KSP2 EA Grand Discussion Thread.

[Bej Kerman]

25 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

3 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

How does this make sense? How is it justifiable that a Unity game with the capabilities and state of KSP2 can have the stones to ask for more resources than a software that is able to livestream and render photgrammetry whilst also processing hundreds of aircraft systems and parametric physical simulation of aerodynamics all in real time?

One is a complete game with pre-made craft* made by the company that made the operating system the game is playing on, while the other is in EA, made by a (at least relatively speaking) small team, and allows its users to build anything the engine can render.

*I know people say you can add planes to it, but from what I see building them is more similar to coding a mod in KSP than building a ship. I've no firsthand experience with it as MSFS is as interesting to me as Paint Drying Observer 2023.

Your idea of how fun aviation is, is misinformed, but yes. Doing the metaphorical God's work showing these bad analogies for what they are.

Edited August 11, 2023 by Bej Kerman

[shdwlrd]

5 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

People are happy here in the forums because most dissenting views are deleted and their 20 people hivemind is safe, and in the discord people are even allowed to insult and harass you if you have a dissenting view.

You really think that? Most of the time I spend on the forums is skipping the same complaints over and over again by the same people. The same rehashed arguments, the same rehashed accusations, the same rehashed meaningless data.

I mean almost every single thread in this section and the dev dairies decends into enough bickering, gaslighting, flame baiting that the mods are censoring the threads to keep them on topic and within guidelines. 

Am I happy visiting the forums? No, not anymore. Why? Because the negatively is so great that there no possibility of having a constructive debate without it turning into a echo chamber of the same meaningless and unwarranted arguments about KSP2 development failings and short comings that have NOTHING to do with the topic at hand.

I'm sick of the degrading rhetoric against the devs, the studio, the game itself, and the people who actually want KSP2 to succeed.

This forum is very toxic with unwarranted hostility to any positive outlook for KSP2. 

At this point, I find this ringing true on here more and more. "The biggest waste of time is arguing with the fool and fanatic who doesn’t care about truth or reality, but only the victory of his beliefs and illusions. Never waste time on discussions that make no sense. There are people who, for all the evidence presented to them, do not have the ability to understand. Others who are blinded by ego, hatred and resentment, and the only thing that they want is to be right even if they aren't."

[VlonaldKerman]

2 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

ou really think that? Most of the time I spend on the forums is skipping the same complaints over and over again by the same people. The same rehashed arguments, the same rehashed accusations, the same rehashed meaningless data.

I mean almost every single thread in this section and the dev dairies decends into enough bickering, gaslighting, flame baiting that the mods are censoring the threads to keep them on topic and within guidelines.

When you go to a super public (popular) forum post like a dev blog, you are going to get popular opinion. It’s a general sentiment if you like the opinion, and an echo chamber if you don’t. I’m sorry you disagree with popular opinion about the game.

In fact, if you go to the more substantive threads, there’s plenty of fruitful discussion, even optimistic discussion, about the ways the game might evolve. I’m going way out on a limb here- but I think some people deliberately traffic the more negative places so that they can feel righteous in their optimism. Kind of like looking out from a castle balcony onto all the scrubby peasants below, except the scrubby peasants are right to be upset, and you just disagree with them.

2 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

I'm sick of the degrading rhetoric against the devs, the studio, the game itself, and the people who actually want KSP2 to succeed.

You are conflating frustration with the devs for ill-will towards the game. Do you really believe the critics are on this forum but don’t like KSP? You are fighting an straw man.

3 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

At this point, I find this ringing true on here more and more. "The biggest waste of time is arguing with the fool and fanatic who doesn’t care about truth or reality, but only the victory of his beliefs and illusions. Never waste time on discussions that make no sense. There are people who, for all the evidence presented to them, do not have the ability to understand. Others who are blinded by ego, hatred and resentment, and the only thing that they want is to be right even if they aren't."

That’s a lot of words to say, “I disagree and think you all are irrational.” But point taken.

[Bej Kerman]

10 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

This forum is very toxic with unwarranted hostility to any positive outlook for KSP2. 

Exactly. It's mostly people whining about KSP 2 and coming up with the most ridiculous arguments for why it'll fail that make this forum a reading on the Geiger counter, and yet it's that exact same group also whining about censorship and toxicity.

7 hours ago, VlonaldKerman said:

When you go to a super public (popular) forum post like a dev blog, you are going to get popular opinion. It’s a general sentiment if you like the opinion, and an echo chamber if you don’t. I’m sorry you disagree with popular opinion about the game.

In fact, if you go to the more substantive threads, there’s plenty of fruitful discussion, even optimistic discussion, about the ways the game might evolve. I’m going way out on a limb here- but I think some people deliberately traffic the more negative places so that they can feel righteous in their optimism. Kind of like looking out from a castle balcony onto all the scrubby peasants below, except the scrubby peasants are right to be upset, and you just disagree with them.

You are conflating frustration with the devs for ill-will towards the game. Do you really believe the critics are on this forum but don’t like KSP? You are fighting an straw man.

That’s a lot of words to say, “I disagree and think you all are irrational.” But point taken.

[snip]

Edited August 11, 2023 by Vanamonde

[Alexoff]

11 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

It kind a feels like when you've got an issue with a big company just screaming at the poor kid taking your call in customer service.

Is this some sort of logic trick? Only those who have nothing to do with the game and its state are talking to us. And those who are responsible, they hid somewhere. And as a result, who is to blame? Well, buyers of course!

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, Alexoff said:

Is this some sort of logic trick? Only those who have nothing to do with the game and its state are talking to us. And those who are responsible, they hid somewhere. And as a result, who is to blame? Well, buyers of course!

Call it a bit of free advice. Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but if I squeak constantly about everything on and on folks on the other end are just as likely throw their hands up and dismiss me as a malcontent. I find in situations like these being at times stern but always courteous and helpful usually gets the best results. 
 

As to you your last point the folks actually working on the game have been pretty active offering AMAs and Dev blogs and progress updates every few weeks. We often didn’t hear from Squad for months at a time. I’ll remind folks that KSP1 was also a buggy mess right through 1.0 and didn’t really get cleaned up till 1.3. Even after that there were big problems with wheels and randomly exploding vessels and so on. The people responsible for KSP2’s state at release are the folks who for whatever reason forced the issue this spring rather than giving the team another 9-12 months to get things into a more playable state. I think that was short sighted and didn’t well serve players nor devs nor even T2’s earnings over the next 10 years. 

Edited August 11, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[MechBFP]

7 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

You really think that?

The best thing to do is to simply not engage when they can’t be bothered to make arguments in good faith though, like in that example. 

[Alexoff]

2 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I find in situations like these being at times stern but always courteous and helpful usually gets the best results

What results can be on the forum? What are we talking about? It looks like some kind of motivational universal speech... I do not understand this mentoring tone and communication only at the parent-child level. There is a good child - the developers, for many of them this is the first game, making game is hard, they need to be encouraged and praised. There are bad kids who are always whining and unhappy, let them shut up and wait. But both we and the developers are adults, many of us have children ourselves.

14 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

As to you your last point the folks a actually working on the game have been pretty active offering AMAs and Dev blogs and progress updates every few weeks

What is the progress of the game?

15 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

The people responsible for KSP2’s state at release are the folks who for whatever reason forced the issue this spring rather than giving the team another 9-12 months to get things into a more playable state.

Two news - another delay until 2024 and a game without colonies, multiplayer, a bunch of features from the first part and with a lot of bugs. I highly doubt that the game would have been warmly received. All delays of the game were accompanied by the words that this was only to make a good game even better and bigger, and not because the development went somewhere wrong.

[Periple]

1 hour ago, Alexoff said:

Only those who have nothing to do with the game and its state are talking to us. And those who are responsible, they hid somewhere.

Who do you believe is responsible for the game and its state?

Why do you think they would be willing to come out and be pilloried?

As a reminder, there is a division of responsibilities in gamedev. Talking to the public is hard, stressful, and thankless at the best of times, and in bad times, it's downright gruelling, and it's also really difficult to do in a way that just doesn't add fuel to whatever fire is causing the bad times. 

When you sign up for a position, if "talking to the public" isn't in your job description, then you're not expected to do it. They can ask you, but you can say no, and most of the time if you have any sense that's exactly what you should do, both for your own sanity and for your studio's reputation. 

[Stoup]

23 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

What results can be on the forum? What are we talking about? It looks like some kind of motivational universal speech... I do not understand this mentoring tone and communication only at the parent-child level. There is a good child - the developers, for many of them this is the first game, making game is hard, they need to be encouraged and praised. There are bad kids who are always whining and unhappy, let them shut up and wait. But both we and the developers are adults, many of us have children ourselves.

I mean, as much as I feel it's important to voice malcontent over the game's state if that's what we feel, that's not the message I think he was trying to get across. There's a distinction between blind positivity in support and defense of the way KSP2's development has come along, and positivity from the perspective of trying to improve the general state of communication between all of us members of the community here.

Instead of coming from a point of condescension, it's just trying to keep discussions from falling into the same repeating pattern of bickering that has become very commonplace.

Edited August 11, 2023 by Stoup

[Alexoff]

35 minutes ago, Periple said:

Who do you believe is responsible for the game and its state?

Management?

36 minutes ago, Periple said:

Talking to the public is hard, stressful, and thankless at the best of times, and in bad times, it's downright gruelling, and it's also really difficult to do in a way that just doesn't add fuel to whatever fire is causing the bad times. 

Of course, it is difficult, it seems there was no one who would take on such responsibility.

 

23 minutes ago, Stoup said:

Instead of coming from a point of condescension, it's just trying to keep discussions from falling into the same repeating pattern of bickering that has become very commonplace.

It seems to me that any discussion on the part of the defenders of the developers ends with the phrases "be patient", "KSP1 was not better", "make games hard" and "your message is not constructive". So the conversation has long since slid into this.

[regex]

8 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

You really think that? Most of the time I spend on the forums is skipping the same complaints over and over again by the same people. The same rehashed arguments, the same rehashed accusations, the same rehashed meaningless data.

Same, same.

To tell you the truth I still have no idea what the people making these same complaints over and over and over again are actually trying to achieve, what their actual goal is. It's like they expect the game to turn around on a dime, some devs are going to crunch a couple of 120 hour weeks and suddenly we're going to have the science update and all the bugs fixed in complete defiance of reality. It's literally unhinged.

[MarcAbaddon]

26 minutes ago, regex said:

Same, same.

To tell you the truth I still have no idea what the people making these same complaints over and over and over again are actually trying to achieve, what their actual goal is. It's like they expect the game to turn around on a dime, some devs are going to crunch a couple of 120 hour weeks and suddenly we're going to have the science update and all the bugs fixed in complete defiance of reality. It's literally unhinged.

Of course, it's mostly pointless and will not achieve anything. Just the same as complaining about them - that's exactly equally pointless. So is probably me pointing it out.

Maybe they want to vent or want to warn people off because they regret their purchase and emotional investment and do not want others to do the same. But if your goal is to "achieve" something you should probably not hang around internet discussion forums.

[regex]

2 minutes ago, MarcAbaddon said:

But if your goal is to "achieve" something you should probably not hang around internet discussion forums.

It is very possible to achieve a toxic environment where no one wants to engage with others on internet discussion forums. Is that the goal here? Just make it a totally painful place to visit?

[VlonaldKerman]

[snip]

You know what, you’re right. The naysayers on this forum are so dismissive, callous, and unintellectual. They just levy criticisms without logic or reasoning; I hate that.

Edited August 11, 2023 by Vanamonde

[The Aziz]

It's funny how one thing is called

15 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

 a Unity game with the capabilities and state of KSP2 

while obviously completely ignoring everything that goes into simulating a whole solar system (with foundations for more than one), slightly simplified astrodynamics, aerodynamics, joint physics etc, but the other is

15 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

software that is able to livestream and render photgrammetry whilst also processing hundreds of aircraft systems and parametric physical simulation of aerodynamics all in real time?

where you can fly a big plane with 10 minutes of practice because most of the buttons in the cockpit are inactive (so I'm not sure about those hundreds of systems). And weighs few hundred gigabytes.

[VlonaldKerman]

I don’t mind the heavily saturated, somewhat cartoonish look, actually. But I do think Blackracks clouds look better, and parallax looks better. I think making the clouds more varied and high-def and upgrading the terrain detail/rendering system would go a long way, even if they stick with the current style.

Reflective grass has got to go, though.

[K33N]

There is definitely some histrionics coming from upset players, but the actual serious toxic behavior is almost exclusively coming from people who hate those criticizing the game. 

Neither are necessarily productive, but the later is really bad for the community.

[VlonaldKerman]

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

The people responsible for KSP2’s state at release are the folks who for whatever reason forced the issue this spring rather than giving the team another 9-12 months to get things into a more playable state. I think that was short sighted and didn’t well serve players nor devs nor even T2’s earnings over the next 10 years. 

I partially agree with this but also partially disagree:

I suspect that T2 knew they were forcing the game out in an uncooked state. Development was evidently proceeding at a snails pace, never mind whatever happened when they thought they were a year away from release in 2019, who knows about that. T2 execs were probably growing frustrated, and I would even hazard reasonably so, so they figured that a poor release and the ensuing ****storm would light a fire under the devs.

However, I think this was probably a miscalculation. Whatever development issues there were, they should have been upfront about them. The community would probably react comparatively well to that, especially if the problems are technical in nature and not due to bad management or laziness. However now it is too late to do that, because it’s obvious that they misled people from 2019-2022/23 about how advanced the game supposedly was, and they charged $50. But they can’t cop to that, so the frustration festers and stews. So it was a miscalculation.

Edited August 11, 2023 by VlonaldKerman

[PDCWolf]

12 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

One is a complete game with pre-made craft* made by the company that made the operating system the game is playing on, while the other is in EA, made by a (at least relatively speaking) small team, and allows its users to build anything the engine can render.

*I know people say you can add planes to it, but from what I see building them is more similar to coding a mod in KSP than building a ship. I've no firsthand experience with it as MSFS is as interesting to me as Paint Drying Observer 2023.

Your idea of fun is irrelevant to the comparison. Now, for your message and the following:

7 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

It's funny how one thing is called

while obviously completely ignoring everything that goes into simulating a whole solar system (with foundations for more than one), slightly simplified astrodynamics, aerodynamics, joint physics etc, but the other is

where you can fly a big plane with 10 minutes of practice because most of the buttons in the cockpit are inactive (so I'm not sure about those hundreds of systems). And weighs few hundred gigabytes.

The physics and even more so the system level simulation that goes into premium products like PMDGs aircraft or a proper study model  is infinitely more complex and demanding than whatever basic on-rails scaled space planetary and patched conics+rigidbody interaction KSP needs. Whilst also still including this-gen graphics. It's not an apples to oranges comparison in sofar as they're a comparison of hardware required for (in one case) much more complex and intense simulation. Being different genres doesn't mean one gets a pass for being hilariously unoptimized.

[PDCWolf]

12 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Dude games often take 6 or 8 years to complete.

AAA games do. Entirely agree there, now...

12 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Starfield has been in production since 2015.

And is set to become another revolutionary genre-defining CRPG like its predecessors were, and along with all its features it has no business being compared to KSP2 unless it's to highlight how in the same time PD hasn't been able to complete a quarter of a game.

12 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Are you more worried that investors meet their targets than the game is actually good? 

I think my point is clear enough: T2 has been more than patient, gave 3 delays on top of at least 3 years of development time, hired 2 different studios, and is still funding the development as per the words of official statements. Saying they "rushed" PD and are doing everything out of greed and are culprits of everything bad is, at the very least, an insult to a reader's intelligence.

1 hour ago, regex said:

To tell you the truth I still have no idea what the people making these same complaints over and over and over again are actually trying to achieve, what their actual goal is.

For starters, save for a slight bettering of the dev updates, and the bug forum (which still offers no progress tracking) any complaint so far has completely failed to been even recognized. IF you consider the stuff that went on yesterday, where a good part of the community was called "easily sway-able toxic bots", and how the discord and forum were exposed for what they are, then at the very minimum an apology is owed, even if just to count as maintaining a minimum image of professionalism.

Warning people off this trainwreck is a good second, and yesterday it even got to the point people started pushing for KSP2 to be banned off the subforum because the CM has done nothing but continuously come back to harass and provoke the community whilst clearly averting any sort of serious discussion.

19 minutes ago, K33N said:

There is definitely some histrionics coming from upset players, but the actual serious toxic behavior is almost exclusively coming from people who hate those criticizing the game.

This is it, nowadays being critical in the discord means people are allowed to harass you. Being critical in the forum means people are free to write inflammatory comments aimed at you. And then they have the gait to blame others for "toxic behavior".

Edited August 11, 2023 by PDCWolf

[Pthigrivi]

I don't know, to me if you liked KSP1 and want to see KSP2 become something even better your goal should be to see the game gets steadily more stable and more performant. Yes, pointing out specific bugs and even emphasizing "Hey this one is still here and it's really frustrating" helps them prioritize. That definitely helps make the game better. Im less convinced that flooding every thread on the forum with the same repetitive, generalized complaints and recriminations about the history of development do anything but swamp what might otherwise be productive conversations. 

Edited August 11, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[TwoCalories]

17 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

The physics and even more so the system level simulation that goes into premium products like PMDGs aircraft or a proper study model  is infinitely more complex and demanding than whatever basic on-rails scaled space planetary and patched conics+rigidbody interaction KSP needs. Whilst also still including this-gen graphics. It's not an apples to oranges comparison in sofar as they're a comparison of hardware required for (in one case) much more complex and intense simulation. Being different genres doesn't mean one gets a pass for being hilariously unoptimized.

I'm no MSFS player, but I'm fairly sure that, while MSFS has really nice graphics and all, it doesn't have a highly complex physics system that's gives each part its own individual physics engine. I'm also pretty sure that a plane game has no need to simulate orbital mechanics and Newtonian dynamics.

Edited August 11, 2023 by TwoCalories

[regex]

1 minute ago, PDCWolf said:

then at the very minimum an apology is owed, even if just to count as maintaining a minimum image of professionalism.

Just an apology? Then we can have some peace and quiet? I don't believe you.

1 minute ago, PDCWolf said:

Warning people off this trainwreck is a good second

So the goal absolutely is to create a toxic environment, good to know.

2 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

the CM has done nothing but continuously come back to harass and provoke the community whilst clearly averting any sort of serious discussion.

Interesting. I went fishing around Reddit last night (and found out I was one of the most condescending posters here, apparently) and I'm not sure how anything Dakota posted could be considered harassing or provoking, but I guess I'm not really coming from your point of view.

[PDCWolf]

10 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I don't know, to me if you liked KSP1 and want to see KSP2 become something even better your goal should be to see the game gets steadily more stable and more performant. Yes, pointing out specific bugs and even emphasizing "Hey this one is still here and it's really frustrating" helps them prioritize. That definitely helps make the game better. Im less convinced that flooding every thread on the forum with the same repetitive, generalized complaints and recriminations about the history of development do anything but swamp what might otherwise be productive conversations. 

Black holes don't work, it's why people asked for a bug tracking forum: if I say A is bad and don't hear anything back, then I assume nothing happened. A lot of people will say A is bad, not hear anything back and move on to another game, I'm sure that if the goal really is to see a good KSP2 somewhere down the line, then you'll easily understand how important is to receive a response when you knock (and in some cases kick) a door.

Bugs got their subforum now, with upvotes and bug hunters engaging the community. Now we need CM/PR/Devs or whoever it is to engage the community as they should about the complaints that are not bugs.

4 minutes ago, regex said:

Just an apology? Then we can have some peace and quiet? I don't believe you.

The apology is more about yesterday, nothing else. I can also obviously not talk about literally anyone else but me, as I'm sure there's a lot of people that don't even care about an apology, or even care about what happened yesterday. I can't talk for them.

4 minutes ago, regex said:

So the goal absolutely is to create a toxic environment, good to know.

More to help people avoid what a lot of players seem to perceive as a very toxic customer vs team relationship. You wouldn't join an EA for some game that hasn't been able to put out new content in 6 months and doesn't have it on sight until end of year, whilst also still carrying release bugs and what happened yesterday. There's also the very basic fact that if you don't mess with the hornets they won't sting (not sure how this saying translates to English), what part of the community is doing is a response to what they get.

4 minutes ago, regex said:

Interesting. I went fishing around Reddit last night (and found out I was one of the most condescending posters here, apparently) and I'm not sure how anything Dakota posted could be considered harassing or provoking, but I guess I'm not really coming from your point of view.

Entirely a matter of perspective. I heavily disliked what Dakota said yesterday on Discord, as that's berating and provoking the community, even if you remove the botting accusations, he still went way over the line. I'm also not sure which threads you happened to visit but it is very obvious that if people are posting evidence of users harassing others, coming at them with "we have a very tight code of conduct" in their faces is not gonna be well received.

Edited August 11, 2023 by PDCWolf