Dear Developers.... (Feedback | Please Read)

[Coneshot]

/facepalm!

[Rizzupl]

Oh ho there. I'm not defender of Squad, I defend solely what is right.(...) You can now proceed with your pointless joke on how that will be in 2025, the facts are still there.

Predicting the obvious response and calling it out doesn't mean it's any wrong though. Resources will be pushed to 2014 at this pace.

[stupid_chris]

Predicting the obvious response and calling it out doesn't mean it's any wrong though. Resources will be pushed to 2014 at this pace.

Thing is, games that you don't get an early alpha access to can easily spend over five years in development before release. And Squad is only working with a group of people I can count on both of my hands.

[ASnogarD]

I would of preferred a opt in to test new updates rather than wait around while 'testers' test, it would of been nice to help develop the title as it makes its way to release and a opt in system would negate all complaints about bugs in the test versions plus negate all those who want to mess with the new stuff.

Currently I am sort of in limbo with KSP, I dont want to start anything as it wont carry over and as the release date is not known and the hype is high I have been expecting the update anytime now, the result is that I am just getting more irritated with the game as I can only mess around with building craft and *boom* symmetry bug lololol craft is now useless.

(Was messing around for over an hour building a large skycrane / tug in the same style as Manleys Arachne ship... but much more over designed and went OCD on the placement of fuel lines and struts, everything looked cool in the VAB, went to launch and ...TROLLED! One of the 4 engine mounts sitting on the side with the nuke firing into the air while the rest of the craft is ok, I was like ALT F4 gtfo my machine pos).

Its a complex issue though, release too often and theres complaints there is nothing substantial in the updates, too rarely and the hype goes over the top, break saves and players dont want to play, but delay updates to not break saves and players complain they want the new stuff even if it breaks saves...

You cant win

[Phawks]

I'll (1) remember you that you paid for a game in early alpha, not a complete product. (2) You get the updates, but not to control what comes with the updates. You are not positioned in any way to tell Squad what to do, just as you aren't placed to tell Sony how to build the next Play Station, even if you preordered it. You paid to get it. IF that doesn't make you happy, the only thing I can suggest to you is to take a break from the game and come back when it's complete, you paid for it anyway. You can now proceed with your pointless joke on how that will be in 2025, the facts are still there.

1. That's remind, actually.

2. Sony is a massive corporation whose financial structure is built upon shareholders, then customers. Squad is a small Mexican marketing firm with an experimental game development branch. It's safe to say that the customers are providing most of the funding for development; we're unofficial shareholders, in essence. But then again, if development was seeing the entirety of the millions of dollars KSP is making at the moment, we would have a much larger team and much faster development. The head company is still writing everyone's paychecks and controlling development. That's why there's been so much hype this release cycle; they're baiting people in through Steam and the YouTube media releases to make a ton of money. I don't have a problem with that so long as it goes all toward development, but from what I can tell, it's not. I'm pretty sure that's also a reason for the obscene amounts of censorship and secrecy surrounding development.

Also, ask Microsoft and the Xbox One(Eighty) how they feel about customers being "positioned in any way to tell [them] what to do." I think you'll revise that statement.

[stupid_chris]

1. That's remind, actually.

2. Sony is a massive corporation whose financial structure is built upon shareholders, then customers. Squad is a small Mexican marketing firm with an experimental game development branch. It's safe to say that the customers are providing most of the funding for development; we're unofficial shareholders, in essence. But then again, if development was seeing the entirety of the millions of dollars KSP is making at the moment, we would have a much larger team and much faster development. The head company is still writing everyone's paychecks and controlling development. That's why there's been so much hype this release cycle; they're baiting people in through Steam and the YouTube media releases to make a ton of money. I don't have a problem with that so long as it goes all toward development, but from what I can tell, it's not. I'm pretty sure that's also a reason for the obscene amounts of censorship and secrecy surrounding development.

Also, ask Microsoft and the Xbox One(Eighty) how they feel about customers being "positioned in any way to tell [them] what to do." I think you'll revise that statement.

Sorry that my native language isn't English, pointing that out was useless at most.

And you still didn't pay for that. It was just a general example, because going in the specific would've been confusing at the least. The general idea is that you paid for the game and the updates, nothing more, and we are already getting much much more. Pushing further is ridiculous.

[Rizzupl]

Thing is, games that you don't get an early alpha access to can easily spend over five years in development before release. And Squad is only working with a group of people I can count on both of my hands.

Do you think that after they finally take the beta tag out of the game and ,,release'' it will magically sell billions and go full-blown AAA game mode? They already are making money on it, the majority of playerbase is already there and as someone who paid I'm not satisfied with the current state of development. Chairs and new wheels for 5 months. Seriously. It will soon turn into minecraft and we will get 1 new copypasted KSPX part and space horses every 3 months -.- I was really really happy with my investment but now after 0.18 it just looks like they lost all the passion and I certainly will not wait forever so they can finish building the core of the game and start making content again.

@down

yeah run away, enjoy your delusions

Edited July 24, 2013 by Rizzupl

[stupid_chris]

Taking aside infrastructure work again. This is pointless, I'll just be going my way. This is slowly turning into personal insults and I do not wish to take part of this. Have a nice day people.

[Ralathon]

I'd rather have my saves break regularly so I can give feedback while things develop as opposed to playing an unfinished game until 1.0.

We are alpha players after all. Our primary purpose of being here is giving Squad some income during development, providing feedback on a large scale and having some fun.

[Brabbit1987]

Do you think that after they finally take the beta tag out of the game and ,,release'' it will magically sell billions and go full-blown AAA game mode? They already are making money on it, the majority of playerbase is already there and as someone who paid I'm not satisfied with the current state of development. Chairs and new wheels for 5 months. Seriously. It will soon turn into minecraft and we will get 1 new copypasted KSPX part and space horses every 3 months -.- I was really really happy with my investment but now after 0.18 it just looks like they lost all the passion and I certainly will not wait forever so they can finish building the core of the game and start making content again.

I am kinda confused as to why you purchased this game if you are only going to complain about it when an update isn't exactly what you wanted. Do you even understand that the game is not a final product? If you do, you certainly wouldn't be complaining about this -.-

[Lanfranc]

2. Sony is a massive corporation whose financial structure is built upon shareholders, then customers. Squad is a small Mexican marketing firm with an experimental game development branch. It's safe to say that the customers are providing most of the funding for development; we're unofficial shareholders, in essence. But then again, if development was seeing the entirety of the millions of dollars KSP is making at the moment, we would have a much larger team and much faster development. The head company is still writing everyone's paychecks and controlling development. That's why there's been so much hype this release cycle; they're baiting people in through Steam and the YouTube media releases to make a ton of money. I don't have a problem with that so long as it goes all toward development, but from what I can tell, it's not. I'm pretty sure that's also a reason for the obscene amounts of censorship and secrecy surrounding development.

Okay, three things:

Firstly, we're not "unofficial shareholders" in any sense, although we are stakeholders.

Secondly, how is weekly status updates on what each developer is doing the same as "obscene amounts of censorship and secrecy"? What more do you want, updates in 10-minute intervals? Or live feeds from the development offices?

And thirdly, I very much doubt that Squad is earning "millions of dollars" from KSP, and even if they did, as long as development is continuing as planned, they can do whatever the hell they want with their money.

[chaos_forge]

I'm pretty sure that's also a reason for the obscene amounts of censorship and secrecy surrounding development.

The reason for the increased amount of secrecy is the larger community, which means there are more people complaining and starting flame wars like the one in this thread. People keep taking offhand comments the developers make and blowing them out of proportion, or complaining about features that were not originally going to be implemented in the game not being in the next update. (I'm looking at you, resources) I mean honestly, you should be glad that they're being included at all. And the devs decided to implement them because of the community.

People's capacity for overreaction amazes me sometimes.

Edited July 24, 2013 by chaos_forge

[Shuttle]

I want .21 now just like many other people in this thread

[Torham234]

I could go on and point out how silly this pool is, but I can see that many people before me have already done it, so .... yeah

pointless thread is pointless

[Rockhem]

Wow there is so much entitlement in this thread I don't know where to start.

1. Squad is not required to give you any updates or any information.

2. More money does not equal faster development.

3. Don't underestimate infrastructure, would you rather have a broken resource system and career mode done quick or a working one that takes a couple months?

4. If they wanted to they could take space port and the forums down too.

[Rizzupl]

The reason for the increased amount of secrecy is the larger community, which means there are more people complaining and starting flame wars like the one in this thread. (...)

so the best way to solve it is apparently punishing everyone who asks questions, ignoring them and going all like:

Q: new version when ?

A: fk off entitled kid :^* whenever we feel like it

certainly being honest with community and giving estimate week or even month of release time to shut everyone up is logically retarded and worse.

[Rockhem]

so the best way to solve it is apparently punishing everyone who asks questions, ignoring them and going all like:

Q: new version when ?

A: fk off entitled kid :^* whenever we feel like it

certainly being honest with community and giving estimate week or even month of release time to shut everyone up is logically retarded and

worse.

What happens.if said entitled kid realises that squad missed the update deadline? All hell will break loose then.

[chaos_forge]

so the best way to solve it is apparently punishing everyone who asks questions, ignoring them and going all like:

Q: new version when ?

A: fk off entitled kid :^* whenever we feel like it

certainly being honest with community and giving estimate week or even month of release time to shut everyone up is logically retarded and worse.

. . . are you ignoring that the Milestone system even exists? And as a programmer, I can tell you that bugfixing (and development in general) is unpredictable. They aren't telling us when .21 will be released because they don't know. They're not keeping information from you, you're just asking for information that nobody has. It isn't some super secret plan to leave all the players uninformed.

[EleSigma]

Do you think that after they finally take the beta tag out of the game and ,,release'' it will magically sell billions and go full-blown AAA game mode? They already are making money on it, the majority of playerbase is already there and as someone who paid I'm not satisfied with the current state of development. Chairs and new wheels for 5 months. Seriously. It will soon turn into minecraft and we will get 1 new copypasted KSPX part and space horses every 3 months -.- I was really really happy with my investment but now after 0.18 it just looks like they lost all the passion and I certainly will not wait forever so they can finish building the core of the game and start making content again.

I'm going to have to agree with Rizzupl, I'm a long time player and it seems that after 0.18 the development for KSP has dropped off a cliff. Maybe the team just isn't really enthusiastic about career mode and thus it's hindering their ability to work since they're not putting their all into it like they did with planets? The attempt to make quick, monthly releases that would release selected finished features has failed since all we have is the same bi-monthly to almost tri-monthly development time but with fewer results than before the new method was started.

I'm a bit concerned about development and how things are going honestly.

I do like the milestone system though, that's a good thing to keep us informed.

[Rockhem]

How other companies get release dates is finishing it before hand then placing a release date or giving them absurd amounts of buffer time (months) which would actually delay development.

[stupid_chris]

I'll just leave this here.

I was meaning to do a post about just that in fact.

We tried to do faster-paced smaller updates on 0.19 and 0.20, but it didn't really work out. The problem is the time we have to spend focused on maintaining stability.

On each update we've done, we've noticed the demand to keep the game stable and bug-free is always higher than before. That means we need to devote more and more time to testing and bugfixing.

That's something we expected. We started the project doing 3-week cycles with no testing at all between them (before publishing), and after the first public release, found we had to do 4-week updates with one for testing, and later 6-week updates with 2.5 for testing...

That's fine, that's a natural part of the game's growth I think. The problem is when you try to scale it back. The testing phase, as it turns out, is incompressible. Every time you put a build out, regardless of the number of features, you're going to spend a couple of weeks cleaning up issues.

So doing shorter releases doesn't really work. It's like trying to build a house while having to make sure you're cleaning up every bit of sawdust for every board you nail to a wall. It's far more efficient to do it all in one go, and clean up the whole mess afterwards.

That's what happened. We learn as we go, in much the same way Kerbals do... Fiery destruction and all.

Currently, we're back to our old cycle we had for 0.17 and 0.18. It does seem to work out a lot better in terms of what we can get into the game in the time available.

Cheers

[Koren]

I'm going to have to agree with Rizzupl, I'm a long time player and it seems that after 0.18 the development for KSP has dropped off a cliff. Maybe the team just isn't really enthusiastic about career mode and thus it's hindering their ability to work since they're not putting their all into it like they did with planets? The attempt to make quick, monthly releases that would release selected finished features has failed since all we have is the same bi-monthly to almost tri-monthly development time but with fewer results than before the new method was started.

I'm a bit concerned about development and how things are going honestly.

I do like the milestone system though, that's a good thing to keep us informed.

Maybe some took some holidays and the dev is slow down a bit, everyone should take some rest from time to time

Game is good so to me the way the dev is good too

[chaos_forge]

I'm going to have to agree with Rizzupl, I'm a long time player and it seems that after 0.18 the development for KSP has dropped off a cliff. Maybe the team just isn't really enthusiastic about career mode and thus it's hindering their ability to work since they're not putting their all into it like they did with planets? The attempt to make quick, monthly releases that would release selected finished features has failed since all we have is the same bi-monthly to almost tri-monthly development time but with fewer results than before the new method was started.

I'm a bit concerned about development and how things are going honestly.

Have you heard about the 80/20 problem? HarvesteR even made a post about it.

[OtherDalfite]

If breaking saves mean we can get all this amazing new content and overhauls, by all means, break saves. It's not worth holding the game back.

[Rizzupl]

If breaking saves mean we can get all this amazing new content and overhauls, by all means, break saves. It's not worth holding the game back.

the problem is there's almost no new content in this update. xD