HOI3 and Paradox Business Practice

gamingmaniac said:

I've been expressly told by a moderator that criticism of both the game and of Paradox is neither a) a bannable offense, nor b) something that can get you an infraction on this forum.

So here you go, boys and girls, since both of the other threads were locked. If you've got a complaint about this game, or about Paradox, have at it.

I've already said what I had to say in the last locked thread. Now let's here from you. What do you think about HOI 3, and Paradox's business practices?

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I think the business practice is GREAT, I am getting a refund! How many companies can say that?!!?

gamingmaniac said:

Whoah, son, tell me how you did that! I ordered off of Amazon, and they said "no-ee refund-ee!". Where do I return my coaster?

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Like I said, PM Frederik II (I hope i did not misspell his name). Ask him what to do.

gamingmaniac said:

Whoah, son, tell me how you did that! I ordered off of Amazon, and they said "no-ee refund-ee!". Where do I return my coaster?

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Did you read my last post in the thread I locked? Your answer is right there.

Renamed thread and edited first post a bit, so no one can claim ignorance of the rules

kesh said:

There are threads to complain about every conceivable problem in the game. And general ones about v 1.2 in general. Why not use them?

Bcause you are angry, and angry people like attention, perhaps.

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See?

No need to attack him like that...

gamingmaniac said:

I've been expressly told by a moderator that criticism of both the game and of Paradox is neither a) a bannable offense, nor b) something that can get you an infraction on this forum.

So here you go, boys and girls, since both of the other threads were locked. If you've got a complaint about this game, or about Paradox, have at it.

I've already said what I had to say in the last locked thread. Now let's here from you. What do you think about HOI 3, and Paradox's business practices?

Click to expand...

i think the exess critisism and remarks about people who should not be remarked about, would of been a good thing to left out.

the games Paradox do are great, and tbh you never get a perfect game in 1st release in strategy games.

there is always a way to handle reclamations or disgrunted mood in a way that the actual customer is happy and the company is happy, and i guess in this case there is a way.

all the negative flooding in the forums just, is wrong as ive bought like 500+ C64 games 700+ Amiga games and like over 300 PC games in my life, but only 1 music CD. Trust me the majority of the games had bugs, and some of them so bad that they never even got patches.

i am happy to see you got what you wanted, its just makes us hardcore veterans who enjoy the community to get to a bad mood when there is "doomsayers" or just exess "whine" flooding on the forums. And thus you guys and ladies should keep in mind that this is a community of gamers here, so respect and get respected in turn.

/Lance

Being a gaming industry professional myself, albeit in a much smaller company and in the console industry, I must say that I am very much in love with Paradox' business model. They communicate with their fans, they provide ample support for their games and they apparently are successful enough to launch a project the CEO did not necessarily think would be profitable. They're flexible, and they're transparent, which is more than most companies in the business can claim.

Now, to HoI 3. I personally believe the game was indeed rushed out the door. I also believe however that some people overreacted, mostly due to the huge jump in practical system requirements from EU: Rome. Still, I am playing the game on a P4 3,4 Ghz with 1 GB RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700, and I can play it decently. Maybe my expectations in terms of game performance are just lower, but for me, it works fine. The only bug I have is the one with provinces showing up in the color of another, completely unrelated province, which appears to be a GPU problem.

Allow me to take that problem: there have been two or so posts from players who were disappointed by PI not fixing this one problem that they had to exclaim it on the forum. In my book, constructive criticism on the forum is fine. People are able to constructively criticize AARs and Mods, why not the game itself? Do they feel entitled to be impolite, destructive and simply behave like an angry child just because they paid for the product? Yes, you are entitled to complain about problems with a product you paid for, but that does not nullify general rules of human interaction, i.e. politeness.

I am not content with HoI 3 yet, especially since the bug persists, but I have expressed my opinion constructively in other threads, have made suggestions on what can be improved, and am still having fun playing and modding HoI 3. I am very much looking forward to Paradox' next products, hoping I'll have a better PC by then, and without any bitterness eagerly await the next patch. I believe that HoI 3 was worth the money I paid for it.

I'm glad you settled down and you should have full credit for it. And a thread to let of some polite steam is a very good idea.

To answer your questions:

1. I find HOI3 to be very enjoyable, but it sure has it's problems too. The weather bug is very annoying, and in my view the issue that is in most need of attention. Not so bad for land warfare, but naval warfare gets very messed up since you have a unit type (subs) that are more or less imune to the effects.

The second major flaw would be that puppets can become imune from attacks if the puppet master decides not to invite it into the war. Wether or not the puppet master allows it puppet to go to war should not matter if I decide roll over the border and have the neutrality to do so.

One big issue that a lot of people are complaining about that I don't care about is the speed. This is because a) I have a good speed of 3-4 secs per day on maximum, and b) I rarely use that speed. I like to take my time and poke around with every setting, checking the map out, making plans etc.
At the pace of my own choosing, playing through 1936 usualy takes me around 10-20 hours of playtime. On the other hand, if one wants to run through the game and the lag prevents you from doing so even though your specs are fine, I can see how it must be very frustrating.

2. As far as PI goes, I truly think they are the best game producer out there. They go out of their way to give refunds when possible, and they put in a patching effort to their games that puts the largest producers in the world to shame. If I felt that they produced games that were broken to begin with, this after release attention would merely be a bandaid, but I don't think that they do. EA will release games like Red Alert, where you drag-selct all your forces and click on the enemy and that's it, and they still can't find the time or effort to patch it properly, while PI (in my opinion) release games that are so complex that it boggles the mind. I simply expect more things to go wrong in such a game, and thus have more patience with it.

eidt: Changed the beginning to be more civil and mature.

The game itself is "good," but it could be the best game I've played in a long time, I think the thing that gets most players right now is the game hasn't lived up to its potential.

Given time I sure it will, but if were allowed to comment on business practice I think we can all acknowledge its not good business practice to release a buggy, not finished game that will take at least another month or two to fix properly.

Paradox will bear the consequences for that mistake and I'm sure they realize that. Though I own a number of Paradox games, this is the first I purchased within a week of it coming out and unfortunately it will be the last. Having read a number of threads over the past month or so I suspect many in the community will do the same.

Well, here goes:


HOI3 is a great idea released in pre-beta state to the un-suspecting public (none of the reviews told about the bugs, at least none that I saw)

I know Paradox tends to have these same kind of problems with every game, but Hoi3 as it was upon release (and to a degree still is) was over the line IMHO.

Please do better in the future, this sort of business practise will only hurt PI in the long run.

Sorry, i answered before i saw the new material there.

Anyway,

I think Paradox has a nice policy towards disgrunted customers. +They always patch the games with community in mind(they hear us).

I personally have worked for 16 years in customer service and trust me, Paradox scores 9+/10 in my scale, and that a lot.

I trust Paradox as a name.

- - -

HOI3

Waited for a long time for Hoi3 i think people had extreamly high hopes for it as Hoi2 was just awesome, so when the game was released and as always had some problems, they got annoyed.

Hoi3 biggest problems at the moment is the weather system bug and some lag while in game. Also some microing problem on production is a big problem too, have to go production screen all the time.

There should be a sticky with this information.

1. Keep your savegame folder with only couple of savegames that you play. (keeps lag away)
2. Building Carriers at the moment is a bit useless. (weather bug)
3. The mod, Intelligent AI Production mod 2.0 ALPHA is a must (so you dont have to micro production)
4. There is also a fix for weather by just negating all weather effects so you can actually use Carriers.

With these things I see a company like Paradox with about 9+/10 score on my scale, and HOI3 as a good game with only couple of minor flavs, that are easily corrected.

It seems faily clear to me that PI for some unknown reason knowingly realeased a product that was no where near done. There are three possibilities for doing so that I can think of.

1) They had a contract with someone where they had to release it no matter the state of the product.

2) They were running short of money and needed a capital infusion to keep them going. A product like HOI3 generates cash so this was a way to help them out.

3) They felt that the issues weren't that big and that a patch or two would fix them all in a short time period.

You may have noticed that I left out the possibility that they were unaware of the problems in the game. I ruse to believe they were that incompetent. So what do the possibilities mean to us the loyal fans and wargamers that play their games?

If it was number one then the issue was due to some very poor estimates on what it would take. We can only hope that they will continue to devote resoureces to fix HOI 3 and make it a great game.

Possibility number two scares me. It implies that the company is at risk of going out of business. I don't want to see PI leave at all. But it also means that the resources most likely won't be there to fix HOI 3.

That leaves us the third possibility. This one would mean that the testers are incompetent or were ignored. Anyone spending a week playing the game (40 hours or so) can clearly see the major issues with it. Some will be able to be fixed with changes to variables or balancing stuff. But some need code changes and major rethinking to make them work.

So where does that leave all of us? By all of us I mean the customers and PI. I would like to see a post by Johan or some other very senior person stating PI's side of this story and what they plan to do about it. Mistakes were made but if the company can come out and tell us what their future plans on that should go a long way to resolving this problem.

RobbieE said:

Like I said, PM Frederik II (I hope i did not misspell his name). Ask him what to do.

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He wasn't very happy when I asked him for one. Perhaps he is getting mass requests suddenly now that 1.2 doesn't fix a lot of the core problems. Fixed saved game CTDs(far as I have seen anyways), but didn't do anything about memory leaks or weather (which I havn't really noticed since as Germany I usually focus on land until the very end).

heteaho said:

Well, here goes:


HOI3 is a great idea released in pre-beta state to the un-suspecting public (none of the reviews told about the bugs, at least none that I saw)

I know Paradox tends to have these same kind of problems with every game, but Hoi3 as it was upon release (and to a degree still is) was over the line IMHO.

Please do better in the future, this sort of business practise will only hurt PI in the long run.

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In what way was it over the line? If you compare HoI3 to the state of previous paradox products on release date, then it certainly stands out from the rest in that it was much better.

LokiusMaximus said:

He wasn't very happy when I asked him for one. Perhaps he is getting mass requests suddenly now that 1.2 doesn't fix a lot of the core problems. Fixed saved game CTDs(far as I have seen anyways), but didn't do anything about memory leaks or weather (which I havn't really noticed since as Germany I usually focus on land until the very end).

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Who would be happy eh? But you'll get one. That's the point.