About the status of KSP2, the community, groupthink and maybe also the devs

[Guest]

I know there are a lot of problems with KSP2 right now. But the thing which is the biggest problem for me is that we have entered full "Groupthink mode".

Before I go into the details about it, I can tell you I have been there. It is bad for the users, it is bad for the dev team. It is bad for everybody. And from my point of view the best thing is to realize that you are actually in "Groupthink mode" helps a lot to understand what you are actually doing and why.

Here is the wiki article about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

I have to repeat I have been there as a dev and and know how bad it is to reach this point.
We are in a situation where the community also starts to take part in the Groupthink process, so is difficult to get the whole picture.

But lets go through the symptoms:

• Type I: Overestimations of the group — its power and morality
  • Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
    check. Hype train was running full speed although the game was in a bad state
  • Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
    Partially. That is mostly a community thing at this point.
• Type II: Closed-mindedness
  • Rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group's assumptions.
    Heat as an example. Wobble is another one.
  • Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, impotent, or stupid.
    This is probably the main thing the community is doing right now. Both sides.
• Type III: Pressures toward uniformity
  • Self-censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
    This is an internal symptom, not external. So I can't judge it.
  • Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
    Currently happening. People lose hope and do not give feedback anymore.
  • Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of "disloyalty"
    Community is fully engaging in this one.
  • Mindguards— self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.
    This is basically happening on discord right now at full scale.

Solving the situation is difficult. Basically the only way out I know by my personal experience is to fix the product and make it usable again.

Actually my main goal is not to start a discussion. But for everybody to understand the current situation. And also why everyone is doing what they are doing.

Maybe this helps. Maybe it doesn't...

Edited September 16, 2023 by running_bird

[MechBFP]

I honestly can’t tell what you are talking about. Since the community doesn’t make any decisions I don’t know how that is relevant to the community, and since you have no clue what the devs internal discussions are like I don’t see how you make make that determination?

[Pthigrivi]

There are also two other threads discussing this already. Maybe consider adding your thoughts there?

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, MechBFP said:

I honestly can’t tell what you are talking about. Since the community doesn’t make any decisions I don’t know how that is relevant to the community, and since you have no clue what the devs internal discussions are like I don’t see how you make make that determination?

KSP2 was released as EA. So they did want our feedback for future development and decisions. That is pretty much what EA is about and what they told us why they did EA.

And orbital decay has been there since day 0. So if it takes 6months+ to fix a basic functionality something is seriously wrong with how they are doing things.

2 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

There are also two other threads discussing this already. Maybe consider adding your thoughts there?

I am not talking about communication or community. This is a thing which involves both. From my point of view it did not really fit in any of those because it touches both.

[Kerbart]

You are absolutely right. As a group, we're unified in thinking that KSP2 right now sucks.

But instead of chalking it up to group think, I'd chalk it up to the product just monumentally falling short of expectations raised by Nate.

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

You are absolutely right. As a group, we're unified in thinking that KSP2 right now sucks.

Actually were are not. There are several groups involved right now. There is also a group which thinks that KSP2 is totally fine right now. For groupthing to occur you need at least 2 groups (ingroup and outgroup). Which is actually what this post is about. Please read the linked wiki.

7 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

But instead of chalking it up to group think, I'd chalk it up to the product just monumentally falling short of expectations raised by A

I really don't think blaming specific devs helps. That is what the "dev ingroup" must work out by themselves. But blaming one specific person is wrong in my opinion, at least on public forums without specific details.

Because, well: The problem is called groupthing and not X-think.

[MechBFP]

44 minutes ago, running_bird said:

So if it takes 6months+ to fix a basic functionality something is seriously wrong with how they are doing things.

Or they are understaffed, and/or are needing to focus on other development work instead of fixes, and/or they lack experienced talent, and/or had lots of turnover, and/or probably a dozen other things. Seems awfully strange to jump to group think, out of all things, when that is only 1 out of dozens of potential reasons.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, running_bird said:

We are in a situation where the community also starts to take part in the Groupthink process, so is difficult to get the whole picture.

I am quoting myself up there because this post was not about the devs especially. Actually the topics says "and maybe also the devs". I was mostly talking about the community. I think actually putting a "and maybe also the devs" would help people understand what I want to say. Because it is also about the community.

Last time I heard "velocity was good" or something. Maybe they have problems right now. Doesn't explain all the previous posts about "too much fun in multiplayer" and "covid was not a problem". Please reread the symptoms at the top and realize that "covid is not a problem" was a really strange thing to say after the whole world did struggle with it.

[Strawberry]

1 minute ago, running_bird said:

"covid was not a problem". 

Please find me the quote that says this, I in fact remember them several times saying the opposite.

[MechBFP]

19 minutes ago, running_bird said:

I was mostly talking about the community

Group think has to impact decision making. What decisions are we making as a group?

[Guest]

20 minutes ago, Strawberry said:

Please find me the quote that says this, I in fact remember them several times saying the opposite.

I will be honest with you: I haven't double checked my facts there. It was this video, but it DOES tell a different story.

My mistake.

5 minutes ago, MechBFP said:

Group think has to impact decision making. What decisions are we making as a group?

As far as I know KERB is community driven? And:

Quote

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

Your feedback will be crucial in helping to make KSP 2 the best it can be, and we want to hear about everything that is important to you. Are the tutorials effective and are there enough of them? Have the user interface changes made a meaningful impact? Is the localization accurate?

Most importantly, we want players to play for thousands of hours. What will keep you playing? During Early Access there will be a form on the KSP website to submit detailed feedback. It can also be accessed from the game’s launcher and the Steam page.

You can follow the development progress through our various social channels: the KSP subreddit, the official KSP forums, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Facebook.

Well they did not specify that the feedback will actually be used. But usually you would expect that feedback will go into the dev process.

 

And furthermore. The community is not developing the game. But can have a high influence on the product never the less. And the descisions the "community" did make did drive a lot of people away. This causing bad reviews on Steam and telling other people directly not to buy the game. The "community" is not totally disconnected from the revenue stream of the game. It is directly involved.

[MechBFP]

Don’t confuse making similar, but independently made, decisions as group think. 

[Infinite Aerospace]

43 minutes ago, MechBFP said:

Or they are understaffed, and/or are needing to focus on other development work instead of fixes, and/or they lack experienced talent, and/or had lots of turnover, and/or probably a dozen other things. Seems awfully strange to jump to group think, out of all things, when that is only 1 out of dozens of potential reasons.

That's an important point to raise and you're quite right, there's a multitude of things that can impact the development speed of a project.

 

On the outside it's easy for people to 'determine' what those delays are but it's often a lot more complex than just *insert group* failed to do 'insert task'. It's impossible to tell from the outside what is the root cause of the ongoing delays with KSP2 development but there's a number of things worth considering.

 

Perhaps there's a relatively small group working on bug fixes and optimisations, with the bulk of the team working on the roadmap.

 

Perhaps in that sort of setup there'd be a pretty reasonable cadence of feature updates once the first 'domino' falls so to speak.

 

Truthfully we don't know and it's never useful for a collective to assume to know which one is fact and which is just 'assumption'. We can't assume it's been X amount of time between this patch, and that patch so it's going to be Y amount of time before whatever update is going to be released. For all we know colonies could be at a very advanced state in development and could drop a few months after science, or that might not be the case.

 

This is where the one area of critique I do support is that of communication, but everything else is entirely subjective. Communications are critical for a good relationship between two groups, in this case it's developers and end-users. It's a give and take arrangement in my opinion but both parties need to be willing to participate.

[Guest]

13 minutes ago, MechBFP said:

Don’t confuse making similar, but independently made, decisions as group think. 

Given your post above I am not sure if you know what groupthink acutally is. It is not some "orchestrated" thing everyone follows. It is something which emerges in a group. It is a thing which emerges naturally, given enough pressure, and the indepenceny of the individual is lost not by choice, but by circumstances.

Edited September 17, 2023 by running_bird

[MechBFP]

7 minutes ago, running_bird said:

Given your post above I am not sure if you know what groupthink acutally is. It is not some "orchestrated" thing everyone follows. It is something which emerges in a group. It is a thing which emerges naturally, given enough pressure, and the indepenceny of the individual is lost not by choice, but by circumstances.

You are going to have to explain how exactly an anonymous online forum would manage to meet those conditions. 

[Guest]

1 minute ago, MechBFP said:

You are going to have to explain how exactly an anonymous online forum would manage to meet those conditions. 

Reddit is very hostile about them game. Not because of the game itself. But because CMs like to censor every opinion of those who are "those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, impotent, or stupid.".

And discord is the opposite. They are the "Mindguards" which try to prottect KSP2.

KSP2 is also easy to explain because of high cohesiveness, which if you read the wiki article, is a good foundation for groupthink.

[cocoscacao]

4 hours ago, running_bird said:

Actually my main goal is not to start a discussion

Well, in that case... BURN THE INFIDELS! 

[MechBFP]

1 hour ago, running_bird said:

Reddit is very hostile about them game. Not because of the game itself. But because CMs like to censor every opinion of those who are "those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, impotent, or stupid.".

And discord is the opposite. They are the "Mindguards" which try to prottect KSP2.

KSP2 is also easy to explain because of high cohesiveness, which if you read the wiki article, is a good foundation for groupthink.

Neat. How does that answer my question exactly?

[RocketRockington]

6 hours ago, running_bird said:

Type II: Closed-mindedness

The replies you're getting, in a nutshell.  

But yes, it's pretty clear there's a lot of tribalism going on,.people who will never change their minds no matter what the state of ksp2 is.  I've seen this attributed to the "haters who just want to see it fail" in several posts in the last couple of days...but it also applies to the people who are so dug in on making excuses or blaming the consumer that they are likely to blame to community if the project gets cancelled because the community was unwilling to loyally buy overhyped garbage and hold thier nose indefinitely in sufficient numbers.

[Kerbart]

10 hours ago, running_bird said:

I really don't think blaming specific devs helps. That is what the "dev ingroup" must work out by themselves. But blaming one specific person is wrong in my opinion, at least on public forums 

I’m not singling out any  developer.  I am singling out the guy who is in charge, and whose voice came out of his mouth accompanying all those videos over the years telling us how fantastic the game was going to be and how amazing all the features in it are. THAT is the guy I am singling out.

The only “groups” we have are those that think IG is a bunch of charlatans milking their scam as long as possible vs those that think it’s an “honest failure” with hopes it will eventually turn into something better.

Both groups agree the game is bad. Even youtubers paid for their content don’t think the game is good. You can try to apply what you learned in psychology class here but the main reason I’m not reading that wall of text is because it seems to  claiming “we” are to blame, And while it’s natural to not want to take responsibility for actions is frequently occurring, putting the balme on the players is, while I appreciate the novelty of the approach, not something I agree with in this case.

 

[MechBFP]

9 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

I’m not singling out any  developer.  I am singling out the guy who is in charge, and whose voice came out of his mouth accompanying all those videos over the years telling us how fantastic the game was going to be and how amazing all the features in it are. THAT is the guy I am singling out.

The only “groups” we have are those that think IG is a bunch of charlatans milking their scam as long as possible vs those that think it’s an “honest failure” with hopes it will eventually turn into something better.

Both groups agree the game is bad. Even youtubers paid for their content don’t think the game is good. You can try to apply what you learned in psychology class here but the main reason I’m not reading that wall of text is because it seems to  claiming “we” are to blame, And while it’s natural to not want to take responsibility for actions is frequently occurring, putting the balme on the players is, while I appreciate the novelty of the approach, not something I agree with in this case.

 

I still have no clue why they think this since they have avoided actually directly answering a single one of my questions so far. At this point it feels like someone trying to bang a square peg through a round hole and trying to pretend that isn’t what is happening despite everyone clearly watching it happen.

[Kerbart]

11 hours ago, running_bird said:

As far as I know KERB is community driven?

I don't agree. Software like Python is community driven. There are PEPs, a steering committee, development is initiated and executed by the community. "Community driven" means that development goes in a direction "community" finds desirable.

Intercept Games may say that development is community driven. If they need to tell us that they're community driven, and that our input is valued, you can almost take it for granted that it's not. They don't need to say it if it were; we'd see it in their actions.

Was it community driven to drop insane system specs two days before Early Access release? Was it community driven to announce "yay gridfins" when there was an absolute outrage over the bugs and lack of performance. Was it community driven to take three months to acknowledge the sorry state of the game and bump (minor) bug fixing higher up the priority list? If development actually is community driven, they have a weird way of acting on it.

[Kerbart]

1 hour ago, MechBFP said:

I still have no clue why they think this since they have avoided actually directly answering a single one of my questions so far. At this point it feels like someone trying to bang a square peg through a round hole and trying to pretend that isn’t what is happening despite everyone clearly watching it happen.

Now that could arguably be "group think," the dev team telling themselves the product is great and what they're hearing is just from a bunch of grumpy old curmudgeons not representing all the other players.

[MechBFP]

1 hour ago, Kerbart said:

Now that could arguably be "group think," the dev team telling themselves the product is great and what they're hearing is just from a bunch of grumpy old curmudgeons not representing all the other players.

And I am positive that is not the case anyway. Do you remember that video that they released shortly before the EA release where all the devs had some screen time? There was a section where a couple of the devs said something along the lines of "Let us know what you like about it as well"  (in reference to the game). I think it is fairly obvious why they were saying that, lol.

[MarcAbaddon]

On 9/17/2023 at 2:32 AM, MechBFP said:

Or they are understaffed, and/or are needing to focus on other development work instead of fixes, and/or they lack experienced talent, and/or had lots of turnover, and/or probably a dozen other things. Seems awfully strange to jump to group think, out of all things, when that is only 1 out of dozens of potential reasons.

That's criticism doesn't feel convincing to me. To put it in generic terms, someone made the argument A and you reply with oh, but it could also been a1, a2 or a3... so why do you jump to A? But your a1, a2 and a3 are special cases of A. For example, 'lack of experienced talent' is  just an example of something 'seriously wrong with how they are doing things', unless maybe you think talent retainment and effective hiring is somehow not part of the wider team's job.