KSP2 EA Grand Discussion Thread.

[PDCWolf]

22 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Again, what is the actual point of this endless conversation we have over and over and over again in 2/3 of every thread on this forum? What do you actually want to happen to fix this for you? 

Not only was that already clarified previously, it's already started to happen:

Edited August 12, 2023 by PDCWolf

[Guest]

Honestly I don't care anymore.
Most of the public communication is basically telling lies. I know that sounds harsh but "heat turned off because of small VFX issues" was not the truth. And nothing has changed since that. So I don't care anymore about "announcements for announcements".

And i tried to be polite on the forums because what I am actually thinking is not constructive. And then they blame reddit. I have no words.

I have lost all hope because 6 month+ for the most basic bugs is too much.

Have fun praising the next dev-blog where they tell you why heat is hard and post some short introduction about heat. A rough draft about how heat should work should have been done several years ago. I don't even understand why they post this NOW.

Honestly. A lot of stuff people comment with "nice that you talk to us" for me is like: Wait a minute: They are just now thinking about that? OMG this is bad!

[Alexoff]

40 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Again, what is the actual point of this endless conversation we have over and over and over again in 2/3 of every thread on this forum? What do you actually want to happen to fix this for you? 

The whole forum in this case is meaningless. Everyone already knows everything, no words on this server will change the universe. But in reality, we are trying to reach out to the developers, while other users are trying to answer for them.

 

22 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

I wonder if there will be a grid fin or is it too difficult to do this part in 4 months?

[Kerbal01]

24 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Not only was that already clarified previously, it's already started to happen:

None of that thread is any solid commitments except the next bugfix. The rest is just meaningless words to sound like they're being more open.

[PDCWolf]

6 minutes ago, Kerbal01 said:

None of that thread is any solid commitments except the next bugfix. The rest is just meaningless words to sound like they're being more open.

I agree, and said somewhere else, that blaming "fan expectations" is underhanded when it's them setting those expectations and later on failing to manage them. Other than that, they finally grew a pair to give a date and say (in another place) that we should not expect new parts on 1.4 (managing expectations).

There's still a lot to solve and improve, but this is a baby step in broadly the right direction.

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

Not only was that already clarified previously, it's already started to happen:

Yes,  bugs are being fixed. Bugs were always going to be fixed. The ongoing complaints and speculation about what happened 3 and 4 years ago had literally no bearing whatsoever on those bugs being fixed. I want you to answer this and then I never want to see this same conversation again: What is the actual point of rehashing 6 years of dev development 20 times a month on this board?
 

1 hour ago, Alexoff said:

The whole forum in this case is meaningless. Everyone already knows everything, no words on this server will change the universe. But in reality, we are trying to reach out to the developers, while other users are trying to answer for them.

Reach out and tell them what exactly that they don't know. Again, What is the actual point of rehashing 6 years of dev development 20 times a month on this board?  You've been heard, my dude. Probably 100 times in the last 3 months. Please, please either contribute something useful, ask for something solvable, or give it a rest. 

Edited August 12, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[PDCWolf]

12 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Yes,  bugs are being fixed. Bugs were always going to be fixed. The ongoing complaints and speculation about what happened 3 and 4 years ago had literally no bearing whatsoever on those bugs being fixed. I want you to answer this and then I never want to see this same conversation again: What is the actual point of rehashing 6 years of dev development 20 times a month on this board?
 

Reach out and tell them what exactly that they don't know. Again, What is the actual point of rehashing 6 years of dev development 20 times a month on this board?  You've been heard, my dude. Probably 100 times in the last 3 months. Please, please either contribute something useful, ask for something solvable, or give it a rest. 

it seems you accidentally or willfully ignored what's pretty much the first acknowledgement of the state of the game that IG has posted (even if they're blaming fans for it). You also missed the fact that you're not in a position to tell me or anyone what we can or can't post about, the only ones who can say otherwise are the moderation team.

Even if we could imagine we've "been heard", until stuff starts to happen that clearly demonstrates we've been heard and those complaints are answered, affirmatively or not, then we're in our entire right to keep asking and assume we actually haven't been heard.

[Bej Kerman]

11 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

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.

The CM isn't being provocative or mean. Dev teams are simply sick of being used as your (and everyone else's) doormat and you don't like what they have to say. 

[Pthigrivi]

12 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

it seems you accidentally or willfully ignored what's pretty much the first acknowledgement of the state of the game that IG has posted (even if they're blaming fans for it). You also missed the fact that you're not in a position to tell me or anyone what we can or can't post about, the only ones who can say otherwise are the moderation team.

Even if we could imagine we've "been heard", until stuff starts to happen that clearly demonstrates we've been heard and those complaints are answered, affirmatively or not, then we're in our entire right to keep asking and assume we actually haven't been heard.

Yes, I know the what the state of the game is. You know what the state of the game is. IG certainly knows what the state of the game is. They knew what the state of the game was the first time we had this conversation, and the 20th, and the 100th. The question I asked was what is the actual point of rehashing 6 years of dev development 20 times a month on this board?  I would like a direct answer to that specific question. 

Edited August 12, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[moeggz]

5 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Yes, I know the what the state of the game is. You know what the state of the game is. IG certainly knows what the state of the game is. The question I asked was what is the actual point of rehashing 6 years of dev development 20 times a month on this board?  I would like a direct answer to that specific question. 

For me, it was to get either an explanation or an apology. The tweet they just sent out is enough for me, and as long as this coming update matches the bugfix description without adding more issues I’ll happily take the apology and hope for good progress on the rest of the game.

When the game gets to the point where I would genuinely recommend it, I will update my steam review. That update, however, will still mention that I don’t recommend trusting future private division games with EA or preorders and to wait for reviews for all of the rest of their products because it was a rather long and at times (presumed unintentionally) misleading process to get here. 
 

But if they turn the corner and make it good yeah I’m satisfied with just that tweet and will recommend the game on steam and to others and won’t keep harping on the mistakes of the past.

[K33N]

12 hours ago, regex said:

Dakota was also saying they'd look into the issue, so I guess the smart choice would be to simply not engage with Reddit at all since there is clearly zero good will there. But then, I'm not a CM or a game developer for some very good reasons.

I don't know if its a great idea to create these intense divisions between social media platforms. The community is already on it's knees. Pitting us against each other just seems so cynical. 

Edited August 12, 2023 by K33N

[moeggz]

16 minutes ago, K33N said:

I don't know if its a great idea to create these intense divisions between social media platforms. The community is already on it's knees. Pitting us against each other just seems so cynical. 

I agree with this strongly. While I have my gripes with the ways some platforms do their thing, lumping whole sites into an “us” and “them” isn’t helpful. When I saw Dakota say that in the discord I explained why I felt that saying that might not be productive to community good will. 

The goodwill on Reddit has taken a nose dive. Absolutely parts of Reddit are quite rude (I myself basically only use it for KSP now, having mostly migrated to Lemmy) but addressing all the users for the actions of a fraction of the whole isn't productive imho.

And there is still goodwill on there, myself and @PDCWolf both responded positively to the tweets today. This new clearer communication, coupled with concrete progress down the roadmap, can very well change the tides on Reddit.

I like to hop between different sites to get a broad view of things, there’s value here in the forums, on Reddit, on discord, and even the six of us on Lemmy lol.

[Infinite Aerospace]

With regards to communication, there's been a *really* alarmingly small amount of talk about 'science'. Given that it's the first major content and functionality update to KSP2, and we're sitting at six months after launch.

 

There's been no real detail to this point of what science entails, when it's likely to come, what sort of experiments are going to included. At this point ALL of these should have been finalised for some time now or else, what's been going on at Intercept?

 

So, if all is well and science is finalised and just getting the bells and whistles done then why not share the details with the community? It would add a much needed injection of positivity.

 

Now all I get on Discord is just rebuttal (from fellow users), and 'its being worked on' but how long does 'its being worked on' remain applicable?

[VlonaldKerman]

6 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

The ongoing complaints and speculation about what happened 3 and 4 years ago had literally no bearing whatsoever on those bugs being fixed. I want you to answer this and then I never want to see this same conversation again: What is the actual point of rehashing 6 years of dev development 20 times a month on this board

The first statement you made is incorrect. To illustrate:

Charlie buys a new BMW. It takes 4 years more than anticipated to get to him, and when it does, the delivery driver says it’s still a prototype. When it gets to Charlie, it’s made of Lego and bursts into flames instantly.

Should Charlie care about what happened in the four years prior to receiving his disastrous new car? Yes, ESPECIALLY IF HE CARES ABOUT BMW. Maybe, BMWs are now being assembled by toddlers who can only build with Lego, or maybe it’s run by incompetent leadership who direct their engineering team to use Lego. Either way, I would like to know!

 

The assertion that what the devs have left to do is fix bugs is far from true. There are complicated, vital systems which have to be first developed, then integrated with each other. We don’t actually know how much of that has happened behind the scenes. There are probably still YEARS of serious game dev left to go. So again, the past DOES predict the future. Should fans of the game be ambivalent towards its future?

[TickleMyMary]

Well damn... They REALLY need to start doing better, just ticked over to mostly negative on steam and certainly wont help future sales! 

 

It makes me pretty sad to see this... While I think it's a fair review of the game in it's current state, it really shouldn't be this way. We can bicker over the reasons until the cows come home but there's no way in the world the game and community should be in such a state... Then with the gaslighting over "our expectations" over on discord, no wonder people feel this way.

[Alexoff]

7 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Reach out and tell them what exactly that they don't know. Again, What is the actual point of rehashing 6 years of dev development 20 times a month on this board?  You've been heard, my dude. Probably 100 times in the last 3 months. Please, please either contribute something useful, ask for something solvable, or give it a rest. 

It is strange that only I speak unuseful, and only I must stop.

[PDCWolf]

7 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Yes, I know the what the state of the game is. You know what the state of the game is. IG certainly knows what the state of the game is. They knew what the state of the game was the first time we had this conversation, and the 20th, and the 100th. The question I asked was what is the actual point of rehashing 6 years of dev development 20 times a month on this board?  I would like a direct answer to that specific question. 

Knowing in silence is still not owning up to it, it's not explaining why, and it's also not explaining how you expect for the next years to not go the same way. Until that happens, it'll never be "water under the bridge", it's more like water flooding my village and keeping my house under water, the damage is done, they need to face the reality that damage is done, repair it, and then maybe we can talk about how velocity is good and bugs are getting fixed and development is gonna go faster and faster. There's no way I'd believe statements like those whilst the biggest elephant in the room is still there. Heck, it's probably why almost nobody outside the forum believes those statements.

7 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

The CM isn't being provocative or mean. Dev teams are simply sick of being used as your (and everyone else's) doormat and you don't like what they have to say. 

If I called you the things Dakota called the reddit community, I'd be out the forums for at least 15 days for insulting language.

46 minutes ago, TickleMyMary said:

Well damn... They REALLY need to start doing better, just ticked over to mostly negative on steam and certainly wont help future sales! 

That's the minimum you get when you insult your community that way.

[Yakuzi]

13 hours ago, Strawberry said:

When a development team gets into an actually decent pace for making the game.

So development has yet to start?

Jokes asides (?), that's one subjective definition. Whatever fits your narrative I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[MechBFP]

17 minutes ago, Yakuzi said:

So development has yet to start?

Haha, they walked face first into that one. But ya that is definitely not a reasonable definition.

i would consider development started once code or assets start being created, maybe conceptual art too but I think that varies depending on the type of game and how critical that work is for other work to start. 

[Strawberry]

30 minutes ago, Yakuzi said:

Jokes asides (?), that's one subjective definition. Whatever fits your narrative I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well yes what defines serious/good development will be heavily subjective, its close to impossible to objectively measure the quality and speed of development properly, and doubly so in a way that everyone will agree on, thats just the nature of these conversations

[kdaviper]

2 hours ago, VlonaldKerman said:

The first statement you made is incorrect. To illustrate:

Charlie buys a new BMW. It takes 4 years more than anticipated to get to him, and when it does, the delivery driver says it’s still a prototype. When it gets to Charlie, it’s made of Lego and bursts into flames instantly.

Should Charlie care about what happened in the four years prior to receiving his disastrous new car? Yes, ESPECIALLY IF HE CARES ABOUT BMW. Maybe, BMWs are now being assembled by toddlers who can only build with Lego, or maybe it’s run by incompetent leadership who direct their engineering team to use Lego. Either way, I would like to know!

 

The assertion that what the devs have left to do is fix bugs is far from true. There are complicated, vital systems which have to be first developed, then integrated with each other. We don’t actually know how much of that has happened behind the scenes. There are probably still YEARS of serious game dev left to go. So again, the past DOES predict the future. Should fans of the game be ambivalent towards its future?

Maybe that's why they don't sell BMW:Early Access

[Pthigrivi]

4 hours ago, VlonaldKerman said:

The first statement you made is incorrect. To illustrate:

Should Charlie care about what happened in the four years prior to receiving his disastrous new car? Yes, ESPECIALLY IF HE CARES ABOUT BMW. Maybe, BMWs are now being assembled by toddlers who can only build with Lego, or maybe it’s run by incompetent leadership who direct their engineering team to use Lego. Either way, I would like to know!

Okay, so let's do this one last time and have it done. The question is why did KSP2 take so long and why was it in the state that it was in spring of 23'. First: as I mentioned to PDCwolf big, complicated games often take 6-8 years to be released, and even then they are often buggy and missing features that get added later. KSP2 was more than just buggy at release, it was nigh unplayable. It's still buggier than I would hope for or expect from an EA release. No matter how you slice it the game needed more time, probably another year to be released even with just base-game + science and a playable level of performance and stability. So why did KSP2 end up on the longer end of the 6-8 year development time?

1) KSP is actually a really complicated and very unique game that requires a huge number of novel solutions. Re-writing the code to allow for multiple subassemblies in the VAB, acceleration under timewarp, interstellar, and multiplayer meant re-solving these problems from scratch. Starfield is also a big complicated game, but its still just a Role-Play FPS. There's a lot of content and some newish features but at its core it's still just a skin of FO4, which is a skin of Skyrim, which is a skin of Oblivion and so on. They aren't tasked with reinventing novel physics applications.

2) The original studio collapsed and was rebuilt half-way through development. No matter what you personally think about the politics of that it was undoubtedly incredibly messy and disruptive to the process and probably set them back a year all by itself. 

3) Do people remember this all happened during COVID? Every business I deal with was set back at least a year cumulatively by the collective disruption that happened over the 2 years from 2020 to 2022. 

Each of these was communicated to players. There are whole dev blogs and dev videos devoted to explaining the technical challenges. There was a whole dev video on how frustrating and disruptive COVID was for them and their process. Folks who have been following this for years or went back and watched those videos all know this history. We've talked about it at length many, many times. Again my question was not Was KSP2's history relevant to its current state? or Why are people allowed to bring up the past when talking about the state of the game?  It was: What is the point of rehashing 6 years of dev development 20 times a month?  Why are we filling every other thread on this board with SAME. EXACT. CONVERSATION. OVER. AND. OVER. AND. OVER.

For that I think we need to look at some other responses:
 

10 hours ago, moeggz said:

For me, it was to get either an explanation or an apology. ...
...it was a rather long and at times (presumed unintentionally) misleading process to get here. ...
... if they turn the corner and make it good yeah I’m satisfied with just that tweet and will recommend the game on steam and to others and won’t keep harping on the mistakes of the past.

3 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Knowing in silence is still not owning up to it,...
...Until that happens, it'll never be "water under the bridge", it's more like water flooding my village...
...they need to face the reality that damage is done, repair it, and then maybe we can talk...

This I think gets to the heart of it. For many there is a perception that the time it took and poor quality of the product they received was done either without care or concern or done maliciously. The perception is that a personal wrong has been done and that salving that personal grievance is a critical and necessary step for the game to improve. You might be surprised to hear that I completely understand this feeling. Im pretty sad and annoyed that I haven't been able to play KSP2 in nearly 2 months  and even before that I wasn't really able to do much. That SUCKS. I'm not disagreeing with you on that. I'm glad that them speaking to that sense of player frustration was valuable to many. 

Unfortunately though some of the tactics that are employed here--endlessly spamming threads with the same argument over and over--all in pursuit of bloody satisfaction actually hinders the process of solving the underlying problem. It drowns out all of the much more specific and actionable feedback about UI, dV readouts bugging all over, whatever mess is going on with docking ports, and even more fundamental things going forward like what do we expect from science? and how do we want resources to work?  The people who want to have productive conversations about specific improvements aren't your enemy here. We are trying to see that the game actually improves in a real, material sense. And yeah, we may not be as hung up on receiving a personal apology.  But it's deeply discourteous and sincerely counterproductive to deliberately clog most of a message board up with the same argument over and over and hold us hostage as a tactic for getting an apology from the company. It's a bit like buying something from the store that's broken and then you go harangue other customers waiting in the customer service line for months. We more than anyone understand your frustration. But you're taking it out on the wrong people. 

PS: And yes moeggz used the word "apology" but this isn't specifically directed at you. If anything you've been a more specific and considerate in voicing your concerns than others. I'm also not just hanging this all on PDCWolf. Yes you and I disagree from time to time but it's not about that. This is more about a general trend and style of posting than a specific person or people.

Edited August 12, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[PDCWolf]

52 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

snip

From what I see in your post, there's a big number of assumptions in favor of the dev team and its work that are no more than just that: assumptions.

• The level of complexity of KSP2, and your assessment of this seems highly subjective. Again, there's an epidemic of grossly overstating the complexity of rigidbody physics which if they were such, they wouldn't proliferate that hard on almost every indie engineering title. The complexity of the scaled-space planetarium method and integrating patched conics is also grossly overstated, as they're absolutely the easiest solutions to the problems presented by the concept of the game.
• Somehow KSP2 being almost the same game as KSP1 isn't measured by the same stick as Starfield being built up on its predecessors, even though so far those games have presented the bigger evolutions. Somehow for you, KSP2 had a bigger effort and evolution, whilst actually being so far a discernible devolution of its predecessor save for the assumption that they had to rebuild everything. This assumption is also proven wrong when you see stuff like the PQS topic, where they straight up lifted systems from the previous game.
• The original studio is no more and was replaced, obviously, but they did announce a full product for 2020. The studio that replaced them also announced full products for 2021, 2022, 2023, and then 5 months before release switched to EA. This cannot be ignored at any stage and will remain a glaring issue until clarified. It is also obvious for anyone that such a full product might have never existed, but even then we'd need explanations of why they chose lie to our faces 4 times. "le greed xd" is not an explanation, much less when coming from a user.
• COVID lockdowns went on from late 2020 to early 2021. The lie that a full product was coming lasted from early 2019 to late 2023.
• The videos explaining the disruption and such still promised a full product, and mentioned that progress was allowed to go on during those times, so the official statement is that they did manage to work on the game.

Fixing the game is not solving this problem. The state of the game is, for me, a completely disjointed issue from their frustrating and outright false -in some cases- PR statements, and how they both fail to acknowledge reality and continue trying to rope us in with lukewarm statements trying too hard at happy-go-lucky.

Lastly, I think a lot of people who share your view forget one thing: Progress has been made. And no, I don't mean the game, I mean getting the upNates to be serious, getting the company to do a small statement about it, getting a public bugtracker, a bi-weekly bug update, and so on, and in those aspects, every bit of progress has ended discussion on those points. People stopped complaining about how dev blogs and updates were given, and how little they talked about bugs, yet you fail to recognize that.

In the end, the "20 times a month" debate keeps coming up because it's what no progress, or negligible little progress, has been made on. It's also a matter of perspective, as obviously there's a lot of people who see it as water under the bridge, but you have to accept that even more people, based on reddit, reviews, twitter and so, do not see it as water under the bridge.

 

[Pthigrivi]

15 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

From what I see in your post, there's a big number of assumptions in favor of the dev team and its work that are no more than just that: assumptions.

Like I said, that was the last time I'm having that conversation. You are also just making assumptions. You and I disagree. Neither of us knows, nor are you likely to accept nor trust any explanation given to you by the devs or anyone else. [Snip]

15 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Fixing the game is not solving this problem. The state of the game is, for me, a completely disjointed issue from their frustrating and outright false -in some cases- PR statements, and how they both fail to acknowledge reality and continue trying to rope us in with lukewarm statements trying too hard at happy-go-lucky.

Lastly, I think a lot of people who share your view forget one thing: Progress has been made. And no, I don't mean the game, I mean getting the upNates to be serious, getting the company to do a small statement about it, getting a public bugtracker, a bi-weekly bug update, and so on, and in those aspects, every bit of progress has ended discussion on those points. People stopped complaining about how dev blogs and updates were given, and how little they talked about bugs, yet you fail to recognize that.

In the end, the "20 times a month" debate keeps coming up because it's what no progress, or negligible little progress, has been made on. It's also a matter of perspective, as obviously there's a lot of people who see it as water under the bridge, but you have to accept that even more people, based on reddit, reviews, twitter and so, do not see it as water under the bridge.

Again, we are not the company.  This is a community message board. If you want to communicate with the company directly write them an email. Write them 20 emails a day. Respond directly to their tweets and communications. If you have specific solvable concerns that the actual people making the game can implement and tangibly improve upon the game itself that don't require a time machine by all means voice them! But the vast majority of people reading and contributing to this board are just other customers in line trying to solve the same problem. [Snip]

Edited August 13, 2023 by James Kerman
Redacted by a moderator

[PDCWolf]

15 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Like I said, that was the last time I'm having that conversation. You are also just making assumptions. You and I disagree. Neither of us knows, nor are you likely to accept nor trust any explanation given to you by the devs or anyone else. [Snip]

You admit neither us know, but you want me to accept your assumptions...

15 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Again, we are not the company.  This is a community message board.

And I believe none of those messages were aimed at you, they are posted on official statement threads or feedback threads, right where they belong. The moment you mention your views on development times, someone else will mention theirs [Snip]

[Snip]

Edited August 13, 2023 by James Kerman
Redacted by a moderator