argue in the interim, if a concrete date can't be given give at least a rough date, a one that is conservative enough to not put the team under pressure but for most casual players that'd be enough.

 

Hell even come out and say 'we're fully expecting science and progression to be finalised and rolling out in Q3 of 2023 but as always this is subject to change depending on the feedback from testers'.  That would at least throw the community a line and give us something to be positively looking forward to.

 

Then, something that just gives us a bit more of a peek into the 'method', share with us the current progress of the first major update. What are people doing? What does it look like? The mechanics of it? What sorta issues is the team running into (and overcoming)? Positivity is something the community is sorely lacking at the moment, which don't get me wrong whilst I can't understand a lot of the negativity, there's some aspects I get.

 

I dunno, no-one has to come out and say 'the work is delayed because *insert name* made a total hash of it'. I think a lot of this sorta approach working is shoulder on us, we can all make a choice as to how to react to news, and a lot of the time that reaction has been first and foremost a bit knee jerk, and second a bit unnecessarily angry.

 

I appreciate the response, it's nice to have something of a constructive chat about things. 

[cocoscacao]

2 hours ago, VlonaldKerman said:

I think there’s a third option

I guess there's a fourth one as well. A simple table with general info.

70% of planned science stuff done
25 known (science related) bugs

Something like that. I'm also curious if there are any parts of the game which may receive a complete overhaul in the future (part manager, part manager, part manager... part manager )

[VlonaldKerman]

1 minute ago, cocoscacao said:

I guess there's a fourth one as well. A simple table with general info.

70% of planned science stuff done
25 known (science related) bugs

This is a pretty good idea that also strikes me as feasible, low-time-investment, and like something they might actually do.

2 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

I'm also curious if there are any parts of the game which may receive a complete overhaul in the future (part manager, part manager, part manager... part manager )

Also, the part manager. And the part manager, too.

[Periple]

12 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

70% of planned science stuff done
25 known (science related) bugs

If somebody showed me something like that I’d KNOW they were bulling!

— Or, more seriously, the numbers don’t mean anything if you don’t know where they come from and what definition of done was used. It could mean anything from “70% of the roadmap items are at L0” (meaning, about 10-15% of the work is done) to “according to our seat of the pants estimation which is probably wrong 70% of the work is done” to “70% of the items are at L4, 20% at L3, and 10% at L2” which would be pretty good.

The bug count is even less meaningful. You won’t have a lot of open bugs until you get into QA, and after that the number can get very high without it meaning much. You can have 100 cosmetic bugs that most players won’t even notice, or 3 that ruin everybody’s day.

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

I couldn't find any thread discussing patch 0.1.4 that was announced for Aug 22 (way over the promised update cadence) so gonna post here as any such threads appear to be merged here for some reason although the topic is this one patch itself, not the entire KSP2 EA.

It appears this patch comes 2 months after the previous one, so in total this accounts for one third of the total dev time from launch, and I couldn't find concrete information about what this patch contains (also there appears to be no dev announcement about this and I could only find one on Steam but not here for some reason), and I don't know how this is still a problem after this bad communication style has been many times criticized countless times already by the players.

Wonder if in the upcoming AMAs this will be clarified and we will find out if this patch that took so long was worth the wait.

The only good outcome is they finally somehow admitted it may have been a tall order and said they are going to think twice about the future of Multiplayer, which IMHO is much better than dropping KSP2 entirely.

 

Edited August 14, 2023 by GGG-GoodGuyGreg

[cocoscacao]

9 minutes ago, Periple said:

Or, more seriously, the numbers don’t mean anything

True. I don't mean it as an exact state, that would take way to much time from the team. Just some sort of general overview of how much the team thinks it's done. There are always bugs that derail you from the schedule, because they ran deeper than initially thought. But it would give us guesstimate on roughly when we can expect roadmap steps to be completed.