Release pacing

[Oak7603]

I am beginning to feel like the pacing of the releases, either the next stage as per the road maps, and updates or even hotfixes, is going to be problematic for the game as things move forward and may even end up being a big negative.

The release of For Science! was followed by a rush of posts, video reviews, and other activity that has already seemed to have dropped off after just short of 2 months. Players seemed to have gobbled up the new content and I wonder if they are now just waiting for the next little bit to be released or for their bugs to be fixed.

Is this because KSP2 no longer feels like a sandbox, and the mission system actually causes play to stop when the final missions have been completed? Or is it because for us in early access we have been playing with KSP2 now for nearly a year and there is only so much anyone can do over that time before it is repetitive, especially with the limited toys to play with and the mission based system in place. In my opinion, KSP2 seems a lot 'easier' than KSP1 and for someone who barely left Kerbin and certainly never visited the Jool moons, in KSP2 I have been to all planets and most moons. Yes I could farm every biome but that seems like a chore rather than a game.

Looking even longer term, when the official final release is here, those with EA may simply play the little bit of new content, maybe have a full run through again, and then stop playing. Will this have a negative impact on player numbers and if the final release doesn't do well because of this, will that have a knock on effect with KSP2 long long term?

Hopefully things start to get released quicker and quicker as bugs are ironed out and the amount of work left gets less which will stop the above happening. What do you all think?

[The Aziz]

20 minutes ago, Oak7603 said:

The release of For Science! was followed by a rush of posts, video reviews, and other activity that has already seemed to have dropped off after just short of 2 months. Players seemed to have gobbled up the new content and I wonder if they are now just waiting for the next little bit to be released or for their bugs to be fixed.

Absolute normal thing in the industry when it comes to early access games.

22 minutes ago, Oak7603 said:

Is this because KSP2 no longer feels like a sandbox, and the mission system actually causes play to stop when the final missions have been completed? Or is it because for us in early access we have been playing with KSP2 now for nearly a year and there is only so much anyone can do over that time before it is repetitive, especially with the limited toys to play with and the mission based system in place.

Sandbox was an empty plate. You can only stare at it for so long. FS gave us the potatoes so we have something to chew on, but the meat still isn't there. First hot steak is coming in next milestone, which will give us first good reasons for long term gameplay. But now? If you unlock every node in the tech tree there isn't much else to do. Setting up self sustaining colonies on all bodies, that's another story.

28 minutes ago, Oak7603 said:

Looking even longer term, when the official final release is here, those with EA may simply play the little bit of new content, maybe have a full run through again, and then stop playing.

They said they have 3 star systems planned. One more than on the current roadmap. The final milestone isn't bringing much into the game (by the looks of it now) other than MP, so a 3rd star will be appreciated - and again, exploring and colonizing the entire new system isn't something I'd be able to complete if I played "a bit". That's long term commitment as a player.

Then, was KSP1 any different? Thousands of people used to start over every time an update dropped, the rest were continuing old saves, and even with limited tools the game offered, compared to what's planned for the sequel, it's still played and it was officially supported for over a decade. Why would KSP2 be any different? It's following the exact same path.

[Biggen]

My concern is that bugs need to have priority at this point.  Parachutes not deploying, VAB dV sillyness with staging, maneuver lines disappearing, etc... all need to be fixed before they push new content.  Coming from KSP1, I had a good handle on what I was doing even with the bugs in KSP2. But if I was a new player, I would have put in for a refund pretty quickly.

[Scarecrow71]

2 minutes ago, Biggen said:

My concern is that bugs need to have priority at this point.  Parachutes not deploying, VAB dV sillyness with staging, maneuver lines disappearing, etc... all need to be fixed before they push new content.  Coming from KSP1, I had a good handle on what I was doing even with the bugs in KSP2. But if I was a new player, I would have put in for a refund pretty quickly.

If I could upvote, or provide recognition, or like this post, I would.  I could not possibly agree more that some of the bugs that are present are game-killers and need immediate priority other than just to be on the list of bugs the devs might be looking at.  It's been a year; it doesn't bode very well for the game if these bugs cannot be squashed (or get squashed and then come back).

[Oak7603]

10 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Sandbox was an empty plate. You can only stare at it for so long. FS gave us the potatoes so we have something to chew on, but the meat still isn't there. First hot steak is coming in next milestone, which will give us first good reasons for long term gameplay. But now? If you unlock every node in the tech tree there isn't much else to do. Setting up self sustaining colonies on all bodies, that's another story.

Agreed but that is with the assumption that with colonies comes resources, or at least that there is a complete colony/resource system from the get go. I would also question if colonies will give long lasting gameplay considering it's not really new and we don't actually know how colonies will work.

10 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

They said they have 3 star systems planned. One more than on the current roadmap. The final milestone isn't bringing much into the game (by the looks of it now) other than MP, so a 3rd star will be appreciated - and again, exploring and colonizing the entire new system isn't something I'd be able to complete if I played "a bit". That's long term commitment as a player.

Agreed again as long as there is the interest by the time this happens. Of course there will be long term players but will there be enough?

10 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Then, was KSP1 any different? Thousands of people used to start over every time an update dropped, the rest were continuing old saves, and even with limited tools the game offered, compared to what's planned for the sequel, it's still played and it was officially supported for over a decade. Why would KSP2 be any different? It's following the exact same path.

The difference as I see it is that KSP1 seemed much more geared towards restarting and trying new, whether that was because of the contract system, the money system, the three play modes, or the overall difficulty where as KSP2 just seems easier and far more linear.

[MechBFP]

While I agree the game needs a lot of bug fixing and polish still, new content is needed in order to be able to identify and fix issues that otherwise wouldn’t be identified because of the lack of a use case to run into those issues or general player disinterest resulting in a lack of feedback.

In spite of that however I do hope the game starts to get some polishing passes soon because a I feel like a lot of these issues are simply a waste of time for the player to report because Intercept shouldn’t be so oblivious to the state of their own game that they actually need those reports to know they are a problem. 

It would be a better use of everyone’s time if the issues that players can run into are actually things that are more rare and/or require specific conditions to trigger. 

Edited February 5 by MechBFP

[The Aziz]

11 minutes ago, Oak7603 said:

Agreed again as long as there is the interest by the time this happens. Of course there will be long term players but will there be enough?

There are players who buy games during early access, and there are people who don't. The game rating is slowly but steadily improving as game gets more content and more things are fixed, so if we're lucky, by the time it reaches 1.0 it should be received positively. Chances are, plenty of people will purchase it despite earlier hiccups.

 

8 minutes ago, MechBFP said:

Intercept shouldn’t be so oblivious to the state of their own game that they actually need those reports to know they are a problem. 

QA here: sometimes even after excessive playtesting some critical bugs aren't appearing for the team, but will for the players after update goes live. That's just how it is. It may be not that they are oblivious, but simply unaware. Buuut regardless of that, I'd vote for adding some time for more playtesting, not just smoke/basic feature tests. cuz you know "DARRIN!" during dev streams is heard a bit too often

[Kerbart]

1 hour ago, Biggen said:

My concern is that bugs need to have priority at this point.  Parachutes not deploying,

The low interest in the game (based on Steam stats) and the spike after launching FS suggests a balance is needed to keep interest—and feedback—alive. I agree that there are many game-ruining bugs. They do need fixing. But the game also needs to move forward.

54 minutes ago, MechBFP said:

In spite of that however I do hope the game starts to get some polishing passes soon because a I feel like a lot of these issues are simply a waste of time for the player to report because Intercept shouldn’t be so oblivious to the state of their own game that they actually need those reports to know they are a problem.

By now the feedback should be on the new features—that's the point of EA after all. The fact that a year into the release we're still harping over double-tap staging, invisible orbit lines and faulty DV calculations is a bit worrisome and does raise the question why internal QA doesn't seem to bring up these issues. And if they do, why they're not being addressed.

[steveman0]

Given the pace of updates so far, I've always suspected that they are working on a lot in the background in parallel rather than full focus on immediate content and fixes.  We know they have been working on all of the major milestones at least to some extent since alpha.  I assume they've distributed this work among the team.  I'm hopeful, as Nate himself has optimistically hinted at, that completion of individual milestones will accelerate as various team members on these pieces can devote more of their time to later milestones or bug fixing/polish.

Additionally, the scope of their plans might require some fundamental changes to how some core systems work such as rocket physics some aspects of the rendering.  We might not be seeing bug fixes and performance improvements in some areas in anticipation of replacing obsolete pieces of code with major revisions once they are ready.

[Biggen]

We keep talking about “polish” but they have game breaking bugs  that need tending to before new content is pushed out. I’d say docking issues, orbital decay, parachute issues, all need correction before any new content is developed. And these are only just three items. I’m Sure there are even more I havent discovered.

[cocoscacao]

1 minute ago, Biggen said:

We keep talking about “polish” but they have game breaking bugs  that need tending to before new content is pushed out. I’d say docking issues, orbital decay, parachute issues, all need correction before any new content is developed.

Alas, putting more manpower to these problems wouldn't fix 'em any faster. So let them work in parallel. Bugs aren't things that I'm worried about.

[The Aziz]

17 hours ago, Kerbart said:

double-tap staging

Fixed

29 minutes ago, Biggen said:

orbital decay

Also reportedly fixed

[steveman0]

1 hour ago, Biggen said:

We keep talking about “polish” but they have game breaking bugs  that need tending to before new content is pushed out. I’d say docking issues, orbital decay, parachute issues, all need correction before any new content is developed. And these are only just three items. I’m Sure there are even more I havent discovered.

An engineer responsible for multiplayer net code is not likely to be as capable of figuring out orbital decay better than the one responsible for the physics sim nor better to figure out docking and parachutes than the one responsible for parts.  It only makes sense that the work is distributed among the developers best suited to address each issue.  To a player, it will appear as though things take longer than you think they should, but as a team it likely means much faster progress on development as a whole.  I would like to see them heavily focus on the bug fixing as well and I hope the developers well suited to doing this focus more on bug fixing than polish at this time, but this still might be only a fraction of the team and they might be dealing with some of the most elusive bugs.

[HebaruSan]

3 hours ago, steveman0 said:

An engineer responsible for multiplayer net code is not likely to be as capable of figuring out orbital decay better than the one responsible for the physics sim nor better to figure out docking and parachutes than the one responsible for parts.  It only makes sense that the work is distributed among the developers best suited to address each issue.

This is quite true for some issues, less so for others. For example, probably anybody on the team could fix this one pretty quickly, since it's just rearranging some strings and fixing some comically wrong calculations:

If easy (yet very visible) issues like that are going unfixed because everybody is too busy, then I'd say it's reasonable to hope that they will start getting cleaned up as the headline features are wrapped.

Edited February 6 by HebaruSan

[The Aziz]

Obviously there's more to bugs than "easiness" of getting one fixed. Severity and priority comes first. Smaller issues may be resolved if something more complex is moved further down the line to a future update (because of being too complex). 

inb4 "why the chute bugs weren't fixed in 0.2.1" Because they didn't make it on time for patch release. KERB reports are a good indication on what to expect. If something is in "reproducible" phase a week before a patch, chances that it will be fixed in that one are low.

[Scarecrow71]

37 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

inb4 "why the chute bugs weren't fixed in 0.2.1" Because they didn't make it on time for patch release. KERB reports are a good indication on what to expect. If something is in "reproducible" phase a week before a patch, chances that it will be fixed in that one are low.

This would be believable if the bug wasn't identified almost immediately upon release of 0.2 AND 0.2.1 had been released a week or so after 0.2.1.

[The Aziz]

 of course. A week after release it was a middle of winter holiday period. They all probably returned to office in the second week of January (high chance of few people being on guard in the first week as well), so about two weeks after release. And from there it was less than a month to gather all info, try to reproduce (which isn't always successful, as my own QA experience tells me) and start figuring out the possible cause, not only for that one, but dozens of others (search by v.0.2.0 tag shows over 500 results, but some of them are for sure pre-FS).

[magnemoe]

5 hours ago, steveman0 said:

An engineer responsible for multiplayer net code is not likely to be as capable of figuring out orbital decay better than the one responsible for the physics sim nor better to figure out docking and parachutes than the one responsible for parts.  It only makes sense that the work is distributed among the developers best suited to address each issue.  To a player, it will appear as though things take longer than you think they should, but as a team it likely means much faster progress on development as a whole.  I would like to see them heavily focus on the bug fixing as well and I hope the developers well suited to doing this focus more on bug fixing than polish at this time, but this still might be only a fraction of the team and they might be dealing with some of the most elusive bugs.

Now this doubles down for stuff making models and other stuff. Now KSP is an much more software development game than a game focused on quest, story, dungeons and bosses who would have much more artists at least after initial launch. 

[Biggen]

8 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Fixed

Also reportedly fixed

Definitely not fixed.  I'm experiencing it right now trying to do a rendezvous.  My actually PE is 1km lower than what my PE shows on my map screen and its throwing off my nodes greatly.

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/214244-maneuver-node-controller-080/?do=findComment&comment=4364814

[steveman0]

1 hour ago, Biggen said:

Definitely not fixed.  I'm experiencing it right now trying to do a rendezvous.  My actually PE is 1km lower than what my PE shows on my map screen and its throwing off my nodes greatly.

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/214244-maneuver-node-controller-080/?do=findComment&comment=4364814

That sounds like a different issue. Orbital decay is very obvious as you can watch the AP/PE drop in real time in what should be a stable orbit.

Seems like it could be a mod issue. Maybe a mixup between sea level and ground level altitudes or something of the sort.

Edited February 6 by steveman0

[Brody.mack]

On 2/5/2024 at 11:26 AM, Oak7603 said:

Looking even longer term, when the official final release is here, those with EA may simply play the little bit of new content, maybe have a full run through again, and then stop playing. Will this have a negative impact on player numbers and if the final release doesn't do well because of this, will that have a knock on effect with KSP2 long long term?

I feel like a big retaining feature coming before 1.0 would be multiplayer. Most solely single-player games face the issue you brought up, but since there's a multiplayer feature planned, there will always be "something new" to do with your friends, keeping retention. Especially after adding multiple star systems and colony building. There will be plenty to do then, just gotta wait.

[Kerbart]

13 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Fixed

Also reportedly fixed

I wish. I still have to double tap either the space bar or the stage button. I dare say it is not fixed.

[MechBFP]

3 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

I wish. I still have to double tap either the space bar or the stage button. I dare say it is not fixed.

Sometimes when I envision how the KSP 2 code actually works I just imagine a state machine that just picks which state to go using a random number generator.

Edited February 7 by MechBFP

[Superfluous J]

43 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

I wish. I still have to double tap either the space bar or the stage button. I dare say it is not fixed.

Huh, this was one of my biggest nitpick bugs and I was happy to see that it was indeed fixed for me. Used to be almost every stage if not actually every stage, and in 2 missions (all I've had time for sadly) it's not happened once.

[The Aziz]

7 hours ago, Kerbart said:

I wish. I still have to double tap either the space bar or the stage button. I dare say it is not fixed.

Then make sure to write a report so it can be brought back from the archive and given a second look. Haven't seen anyone doing so in the days after the patch. (Also make sure you're on 0.2.1, one could say it's stupid advice but sometimes stupid answers are correct)