Mid 2026 Feedback Form Reply

Thank you to everyone who filled out our latest feedback form! If you haven't yet, don't worry, there's still time. It doesn't close for another 2 weeks and you can find it here https://forms.gle/QoERPUz17QNFHhsU7

Thank You for the Kind Words

This has been one of the biggest years yet for our feedback form. We've received 416 responses so far, and every single one has been read. That's a lot of reading :D

Only one person rated us below a 7 for their overall experience, and nobody rated us below a 5. The form was full of kind words about Kinetic, and I'm really happy to see that we're still heading in the right direction.

At Kinetic, our team are probably our own biggest critics, so seeing all of the positive feedback has been a huge boost.

Improvements

We didn't specifically ask for feedback about billing this year, but our billing panel came up a few times in the sections asking about issues or things people didn't like about Kinetic.

We're still working on getting our new billing panel in place. Our goal is to have it live before the end of the year. We're a little behind our original target of March, but the scope of the project changed quite a bit based on feedback, while the growth we've seen this year has also meant we've had to focus resources in other areas.

Things are moving a little slower than we'd like, but work is continuing.

Other Games

One of the biggest pieces of feedback was that people want our other games to have the same level of features as Minecraft.

This is something we've been working on heavily over the past few months, with features such as our Rust Auto Wipe system and mod installers for games including Palworld, Windrose and Hytale. We've also been laying the groundwork for things like Workshop installers across more of our supported games. Right now, we're testing some of this with Palworld.

While not every game can have quite the same level of features as Minecraft, we completely agree that some of our other games need more love on the feature front.

One common request was for more QoL features for ARK. I've already had a chat with our Games Integration team about this, so hopefully we'll have some improvements coming your way soon.

Interestingly, some of the feedback for other games requested features we already offer. That's something we need to dig into as well. It may be that we're not making those features clear enough, or that some people haven't played that particular game through Kinetic for a while and haven't seen what's changed.

Themes

Another very common request was themes for the panel.

Our panel has actually supported theming for quite a while. It was added back in Panel 6, but we've never rolled out a way for users to choose or change their theme. Right now, everything is simply locked to the default Kinetic theme.

This is something we'll take another look at once the new billing panel is live.

Personally, I think a Kinetic Toasting theme needs to happen :D

Mobile Panel

This year, we launched our new mobile panel UI.

Overall, the feedback tells us that we need to put some more work into it. People generally like how easy the mobile UI is to use, but it seems we've stripped out too many features for some users.

The original idea was for the mobile interface to be a lighter, simplified version of the main panel. However, based on the feedback, we've probably gone a little too far in places.

There is already an option to switch back to the full desktop panel, but it seems that option is too difficult to find.

Our goal here will be to bring more features into the mobile panel while also making it much clearer that you can switch back to the desktop version whenever you want.

VPS, Dedicated and Web Hosting

We probably get a question about one of these services every day, and it was also one of the biggest topics in this year's feedback.

A lot of you want to see Kinetic offer Web Hosting, VPS Hosting and Dedicated Servers.

Web Hosting is on our roadmap, but it's still quite a long way out.

To me, the reason people want us to offer these services is pretty simple: you want the same good support, useful features and good pricing that Kinetic is known for.

Right now, though, we're not in a position where we could offer Web Hosting, VPSs or Dedicated Servers to the standard we'd be happy with.

We also don't want to simply throw a third-party panel on top and call it a day. Our game panel originally came from an open-source project, but we've built so much on top of it over the years that it's now more custom than not.

Work has already started on expanding the Kinetic Panel so it can eventually support web hosting, but there's still a huge amount to do, including building an entirely new UI for it. The goal is to mix a more traditional web hosting setup with the ease of use you'd get from something like Vercel. We'd also like to do things such as letting you spin up a web server on one of your existing splits.

It's a cool idea, but it's still a long way off. Building the panel is only one part of it. We also need to make sure our support team has the knowledge and tooling available to help you when things go wrong.

VPS Hosting is an even bigger project. Like with Web Hosting, we'd want it properly integrated into the Kinetic Panel, potentially allowing you to spin up a VPS on a split. It's something we'd love to do, but outside of a few small test and seedling projects, very little development has been done on the VPS side yet.

Dedicated Hosting is probably the furthest away. People like Kinetic because of our pricing, and right now we simply couldn't offer dedicated servers at a price that would be better than what's already available. The dedicated server market is extremely competitive.

We'd love to offer something here one day, but it's likely something we won't seriously look at until hardware costs, particularly RAM prices, settle down.

Clutter and a Bloated Panel

We specifically added a question about this because we've seen some feedback that the panel is starting to feel cluttered.

The results were actually pretty clear.

82.1% of you said the panel was fine, while only 2.9% strongly felt that it was cluttered or bloated. Only 0.7% felt the panel was heading in the wrong direction, meaning 99.3% of respondents think we're moving in the right direction overall. That tells me that concerns about the panel becoming bloated are coming from a relatively small part of our userbase.

However, that doesn't mean the feedback should be ignored. There are definitely improvements we can make. One is making it clearer that some extras can already be disabled. For example, you can turn off the Mod Manager when browsing your mods folder. We also need to do a better job of highlighting things like CTRL + K search, which lets you quickly jump to almost any feature in the panel without digging through menus.

For the people who did feel the panel was cluttered, one of the biggest complaints was the sidebar.

However, the feedback here was very mixed. Some people wanted more dropdown menus. Some wanted hover menus. Others wanted fewer dropdowns, and some wanted none at all. Because everyone seems to have a different preference, I think the best path forward is improving the customisability of the sidebar. That way, people who don't like the current setup can configure it in a way that works better for them. We could potentially offer some simple presets as well as manual reordering.

Simple Mode

Another common suggestion was adding a "Simple Mode" to the panel.

For this one, we're going to say a fairly hard no, and hopefully those of you who requested it will understand why after reading this. The mobile UI was essentially our small-scale experiment with this idea: a stripped-back version of the panel designed for easier mobile use.

The problem we've discovered is that nobody agrees on what should and shouldn't be included. Some people want more features added to the mobile UI. Others want fewer.

We saw the exact same issue in the feedback around Simple Mode. For example, some people listed Workspaces as something they'd definitely want included, while others specifically listed it as something they wouldn't need. There isn't really a point where we could draw the line and make everyone happy.

There's also another important reason: support tickets.

The panel is designed around the average user of our service, and a lot of features exist specifically to prevent common problems before they become support tickets. Things such as the client-side mod scanner, world map tools and other helpers aren't just extra features. They solve common issues.

One of the reasons we're able to keep our prices low is because we've built tools that reduce the amount of support people need. If we allowed users to completely disable large parts of the panel, we'd likely see more support tickets as a result. More support tickets means needing a larger support team, which ultimately increases our costs.

Allowing every individual feature to be turned on and off would also add another layer of complexity to the panel itself.

So What's the Goal?

As mentioned above, the number of people who feel the panel is cluttered is relatively small, but that doesn't mean their feedback should be ignored.

Rather than building a completely stripped-down version of the panel, we'll focus on making the existing panel more flexible.

That means improving sidebar dropdowns, adding more customisation options, making it clearer that features such as the Mod Manager can already be disabled, and looking at things such as slightly scaling down the UI on smaller displays so it doesn't feel as large or imposing.

Kinetic probably won't ever offer a stripped-down, console-only version of the panel, but we absolutely can make improvements for people who prefer a simpler experience.

Other Feedback

There were plenty of other suggestions, issues and ideas in the feedback form too.

They haven't been ignored. We've just focused here on the biggest and most common themes. Some smaller ideas are already being worked on. For example, allowing users to suggest their own changes and additions to the Knowledgebase, which we'll review and approve before publishing, is something that should be coming to the site shortly.

So keep an eye out!

RAM Prices and Package Price Changes

One thing we specifically asked about in this year's form was how people would feel about potential changes to our package pricing.

This was mainly to get an idea of how the community feels about pricing in general. Unless there are any more major shocks to the industry, Kinetic is currently in a good position. If we did ever need to make another pricing change, it would most likely be similar to our previous increase, something like an additional $1 on each package.

We don't currently foresee needing to suddenly add $10 to packages or make any similarly large increase.

Our goal would also always be to keep existing customers on their current pricing wherever possible, just as we did with our last price increase. That said, when hardware prices rise, they can sometimes affect servers and infrastructure we already operate as well, so it's impossible to promise that grandfathered pricing will always be possible forever.

But right now, there are no plans to increase our prices.

We simply wanted to get a better understanding of how the community feels about it.

Feedback We've Actioned

Sometimes when you send feedback, it can feel like it's disappeared into a void.

We really do read every piece of feedback we receive, so I wanted to quickly run through some of the changes we've made as a direct result of previous feedback forms.

• Help Videos: One of the strongest requests from our previous feedback form was for more video guides across our Knowledgebase and YouTube. Around six months ago, we hired a dedicated video creator, and hundreds of our Knowledgebase articles now have their own videos.

• A Bigger Knowledgebase: We've added hundreds of new articles to our Knowledgebase, brought in more people to help create guides and blogs, improved screenshots and step-by-step instructions, and made sure that new games don't launch without supporting guides being ready first.

• More Games and More Features: While this year's feedback tells us there's still more to do, we've created a Games Integration team to help us support more games and improve the features available for them. Most games now have better mod installation tools, improved logging, performance improvements and other QoL features.

• Billing Panel: While it isn't live yet, the new billing panel is being designed to address the issues raised in previous feedback.

• Faster and More Consistent Support: Our goal is still same-day resolution, but most tickets now receive their first reply within around 10 minutes. Feedback has never really been that our support is slow overall, but we previously had gaps where support wasn't always available. We've massively expanded the team to fix this, bringing in people with years of experience in the hosting industry.

• Navigating the Panel: We've made major changes to improve navigation around the panel. There's still more we can improve for some users, but we've been listening closely to the feedback here.

• New Panel Features: Features such as Server Folders came directly from feedback forms. Other tools, like the Mod Manager, started with smaller ideas or suggestions that eventually grew into something much bigger. So many features in the panel have either come directly from feedback or started with a small spark of an idea someone gave us that I couldn't possibly list them all.

I couldn't list everything we've changed here, but hopefully this gives you an idea of just how much of your feedback actually makes its way into Kinetic.

A huge thank you to everyone who takes the time to fill these forms out.

Final Note

Once again, thank you to everyone who has filled out the form.

If you haven't submitted yours yet, there's still time, and we'll announce the winners from the feedback form once it closes on the 7th.

Thanks all!
Chris
CEO @ Kinetic