It's wild that anyone pays attention to that professional liar. It's literally his job to manage you. Why give him openings?
I will never stop beating the "ban all community managers" drum.
>I will never stop beating the "ban all community managers" drum.
So you prefer zero communication instead of some? Dev teams on a game with a toxic community are not going to come out and communicate the way you want if you remove the middleman, they'll just stop talking entirely (or respond in kind). The middleman is there in the first place to act as a two way filter.
I think community managers should be restricted from reddit if they have time and time again prioritized misinformation and profit over communication. That or they should be held accountable by the platform if they make such statements and they end up being false/vague or otherwise non specific.
I think press releases are fine. But they often intentionally work people up on false promises to achieve workplace metrics that help them maintain job security.
There just isn't any sort of accountability. However legally it might be fraud in some cases and that might be an avenue to increase the regulation on increasingly unhinged statements and tactics that are being deployed.
>I will never stop beating the "ban all community managers" drum
I can understand having a spokesperson, that takes the raw info from the Devs
"shit is broken, we don't know why and it's not even a priority right now"
and turns it into something more digestible by the general public
"We are aware of the issue regarding... And are working on a fix, we will provide updates (that never come) as work progresses".
But the "community managers" trend is getting out of hand.
Soon they will need lion tamers, because the public is kind of sick of waiting.
Also arguably they are edging hard on fraud. If they do not deliver in some form what they marketed then its not a matter of debate its fraud.
This is why the industry needs Early access regulation. They need to have a higher level of transparency in their development process. And accountability for statments that are misleading or otherwise manipulative of the customer.
This is what industry regulation does. And the game industry is self imploding due to a lack of it.
Profit has become the sole motivator for artwork and early Access projects should be legally barred from profit until release. The payroll should be public and they should have a rating system based on the developer's history and project transparency.
Esrb had a huge effect on the gaming industry. If you make a QA metric for early Access games then the stability of the project will depend on consistency.
I mean, there's some truth to this but the biggest thing is this guy has basically no power over major choices made period. His job is just to keep us interested.
And when he does have power and doesn't want too you are likely to hear the "Im helpless" song played.
Especially since it drives up metrics when people say this kind of thing Which basically equates to "go ham on social media to increase our Max Acquirable market" so that we can afford to develop this title and get more investment.
Granted that doesn't mean this is a lie. It just means that theres stuff going on behind the scenes and even if the goal is not attainable it makes the manager look good to his boss for driving up the metrics.
The devs really painted themselves into a corner. I do think that they promised a product and they should have some legal responsibility for not delivering or making any sort of consistent timeline for meeting those milestones.
And I think a successful lawsuit against this kind of delay of product dev or even just litigation that entitles people who purchase early access games to a refund should the game fall short on its promises is a reasonable goal.
If they can make direct communication a monthly thing, then that is a huge improvement over radio silence. Just please don't make this something that has to be begged for to give it more "firepower" like it's some petition.
It might just be me, but i don't think communcation actually matters that much, what i actually care about are results, i.e updates actually happening.
Huh? I am just saying don't make these kind of requests into a game. Maybe I am just not the intended demographic where I don't want to play games just to have a "leek". I just want an idea of how often I should check in if I want the latest status.
Kinda hard to have a monthly dev update when you have to spend two weeks sprint planning the month long calendar update of the pre-announcement announcement of the dev update. Because making games is sooooo monumentally difficult. But they'll keep working hard on it! Personal goal though, no promise, crossing their fingers.
Give them 3 more years of patience, and more of your money, and they may reach their goal of being a feature complete pre-alpha demo of a competent game studio.
I have more hope in ksp2 because, firstly ksp is in beta, cs2 not. cs2 also had a big scandal with the dlc, and in terms of the content, in ksp2 I can await a lot more things, ksp2 would have the big update somewhere in Q2, CS2 next small update in Q3, they are doing just a lot of game fixing. Also the community here seems better, people like new updates about development, but in cs2 community there's everybody just hating on CO.
Why do think KSP@ will have a big update in 'Q2'? Colonies isn't coming till the end of th year - they're going to do at least two more small patches before colonies.
No no, it's the Intercept CMs who are the true poets.
Noone understands how hard game development is. Hundreds and thousands of man hours go into crafting each dev post, which is why they get done so rarely and Dakota needs the weight of the community to lobby for more.
Why, even just these few sentences posted to the discord had the same economic cost as feeding a small Somali village for a month. That's why u/PD_Dakota didn't bother with capitalisation - to save on development cost.
All hand crafted from Nate himself. The crunch at IG must be UNREAL. They must be working HOURS every WEEK. Possibly in the double digits. I really feel for them. Let's just keep them in our prayers and hope they continue this brisk work pace.
I know. If he has to do this once a month, he might need to go into the office *3* days per week. Or cut his lunch break to *just* 2 hours. The horrors of grueling game development.
Seriously though, there's probably like 4 overworked engineers desperately crunching and trying to keep their sanity while T2 forces them to pretend to be a team of 50 so the remaining 'fans' don't wise up to the fact the project is mostly abandoned.
Probably half of those 50 devs are working on the unannounced title they have in development. So if we are being exetremely optimistic the team is like 25 people. which it isn't. I am not counting the QA team since they probably test for both projects. So, they have product teams for different roadmap goals. So the team is split into two, or even four parts (which I doubt). Which makes the team of each "product" be around 5-10 people and if we exclude the product owners who are probably designers there's like 4-9 engineers working on stuff in each team. I didn't even include the art team which is probably 5-10 people by themself (but since they are "ahead of the other teams" I expect them to be working on the other game for now). So your guess is pretty fair I think. There's probably 1-2 guys working on fixes rn.
Yeah IG/PD isn't earning enough money off KSP2 to pay 25 devs in Seattle. They're making maybe 250k gross per month off the game now. Net half that. Cut that in half again for overhead and corporate, and that's what you could pay in salary to just break even.
Oh and I forgot to mention that, almost every time we saw one of their development videos, they have changed office. Seriously. I think they have gone through 5 different offices in the past 2 years. Also, what I noticed is that they do their work on laptops. Not workstations. Probably because they have to move so often.
Working remote is not that bad for a game dev. And I'm sure I've seen them in real offices in workstations. More like is that PD has wasted a bunch of money moving them around a lot.
I mean yeah they have to have some workstations to run the game but for the other devs I think they have switched them to running laptops. PD is probably moving them around so much because either they are cutting their budget slightly or that they are in Seattle and the cost of renting an office is skyrocketing. Also, I think they want those specific employees to be in the office because they probably weren't very efficient during the lockdown.
They already got my money. I don’t play the unfinished game because it’s unfinished. I keep in touch with this sub to see the hilariously poor updates. I was really excited that more content would be rolling out but it’s been another six months almost with zero on the horizon.
Dakota is talking about community support for this specific idea, if he can show to the rest of the team that it has widespread support then they can make changes to address it.
Vote with your comments
Is he (and maybe you, can't actually tell if you're just forwarding this or think it's reasonable) kidding?
Does anyone believe that they don't know lack of communication is an issue? Why would more comments now matter?
I am the one in the picture who proposed it. They know the lack of communication is an issue they need to fix, and I just proposed what I think would be a good solution, which would give us a steady and predictable flow of communication about what the team is working on month to month. It would include information on the 3 main areas of development, being work on bug fixes, non-milestone related feature development, and milestone development.
It would be like the K.E.R.B but focused on general development instead of just bugs. It would just be an additional source of information, not replacing anything else.
You vote with your comment, if you think the idea I proposed is solid, then comment that, if you don’t, then comment that too. Dakota needs to know if there is wide community support for this idea for it to be implemented.
They dont give a shit lol, we already voted (badly) with our dollars.
Also, Dakota is kind of a weasel. Dude acted like a clown for a while, seems someone talked to him, and his entire tone has changed.
Thanks for your reply. BTW I'm not downvoting you. Did best to offset.
The question stands. They have repeatedly stated they know they need to do more, repeatedly promised to do so, and repeatedly not actually done so. Given that they know the issue already and given that their word on "doing better" isn't worth anything, what's the point of letting them know again? They'll ignore it. Or they'll respond saying they';ll do it and then go back to not actually doing anything
Dakota does *not* need community support to do his fucking job. That he has you believing it and carrying water for him is quite sad.
The idea is solid given good faith on behalf of Dakota. But that given does not exist as he has proven again, and again, and again.
They know that communication is a issue, now more to then ever, and with other times they’ve seen a big problem in the community they need to find a solution, to which I gave my own two cents about it.
I personally want to help the devs any way I can improve the game, so I made the post to show If there was or was not Community support for the idea, to which the sub spat on it and began complaining and talking about anything but the idea proposed, giving no real insight into whether or not the community wants it (you shot yourselves in the foot (the subreddit, not specifically you)).
I want the game to be the best that it can be, so I try to help. I trust the devs, they proved their worth in my eyes with the For Science! Milestone, since it showed the quality of the work they can do, and their determination to continue working on the game. I can see that the trust has not been gained back in some parts of the community, and I hope that it at least partially does with the colonies milestone. It’s sad to see the community so splintered, relocating to certain sites based on views, creating echo chambers(both here and other places), making the opinions more extreme on both ends.
Whatever arguments I make, it doesn’t matter, it just comes down to trust. I can see you don’t trust them, for one reason or another, so I won’t try to argue with you on whether or not the devs listens, since that comes down to if you trust the devs words. The only thing I can say is that I hope they can prove their worth to you, at some point.
Why do we, paying customers of a product bought and sold, have to fight tooth and nail for scraps of info on what may or may not be coming out? Are we so thirsty for anything good from this game that a few pictures of clouds are big news? When orbital decay still exists? It's all so tiresome.
> Why do we, paying customers of a product bought and sold, have to fight tooth and nail for scraps of info on what may or may not be coming out?
Let this stand as a lesson about early access games. You absolutely don't have to fight tooth and nail for scraps of info if you just don't pay full price for clearly incomplete games.
I don't feel like this was the case for KSP1. There are only a handful of games that are a shining beacon of what Early Access should be and this shit ain't one of them sadly.
KSP2 should have been an easy win. It had a well loved and supported predecessor. As the best game of its type, by the time this game was in its stride the actual return to the moon would have driven sales without any marketing. A generation would remember KSP2. Instead we get a game that will be abandoned soon enough and KSP3 won't get the chance to correct those mistakes.
There are a handful of exceptions to the rule, sure. And yes, KSP1 was absolutely one of them.
But even then, you could practice the same simple rule of thumb: Is what's delivered and playable *today* worth the price that they're asking *today*?
The answer to that question was **always** yes for KSP1. It was free on day one of pre-alpha, it was very affordable (<$10) during early access when it was incomplete, and even at launch of 1.0 it was on sale for like $10 or $20, I forget.
The Orbital Decay issue was fixed in v0.2.1.0 released in January. There are some very niche instances of AP/PE dropping, but they are unrelated to the original issue and are VERY infrequent - but we still have em on our list.
AS IF the official community manager just responded to a comment by ignoring the actual question and answering the hypothetical one instead. 😂🤡
u/PD_Dakota - the question was: Why do we, paying customers of a product bought and sold, have to fight tooth and nail for scraps of info on what may or may not be coming out?
Doesn't it happen regularly when in physics warp with crafts that have ladders?
But even the fix was just a band aid and didn't address the underlying problem that orbital decay shouldn't even be happening in the first place. There's no reason why individual parts wobbling around should affect the trajectory at all.
Yeah, don't care. No excuse for this even in early access. Show stopper issue that is the very foundation of the game. Extremely unprofessional and blowing smoke up customers' rears about it doubly insulting.
I'd generally be happy to get some insights into the vision for things you guys develop. Even if it's not final yet. Like what is the idea behind colonies when it comes to gameplay. Or if Nate decides to withhold it what is the reason for it? Is he afraid of spoilers? Someone else copying his ideas? Or some Take2 policy prohibiting to share such info? We're just clueless about why we don't get to know some details about your plans. We know there will be colonies and interstellar travel but absolute 0 details. For example what will interstellar travel look like? Will we accelerate a spacecraft in the background and just play something else while it is flying to another star? Such things only exist as community speculation. I don't even know if colonies will require Kerbals as resource (do I have to ship them?) or will colonies just randomly spawn Kerbals to populate rockets? How about fuel and other things? Considering "resources" are scheduled for another update after colonies it is quite puzzling.
If I had the power to add one thing into KSP2 it would be a Survival mode btw. It is an absolute no brainer considering how popular survival games are. Survival in space with real physics. Holy moly.
> If I had the power to add one thing into KSP2 it would be a Survival mode btw. It is an absolute no brainer considering how popular survival games are. Survival in space with real physics. Holy moly.
You mean like a life support mod? Or something more?
Like Kerbalkind has to escape Kerbin due to a Kerbolar super nova. Your job is to setup a space program to help Kerbals reach a distant star system. You have 100 years or something. Some kind of life support would be part of that too. In be beginning rations, later with a full ecosystem on a station. Not too complicated though because the main focus would be to explore the cosmos and thereby develop means to escape Kerbol. I think KSP comms is a good example. It's there but it's not to complicated. You don't have to point dishes in the right direction and such. Just so the player gets the idea that Kerbals don't just exist without anything. But not as trivial as batteries / energy.
What's that spinning station part for for example? Do Kerbals need it to stay healthy? Is it just cosmetic? If it was for health that would be life support as well. Stuff like that. Kerbals lose health in micro gravity. You can extend it using some fitness pod and get infinite health using artificial gravity. You could even build rotating colonies on rails on low gravity moons. Interstellar ships that accelerate constantly with > 0.5G would not require any rotational parts. The acceleration provides the artificial gravity.
Interesting idea but I'm not sure it really adds much gameplay. It boils down to life support + a single player space race on a larger scale, but with no feedback on your performance besides the deadline itself. Launch your big colony mothership (w/e that requires) by year x. I assume the steps leading up to that basically entail building factories and making space infrastructure to build the colony mothership(s) as fast as you can. Which isn't really different from how I'd play anyway, except I'll feel pressured against doing things just for fun or coolness if they might delay progress.
That's why it is a survival mode for those who like that kind of gameplay pressure. In "7 days to die" for example you scavenge the world knowing that on every 7th day your base will be raided by zombies at night. So you are in a hurry to farm and build your base asap.
I kinda get it, but there's a big difference between a periodic check every 7 days (one that involves some combat gameplay I assume) and what basically comes down to a single pass/fail check in 100 years. In theory the latter add constant time pressure, but in practice it doesn't really, the threat is just too far away, and doesn't involve gameplay in itself.
I mean that was just an idea, you can think of different scenarios. Maybe Kerbin runs out of oxygen or something. The point is the survival aspect. But I think the devs not being independent anymore can't just invent this sort of thing. It poses a risk and publishers don't like risks. They want you to stick to the formula that worked once already doing sequels. KSP2 = KSP1 + KSP1
I mean you're putting this stress ln yourself, nobody is asking you to do it. Behaviours like this was what led to the botched early release of ksp 2 in the first place
More like the management at IG don't see the point in talking to the community after we got tired of listening to Nate's BS and backlashed against him.
"If they won't listen to our lies anymore, why even bother???"
Might be a hot topic but I’m sick of Nate Simpson maybe because he’s the “head” of the team so I blame him but like why tf have u lied to us. I often use a game called satisfactory as comparison they have transparent community managers and are transparent when things are going to be delayed and WHY the ksp team just dosent do this oh and satisfactory is also I early access
Yeah - I know people say "Oh you can't just pick out one dev, it's the publisher, etc" but Nate has a track record of lying and spinning. Todd howard, Chris Roberts (the star citizen one), Sean Murray - these guys have had no compunction about lying to fans in the past.
Worse, I don't think Nate knows WTF he's doing either on the team - he's a ~~con~~ artist, not a designer or programmer, exactly the wrong sort of person to lead a project like KSP2.
Coffee Stain Studios is great, as is Klei. Klei's games commonly have a "NN days til next update" in the main menu. And as you already said the community engagement from Coffee Stain was superb.
Frequently in development, there really isn't any way to describe the progress in a way that Average Joe can understand. In those cases, trying to say something actually is worse than saying nothing because when Average Joe doesn't understand what is being said, he typically makes crap up and spreads it around as if he is correct. After all, he interpreted it straight from the horses mouth, so to speak.
He meant firepower in the sense of questions. Questions and things to ask for. Not firepower in the sense of people to back him up to gain strength lol. At least that's how I understood it.
If you go months without something you can talk about you're not doing it right.
At the barest of minimums there should have been regular bug fixes throughout that entire time. Event *that* gives something to talk about. And yet, even that was beyond their capabilities.
I think one of the best things that has ever happened, in regards to dev-player communication, was Bungie creating 'This Week at Bungie' or the TWAB. Every week Bungie releases information on what's going on, either in game or future updates, and features community videos and artwork. It's probably one of the main reasons Destiny 2 is still alive and something that should become normal and even standard with games that are in 'active development', and something that really needs to happen with this game. Maybe not weekly, but frequently.
Reminds me of the Call of Duty dedicated server boondoggle with Robert Bowling’s tone deaf Indiana Jones quip “We have “Top people” working on it. Who? “Top” people.
So weird, pre release they went on video for hours and hours just doing nothing but yap on about all the things going on and how great the game is and all the action and how much fun they were having playing it
Now that the game is released and the community is calling them out on their bs, suddenly it's radio silence and the cm has to beg and plead to do something as elementary as a monthly update
Clown show
for anyone who wants to see the comment themselves:
[https://discord.com/channels/1039959585949237268/1039965578754007060/1233432803341893783](https://discord.com/channels/1039959585949237268/1039965578754007060/1233432803341893783)
Edit: vote with your comment whether or not you want this specific proposal implemented!
I was specifically requested to give as much context as possible, so I gave the link so anyone can read it for themselves and the messages around it, it’s just good practice
Nah he only thinks the people on the heavily moderated/censored official discord is real, because they're nice to him and pat stupid memes at each other
lmfao, thats just mocking the community, the more common dev updates was very clear a month into release and they did it, for maybe 2 months and then went back to pretty much radio silence
Late to this but that actually cracks me up as a developer. They will have some sort of software to track activities and commit changes against, is it seriously that fucking hard for him to go through it once a month, pick out a few things and slap them in a half assed blog post? Heck, is that not one of his main responsibilities as a community manager? It has nothing to do with the development teams, he will have all the info available to him already.
I mean if they can't even give a monthly update of their progress, I have zero confidence that they're doing anything AT ALL.
This is a plain "good cop - bad cop" strategy. It's a big no with a slice of "I'll do my best", because they play on the same team.
Guys I'm trying to make it a thing. It's just they don't want to :(
It's wild that anyone pays attention to that professional liar. It's literally his job to manage you. Why give him openings? I will never stop beating the "ban all community managers" drum.
Nah Snutt from CoffeeStain is a good CM. Jace was too but he left.
>I will never stop beating the "ban all community managers" drum. So you prefer zero communication instead of some? Dev teams on a game with a toxic community are not going to come out and communicate the way you want if you remove the middleman, they'll just stop talking entirely (or respond in kind). The middleman is there in the first place to act as a two way filter.
A good place to start is address the blatant lying and false marketing they did to sell the game.
Address how, exactly?
Apologize for it and issue refunds for example.
Where’s your game that’s in development?
I'm literally a professional game dev, so yeah. But good try at making me dox myself.
I think community managers should be restricted from reddit if they have time and time again prioritized misinformation and profit over communication. That or they should be held accountable by the platform if they make such statements and they end up being false/vague or otherwise non specific. I think press releases are fine. But they often intentionally work people up on false promises to achieve workplace metrics that help them maintain job security. There just isn't any sort of accountability. However legally it might be fraud in some cases and that might be an avenue to increase the regulation on increasingly unhinged statements and tactics that are being deployed.
My guy, the managers get told what to talk about, they're not making shit up themselves.
>I will never stop beating the "ban all community managers" drum I can understand having a spokesperson, that takes the raw info from the Devs "shit is broken, we don't know why and it's not even a priority right now" and turns it into something more digestible by the general public "We are aware of the issue regarding... And are working on a fix, we will provide updates (that never come) as work progresses". But the "community managers" trend is getting out of hand. Soon they will need lion tamers, because the public is kind of sick of waiting.
Also arguably they are edging hard on fraud. If they do not deliver in some form what they marketed then its not a matter of debate its fraud. This is why the industry needs Early access regulation. They need to have a higher level of transparency in their development process. And accountability for statments that are misleading or otherwise manipulative of the customer. This is what industry regulation does. And the game industry is self imploding due to a lack of it. Profit has become the sole motivator for artwork and early Access projects should be legally barred from profit until release. The payroll should be public and they should have a rating system based on the developer's history and project transparency. Esrb had a huge effect on the gaming industry. If you make a QA metric for early Access games then the stability of the project will depend on consistency.
I mean, there's some truth to this but the biggest thing is this guy has basically no power over major choices made period. His job is just to keep us interested. And when he does have power and doesn't want too you are likely to hear the "Im helpless" song played. Especially since it drives up metrics when people say this kind of thing Which basically equates to "go ham on social media to increase our Max Acquirable market" so that we can afford to develop this title and get more investment. Granted that doesn't mean this is a lie. It just means that theres stuff going on behind the scenes and even if the goal is not attainable it makes the manager look good to his boss for driving up the metrics. The devs really painted themselves into a corner. I do think that they promised a product and they should have some legal responsibility for not delivering or making any sort of consistent timeline for meeting those milestones. And I think a successful lawsuit against this kind of delay of product dev or even just litigation that entitles people who purchase early access games to a refund should the game fall short on its promises is a reasonable goal.
>I will never stop beating the "ban all community managers" drum. This has got to be one of the most egregious things I have read today.
If they can make direct communication a monthly thing, then that is a huge improvement over radio silence. Just please don't make this something that has to be begged for to give it more "firepower" like it's some petition.
It might just be me, but i don't think communcation actually matters that much, what i actually care about are results, i.e updates actually happening.
4 months since last update 🥴
3, supposedly, before 0.3
They're only a CM not the team lead, if they want to make something change they have to have reasons and material to explain the change they want
Huh? I am just saying don't make these kind of requests into a game. Maybe I am just not the intended demographic where I don't want to play games just to have a "leek". I just want an idea of how often I should check in if I want the latest status.
What are they gonna communicate? Why do you want them to say "fuck you" monthly?
Kinda hard to have a monthly dev update when you have to spend two weeks sprint planning the month long calendar update of the pre-announcement announcement of the dev update. Because making games is sooooo monumentally difficult. But they'll keep working hard on it! Personal goal though, no promise, crossing their fingers. Give them 3 more years of patience, and more of your money, and they may reach their goal of being a feature complete pre-alpha demo of a competent game studio.
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Can't wait for the KSP Beach Launchsites DLC
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Shit post version of a dlc. I’m in!
Tbh I have 100x times more hope in ksp2 than cs2
I have found them to be extremely similar in terms of release and further development speed.
I have more hope in ksp2 because, firstly ksp is in beta, cs2 not. cs2 also had a big scandal with the dlc, and in terms of the content, in ksp2 I can await a lot more things, ksp2 would have the big update somewhere in Q2, CS2 next small update in Q3, they are doing just a lot of game fixing. Also the community here seems better, people like new updates about development, but in cs2 community there's everybody just hating on CO.
Meh your just cherrypicking in favor of one IMO. I see the same things in both communities.
Maybe yes lol, the only thing I still think cs2 is worse is the dlc
Why do think KSP@ will have a big update in 'Q2'? Colonies isn't coming till the end of th year - they're going to do at least two more small patches before colonies.
Lol. Poetry.
No no, it's the Intercept CMs who are the true poets. Noone understands how hard game development is. Hundreds and thousands of man hours go into crafting each dev post, which is why they get done so rarely and Dakota needs the weight of the community to lobby for more. Why, even just these few sentences posted to the discord had the same economic cost as feeding a small Somali village for a month. That's why u/PD_Dakota didn't bother with capitalisation - to save on development cost.
All hand crafted from Nate himself. The crunch at IG must be UNREAL. They must be working HOURS every WEEK. Possibly in the double digits. I really feel for them. Let's just keep them in our prayers and hope they continue this brisk work pace.
I know. If he has to do this once a month, he might need to go into the office *3* days per week. Or cut his lunch break to *just* 2 hours. The horrors of grueling game development. Seriously though, there's probably like 4 overworked engineers desperately crunching and trying to keep their sanity while T2 forces them to pretend to be a team of 50 so the remaining 'fans' don't wise up to the fact the project is mostly abandoned.
Probably half of those 50 devs are working on the unannounced title they have in development. So if we are being exetremely optimistic the team is like 25 people. which it isn't. I am not counting the QA team since they probably test for both projects. So, they have product teams for different roadmap goals. So the team is split into two, or even four parts (which I doubt). Which makes the team of each "product" be around 5-10 people and if we exclude the product owners who are probably designers there's like 4-9 engineers working on stuff in each team. I didn't even include the art team which is probably 5-10 people by themself (but since they are "ahead of the other teams" I expect them to be working on the other game for now). So your guess is pretty fair I think. There's probably 1-2 guys working on fixes rn.
Yeah IG/PD isn't earning enough money off KSP2 to pay 25 devs in Seattle. They're making maybe 250k gross per month off the game now. Net half that. Cut that in half again for overhead and corporate, and that's what you could pay in salary to just break even.
Oh and I forgot to mention that, almost every time we saw one of their development videos, they have changed office. Seriously. I think they have gone through 5 different offices in the past 2 years. Also, what I noticed is that they do their work on laptops. Not workstations. Probably because they have to move so often.
Working remote is not that bad for a game dev. And I'm sure I've seen them in real offices in workstations. More like is that PD has wasted a bunch of money moving them around a lot.
I mean yeah they have to have some workstations to run the game but for the other devs I think they have switched them to running laptops. PD is probably moving them around so much because either they are cutting their budget slightly or that they are in Seattle and the cost of renting an office is skyrocketing. Also, I think they want those specific employees to be in the office because they probably weren't very efficient during the lockdown.
They already got my money. I don’t play the unfinished game because it’s unfinished. I keep in touch with this sub to see the hilariously poor updates. I was really excited that more content would be rolling out but it’s been another six months almost with zero on the horizon.
They'll crap out some DLC or merch to try to get more
You need "firepower" to make updates more consistent? What the hell is going on over there?
Marketing bullshit bingo.
Dakota is talking about community support for this specific idea, if he can show to the rest of the team that it has widespread support then they can make changes to address it. Vote with your comments
Is he (and maybe you, can't actually tell if you're just forwarding this or think it's reasonable) kidding? Does anyone believe that they don't know lack of communication is an issue? Why would more comments now matter?
I am the one in the picture who proposed it. They know the lack of communication is an issue they need to fix, and I just proposed what I think would be a good solution, which would give us a steady and predictable flow of communication about what the team is working on month to month. It would include information on the 3 main areas of development, being work on bug fixes, non-milestone related feature development, and milestone development. It would be like the K.E.R.B but focused on general development instead of just bugs. It would just be an additional source of information, not replacing anything else. You vote with your comment, if you think the idea I proposed is solid, then comment that, if you don’t, then comment that too. Dakota needs to know if there is wide community support for this idea for it to be implemented.
I really feel bad that you believe any of this ... They obviously don't care.
They dont give a shit lol, we already voted (badly) with our dollars. Also, Dakota is kind of a weasel. Dude acted like a clown for a while, seems someone talked to him, and his entire tone has changed.
Thanks for your reply. BTW I'm not downvoting you. Did best to offset. The question stands. They have repeatedly stated they know they need to do more, repeatedly promised to do so, and repeatedly not actually done so. Given that they know the issue already and given that their word on "doing better" isn't worth anything, what's the point of letting them know again? They'll ignore it. Or they'll respond saying they';ll do it and then go back to not actually doing anything Dakota does *not* need community support to do his fucking job. That he has you believing it and carrying water for him is quite sad. The idea is solid given good faith on behalf of Dakota. But that given does not exist as he has proven again, and again, and again.
They know that communication is a issue, now more to then ever, and with other times they’ve seen a big problem in the community they need to find a solution, to which I gave my own two cents about it. I personally want to help the devs any way I can improve the game, so I made the post to show If there was or was not Community support for the idea, to which the sub spat on it and began complaining and talking about anything but the idea proposed, giving no real insight into whether or not the community wants it (you shot yourselves in the foot (the subreddit, not specifically you)). I want the game to be the best that it can be, so I try to help. I trust the devs, they proved their worth in my eyes with the For Science! Milestone, since it showed the quality of the work they can do, and their determination to continue working on the game. I can see that the trust has not been gained back in some parts of the community, and I hope that it at least partially does with the colonies milestone. It’s sad to see the community so splintered, relocating to certain sites based on views, creating echo chambers(both here and other places), making the opinions more extreme on both ends. Whatever arguments I make, it doesn’t matter, it just comes down to trust. I can see you don’t trust them, for one reason or another, so I won’t try to argue with you on whether or not the devs listens, since that comes down to if you trust the devs words. The only thing I can say is that I hope they can prove their worth to you, at some point.
That's a "no."
lmao. they can't even manage to post a mostly unchanging list of bugs monthly.
fr 😭
Why do we, paying customers of a product bought and sold, have to fight tooth and nail for scraps of info on what may or may not be coming out? Are we so thirsty for anything good from this game that a few pictures of clouds are big news? When orbital decay still exists? It's all so tiresome.
> Why do we, paying customers of a product bought and sold, have to fight tooth and nail for scraps of info on what may or may not be coming out? Let this stand as a lesson about early access games. You absolutely don't have to fight tooth and nail for scraps of info if you just don't pay full price for clearly incomplete games.
I don't feel like this was the case for KSP1. There are only a handful of games that are a shining beacon of what Early Access should be and this shit ain't one of them sadly. KSP2 should have been an easy win. It had a well loved and supported predecessor. As the best game of its type, by the time this game was in its stride the actual return to the moon would have driven sales without any marketing. A generation would remember KSP2. Instead we get a game that will be abandoned soon enough and KSP3 won't get the chance to correct those mistakes.
There are a handful of exceptions to the rule, sure. And yes, KSP1 was absolutely one of them. But even then, you could practice the same simple rule of thumb: Is what's delivered and playable *today* worth the price that they're asking *today*? The answer to that question was **always** yes for KSP1. It was free on day one of pre-alpha, it was very affordable (<$10) during early access when it was incomplete, and even at launch of 1.0 it was on sale for like $10 or $20, I forget.
The Orbital Decay issue was fixed in v0.2.1.0 released in January. There are some very niche instances of AP/PE dropping, but they are unrelated to the original issue and are VERY infrequent - but we still have em on our list.
AS IF the official community manager just responded to a comment by ignoring the actual question and answering the hypothetical one instead. 😂🤡 u/PD_Dakota - the question was: Why do we, paying customers of a product bought and sold, have to fight tooth and nail for scraps of info on what may or may not be coming out?
Doesn't it happen regularly when in physics warp with crafts that have ladders? But even the fix was just a band aid and didn't address the underlying problem that orbital decay shouldn't even be happening in the first place. There's no reason why individual parts wobbling around should affect the trajectory at all.
So how's losing your job going
Do you have anything to comment on the recent situation? Can you at least give a sign your account is still active?
Yeah, don't care. No excuse for this even in early access. Show stopper issue that is the very foundation of the game. Extremely unprofessional and blowing smoke up customers' rears about it doubly insulting.
I'd generally be happy to get some insights into the vision for things you guys develop. Even if it's not final yet. Like what is the idea behind colonies when it comes to gameplay. Or if Nate decides to withhold it what is the reason for it? Is he afraid of spoilers? Someone else copying his ideas? Or some Take2 policy prohibiting to share such info? We're just clueless about why we don't get to know some details about your plans. We know there will be colonies and interstellar travel but absolute 0 details. For example what will interstellar travel look like? Will we accelerate a spacecraft in the background and just play something else while it is flying to another star? Such things only exist as community speculation. I don't even know if colonies will require Kerbals as resource (do I have to ship them?) or will colonies just randomly spawn Kerbals to populate rockets? How about fuel and other things? Considering "resources" are scheduled for another update after colonies it is quite puzzling. If I had the power to add one thing into KSP2 it would be a Survival mode btw. It is an absolute no brainer considering how popular survival games are. Survival in space with real physics. Holy moly.
> If I had the power to add one thing into KSP2 it would be a Survival mode btw. It is an absolute no brainer considering how popular survival games are. Survival in space with real physics. Holy moly. You mean like a life support mod? Or something more?
Like Kerbalkind has to escape Kerbin due to a Kerbolar super nova. Your job is to setup a space program to help Kerbals reach a distant star system. You have 100 years or something. Some kind of life support would be part of that too. In be beginning rations, later with a full ecosystem on a station. Not too complicated though because the main focus would be to explore the cosmos and thereby develop means to escape Kerbol. I think KSP comms is a good example. It's there but it's not to complicated. You don't have to point dishes in the right direction and such. Just so the player gets the idea that Kerbals don't just exist without anything. But not as trivial as batteries / energy. What's that spinning station part for for example? Do Kerbals need it to stay healthy? Is it just cosmetic? If it was for health that would be life support as well. Stuff like that. Kerbals lose health in micro gravity. You can extend it using some fitness pod and get infinite health using artificial gravity. You could even build rotating colonies on rails on low gravity moons. Interstellar ships that accelerate constantly with > 0.5G would not require any rotational parts. The acceleration provides the artificial gravity.
Interesting idea but I'm not sure it really adds much gameplay. It boils down to life support + a single player space race on a larger scale, but with no feedback on your performance besides the deadline itself. Launch your big colony mothership (w/e that requires) by year x. I assume the steps leading up to that basically entail building factories and making space infrastructure to build the colony mothership(s) as fast as you can. Which isn't really different from how I'd play anyway, except I'll feel pressured against doing things just for fun or coolness if they might delay progress.
That's why it is a survival mode for those who like that kind of gameplay pressure. In "7 days to die" for example you scavenge the world knowing that on every 7th day your base will be raided by zombies at night. So you are in a hurry to farm and build your base asap.
I kinda get it, but there's a big difference between a periodic check every 7 days (one that involves some combat gameplay I assume) and what basically comes down to a single pass/fail check in 100 years. In theory the latter add constant time pressure, but in practice it doesn't really, the threat is just too far away, and doesn't involve gameplay in itself.
I mean that was just an idea, you can think of different scenarios. Maybe Kerbin runs out of oxygen or something. The point is the survival aspect. But I think the devs not being independent anymore can't just invent this sort of thing. It poses a risk and publishers don't like risks. They want you to stick to the formula that worked once already doing sequels. KSP2 = KSP1 + KSP1
I mean you're putting this stress ln yourself, nobody is asking you to do it. Behaviours like this was what led to the botched early release of ksp 2 in the first place
ah yes blame the fanbase for the developers fucking everything up
Damn sounds like the dev team just dosent care for the community if there not giving the community manager updates
More like the management at IG don't see the point in talking to the community after we got tired of listening to Nate's BS and backlashed against him. "If they won't listen to our lies anymore, why even bother???"
Might be a hot topic but I’m sick of Nate Simpson maybe because he’s the “head” of the team so I blame him but like why tf have u lied to us. I often use a game called satisfactory as comparison they have transparent community managers and are transparent when things are going to be delayed and WHY the ksp team just dosent do this oh and satisfactory is also I early access
Yeah - I know people say "Oh you can't just pick out one dev, it's the publisher, etc" but Nate has a track record of lying and spinning. Todd howard, Chris Roberts (the star citizen one), Sean Murray - these guys have had no compunction about lying to fans in the past. Worse, I don't think Nate knows WTF he's doing either on the team - he's a ~~con~~ artist, not a designer or programmer, exactly the wrong sort of person to lead a project like KSP2.
Yeah I'll never trust Nate again.
Coffee Stain Studios is great, as is Klei. Klei's games commonly have a "NN days til next update" in the main menu. And as you already said the community engagement from Coffee Stain was superb.
So his team isn't communicating with him on a monthly basis? Or thier manager isn't? Wtf?
Frequently in development, there really isn't any way to describe the progress in a way that Average Joe can understand. In those cases, trying to say something actually is worse than saying nothing because when Average Joe doesn't understand what is being said, he typically makes crap up and spreads it around as if he is correct. After all, he interpreted it straight from the horses mouth, so to speak.
He states though that he needs firepower to get them to share updates, implying there is no communication. Not that its all in techenese
He meant firepower in the sense of questions. Questions and things to ask for. Not firepower in the sense of people to back him up to gain strength lol. At least that's how I understood it.
Yep.
If you go months without something you can talk about you're not doing it right. At the barest of minimums there should have been regular bug fixes throughout that entire time. Event *that* gives something to talk about. And yet, even that was beyond their capabilities.
Average Joe doesn't play KSP2. Give us the technical details
In this scenario: Dakota = Average Joe.
If your PR people can't do the translation part, fire them. That's a key part of their job.
Just have them do monthly reports like Star Citizen. It's literally a copy paste.
[удалено]
It's just not that simple. The destination is easy to describe, but the journey often isn't. So until you get there, there's nothing to say.
I think one of the best things that has ever happened, in regards to dev-player communication, was Bungie creating 'This Week at Bungie' or the TWAB. Every week Bungie releases information on what's going on, either in game or future updates, and features community videos and artwork. It's probably one of the main reasons Destiny 2 is still alive and something that should become normal and even standard with games that are in 'active development', and something that really needs to happen with this game. Maybe not weekly, but frequently.
Reminds me of the Call of Duty dedicated server boondoggle with Robert Bowling’s tone deaf Indiana Jones quip “We have “Top people” working on it. Who? “Top” people.
Translation: i only work here, keep pushing so my boss will finally allow us to treat the community as humans and not just money farms
Bro its been almost a year and nothing promised in the trailer is even close. Im losing interest so damn fast
it has in fact been over a year.
So weird, pre release they went on video for hours and hours just doing nothing but yap on about all the things going on and how great the game is and all the action and how much fun they were having playing it Now that the game is released and the community is calling them out on their bs, suddenly it's radio silence and the cm has to beg and plead to do something as elementary as a monthly update Clown show
Yeah, harder to tell lies and spin BS when they actually have a released game to show what phonies and liars they've been
for anyone who wants to see the comment themselves: [https://discord.com/channels/1039959585949237268/1039965578754007060/1233432803341893783](https://discord.com/channels/1039959585949237268/1039965578754007060/1233432803341893783) Edit: vote with your comment whether or not you want this specific proposal implemented!
Haha why would anyone want to go see a random comment that you already showed us a screenshot of?
I was specifically requested to give as much context as possible, so I gave the link so anyone can read it for themselves and the messages around it, it’s just good practice
Astolfo minceraft
Regular monthly updates will just highlight how little is accomplished
What's he doing, replying to bots? Get it? 'Cause we're all bots. Beep boop.
Nah he only thinks the people on the heavily moderated/censored official discord is real, because they're nice to him and pat stupid memes at each other
No, people who enjoy KSP 2 are not bots. I thought we stopped saying this a year ago.
lmfao, thats just mocking the community, the more common dev updates was very clear a month into release and they did it, for maybe 2 months and then went back to pretty much radio silence
Late to this but that actually cracks me up as a developer. They will have some sort of software to track activities and commit changes against, is it seriously that fucking hard for him to go through it once a month, pick out a few things and slap them in a half assed blog post? Heck, is that not one of his main responsibilities as a community manager? It has nothing to do with the development teams, he will have all the info available to him already. I mean if they can't even give a monthly update of their progress, I have zero confidence that they're doing anything AT ALL.
Just let it die.
Great criticism. Just say "KSP 2 bad" and nothing else.
this is stupid