Hello everyone! Common Sense and 1.12 have been released, and our expansion sales continue to shatter previous records! With the expansion and patch now out, we're going to shift into a different gear with our dev diaries for a while, talking about other things than upcoming features. Some ideas we've had is to discuss our design process, how we handle feedback from fans, and reflections on different parts of the game and where we want to see them go in the future.

Today, however, we're busy working on a hotfix for 1.12, so I thought I'd tell you about that, and also a bit about why there will always be bugs on release of a new expansion.

Let's deal with the hotfix first. From what we've seen, 1.12 has been a smooth launch for the majority of users, with a low bug count in new features, but there were some serious technical issues on certain hardware setups.

The hotfix is expected to be released today or tomorrow, and at present contains fixes for the following issues:

Hotfix 1.12.1 (AS OF WRITING OF THIS POST, THIS IS NOT YET OUT)
- Fixed a bug where the AI would declare suicidal wars due to incorrectly calculating defensive call acceptance
- Spain can no longer form Andalusia and vice versa (preventing endless nation forming loop for prestige)
- Forts can no longer take control of other provinces with forts (capital, mothballed or otherwise)
- Fixed a bug where the AI would accept concede defeat as the only concession even when they had 100% warscore.
- Fixed a bug where single player games started with the 'Only host can save' setting would be unable to be loaded.
- Fixed a bug where some AIs would constantly mothball and unmothball forts (this could cause serious performance hit on lower end machines as well)
- Fixed a bug where the AI would continously march back and forth between two provinces in a fort's ZoC
- Fixed exploit where you could give away ally's provinces even if not occupied in coalition war.
- Fixed a bug where rebels would spawn at very low morale when there were hostile units in their spawn province.
- Fixed an issue with steam workshop removing supported_version from .mod files
- Fixed an issue where .mod files would be printed with garbled data, resulting in CTD on launch
- Fixed an exploit where you could give away the provinces of your war allies even if they were not occupied (you should only be able to give away your own unoccupied provinces)
- Unit movement lock can no longer be bypassed by issuing another move order.
- Fixed artillery models for several different unit packs to have the correct infantry model accompanying it.
- Lowered cost of diplomatic annexation from 10 to 8 dip points per development (since there's more ways to decrease adm cost)
- Autonomy from diploannexation is now 60 (down from 75)
- Fixes issues using the MacBook trackpad when interacting with the map on OSX.
- Fixed a CTD in AI province conquest weight calculation
- Fixed a CTD related to rebels in uncolonized provinces
- Game no longer crashes when forcing nations with subjects to revoke claims.
- Save games saved in 1.12 no longer cause CTDs in 1.11 (only applies to saves made after this hotfix is applied)
- The '+' key should now increase game speed correctly on US/UK keyboards.
- Fixed issue where foreign Separatists defecting to your country caused your country to act as if it was just released.

Note that we are only considering important fixes and tweaks for hotfixes, so if you have a bug you think should be hotfixed, take a moment and ask yourself whether or not it can wait until the larger bugfixing patch that we'll be releasing later in June.


Why do patches always have bugs?
This is a question we get a lot, along with 'Do you even test your games?', and 'Do you even play your own games?'. The answer is, yes, we play our own games, and yes, we test our games. Loosely calculated, about 2400 man-hours of QA has gone into Common Sense, and before a launch every feature is tested thoroughly. Over the course of the development of 1.12 and Common Sense, approximately 1200 bugs have been fixed by the team.

So why, then, do bugs still get into the release? There are two sides to this, and the first one is math.

As of Tuesday night, we had around 20000 concurrent players. If we assume that those 20000 people each play 2 hours that night, that is 40000 hours of play. In order to have equivalent QA test hours to only 2 hours of play on a release night, we would need a team of 30 full-time QA. Scenarios that only happen once every 10000 games will realistically never happen for our QA, and when you factor in that those 20000 players have 20000 different hardware setups... you can begin to see why things like the game not launching on a single core computer (we do not have a single core computer in QA because they haven't been making them for over half a decade) or the engine upgrade breaking mac trackpads (we did not have a mac trackpad in QA, we now do and will use to test future versions) happen.

That's one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is priority.

It's always our ambition to release new expansions without bugs in the new features, and for this reason we consider newly introduced bugs higher priority than older ones. We haven't always done a great job of this in the past, but 1.12/Common Sense had a much lower bug count in new features than previous expansions. There were however, a couple immediately apparent issues, particularly the fact that movement locking did not work at all. You might reasonably ask yourself how such a thing slipped through QA. The answer: It didn't.

The movement locking bug was introduced in the very last build we made for release, as a result of fixing another bug where ZoCs would create weird movement paths. It was only found after the build was done and smoke tested (smoke testing is basically a thorough 'does the game actually run' test that we do on anything we release to the public). Given that we had no other serious known issues at the time, I made the call that the issue was not serious enough to warrant spending another half a day making a new build and testing that build. QA found the issue, I chose not to fix it because the time spent making a new build could be better spent working on our back log of older bugs, and I figured that we'd have to make a hotfix anyway due to the risk for technical issues appearing with the engine upgrade.

The simple fact of it is that we are probably never going to have a launch that doesn't introduce at least one or two serious technical issues, because we do not, and cannot test the game on the thousands and thousands of different hardware configurations that will be playing the game the moment we set the patch live. The measure of a successful launch, in my book, is not that there are no bugs, but rather that there are no serious bugs which could reasonably have been caught by our internal testing.

Do I expect this explanation to change much? Not really, because I think people like easy explanations, and 'Paradox does not even test their expansions' is a much easier explanation than 'In a complex piece of software you will always have some bugs no matter how much QA you do', 'Fixing bugs can introduce new bugs' and 'Not all bugs are worth grinding development to a halt in order to fix'.

Nonetheless, for those who wish to know, there it is.

 

[shoki]

I thought by beta hotfix they meant a hotfix for the 1.11.4 "beta" to fix the roll back issue (no WE in existing games etc.)?

There was a beta hotfix last time too. If they don't have enough time to test it for release, they'll make it a beta patch for 1.12, which you have to sub in the beta settings too.

 

[inreadible]

I hope you always remember that people who ask questions such as "Do you even play your game?" are a loud minority. And it's the same in any other game's forum that I've ever read. Everytime a expansion or patch comes, there's people telling how everything went wrong and the devs are incapable of doing anything good.

I believe most of the people who play this game are more like me. I appreciate what you have done and really love this game.
The feedback after a patch may be devastating because if a person likes something, they'll probably mention it once. If someone doesn't like something, they'll probably mention it 50 times in different threads.

Good work and try not to get depressed by mean players.

 

[loup99]

Strange that they haven't posted any hotfix yet, most people get off work around 4oclock in sweden

Rather 5 o'clock in case you start at 8 o'clock. (9 hours substracted roughly one for breaks and lunch)

 

[JCan]

Perhaps they need another day. Fair enough if so.

 

[zdlugasz]

Yes its a good idea, so long as the forts actually do something to stop the rebels from enforcing their demands on that province. Like Wiz said, there should be some kind of timer before the rebels enforce their demands. I would put it at about 5 or 6 months. Or perhaps there could be slower province occupation by rebels so that it models them taking over the province rather than just pillaging it.

However e.g. as Lithuania you are unable to "cover" your country with forts in early game (with adjacent ZoCs). I would love timer, but overall slower sieging would probably be the best.

 

[Savagepumpkin]

Don´t know why all those people are SO angry in the forums. Take it easy, men, Paradox know what they are doing, and new DLC is so great for me as long as I´ve played.

Hope the team is not pissed off with all this crticisim and keeps on doing a good job.

 

[zdlugasz]

Perhaps they need another day. Fair enough if so.

In that case I would wish to have "beta" hotfix today, since tomorrow and on Sunday I guess that they wont work.

 

[CheesySnake]

In that case I would wish to have "beta" hotfix today, since tomorrow and on Sunday I guess that they wont work.

It's only twenty to five in Sweden, still plenty of time for them to release a beta before the weekend.

 

[harvesarmy]

However e.g. as Lithuania you are unable to "cover" your country with forts in early game (with adjacent ZoCs). I would love timer, but overall slower sieging would probably be the best.

Yeah slower sieging would be nice, but I don't think that is what they were going for? I don't see how you could make rebels less quick at overtaking unoccupied and unfortified provinces though. They would have to have a slower modifier.

Perhaps we might just have to learn to live with pre-empting rebels as much as we can? I know with events this is difficult, but we might just have to make do. On the other hand though perhaps events that spawn rebels could have a timer associated with them. Perhaps there could be an event chain slightly where it gives you warning of rising rebel tension in a province for instance and then says "there will probably a rebellion in X, Y, Z, within the next 6 months". That way you could get your army over there, and it would tie it up for a bit as well, which seems to be the whole point of rebels anyway.

IMO we need more event chains happening anyway to make peace time more interesting.

 

[LanMisa]

no, you fail. my game currently refuses to launch while it did when this expansion first came out.

Thank you for searching the whole post just to look for that one statement you can disagree on...I feel honoured.

Back to topic: Most of these launch issues are hardware-based, as far as I am aware of - something that is very hard to test for (especially for such a company as Paradox) and which has nothing to do how the game plays once it works. By the way, I already heard of people who did need some tries to get the game to launch but succeeded without going for drastical measures. Like reinstalling it.

 

[TheDarkMaster]

I'm the LightMaster, don't be like this. Do you know any other Developpement Studio which that involved with its community.

I'm not faulting paradox for their community involvement, they do a great job with that. The problem is that when you ask questions or post suggestions in main forum threads like this one you're far more likely to get a response (or at least it feels far more likely) then if you post a suggestion in the suggestions board. If you do make a big suggestion that you feel was well thought out and would really add to the game and it gets no response whatsoever, it feels really discouraging. If you're not seeing anyone else getting posts on their threads either, then it feels like the devs aren't reading anyone's suggestions. You drive away people from the forum and make them not want to post there after doing it the first time or two, either with their own suggestions and other people's. I don't even look at other user's threads anymore unless a dev has posted on them. There's no way to check thread ratings without opening them and that thread icon always gets me excited to know if the devs are discussing suggestions or not because I really want to participate in such a discussion if I might have something to add. I'm really interested in game design and as a computer scientist I specialize in design.

I feel like a suggestion board like this lives or dies based on dev responses to the threads.

 

[TheDarkMaster]

Yeah slower sieging would be nice, but I don't think that is what they were going for? I don't see how you could make rebels less quick at overtaking unoccupied and unfortified provinces though. They would have to have a slower modifier.

Perhaps we might just have to learn to live with pre-empting rebels as much as we can? I know with events this is difficult, but we might just have to make do. On the other hand though perhaps events that spawn rebels could have a timer associated with them. Perhaps there could be an event chain slightly where it gives you warning of rising rebel tension in a province for instance and then says "there will probably a rebellion in X, Y, Z, within the next 6 months". That way you could get your army over there, and it would tie it up for a bit as well, which seems to be the whole point of rebels anyway.

IMO we need more event chains happening anyway to make peace time more interesting.

I think a timer is the fairest way of doing things. Something like, rebels have to be in a province for at least six months or so before they can enforce their siege victory effect.

 

[zdlugasz]

Yeah slower sieging would be nice, but I don't think that is what they were going for? I don't see how you could make rebels less quick at overtaking unoccupied and unfortified provinces though. They would have to have a slower modifier.

Perhaps we might just have to learn to live with pre-empting rebels as much as we can? I know with events this is difficult, but we might just have to make do. On the other hand though perhaps events that spawn rebels could have a timer associated with them. Perhaps there could be an event chain slightly where it gives you warning of rising rebel tension in a province for instance and then says "there will probably a rebellion in X, Y, Z, within the next 6 months". That way you could get your army over there, and it would tie it up for a bit as well, which seems to be the whole point of rebels anyway.

IMO we need more event chains happening anyway to make peace time more interesting.

I do not believe they will do /will want to do any event chaining, since it would require reworking tons of events. Automatic delay of popping of rebel units would be problematic (and might be deemed unrealistic), anyway it might conflict with plain revel popping.

I think that slower sieging should not be that hard: if sieging unit is rebel and there is no fort do not win siege after 30 days but say 180 days (even if progress is 100%); it can not be done by sieging ability through. But I agree that they probably wont do it that way.

 

[harvesarmy]

I do not believe they will do /will want to do any event chaining, since it would require reworking tons of events. Automatic delay of popping of rebel units would be problematic (and might be deemed unrealistic), anyway it might conflict with plain revel popping.

I think that slower sieging should not be that hard: if sieging unit is rebel and there is no fort do not win siege after 30 days but say 180 days (even if progress is 100%); it can not be done by sieging ability through. But I agree that they probably wont do it that way.

If we are going to do a timer then I would have them occupy at the same pace, but if you don't clear them out within say 6 months then you would get the modifier.

 

[Drakken]

Downloading...

 

[CrisisCauser]

Yup, update is live. 240 Diplo to annex 30 development Nevers as Burgundy.

 

[Kazum]

It is not in the launcher but game properties -> betas has the final versions all the way back to 1.4

I have been told so on reddit as well, thanks. I am really happy to see that option.

 

[Erixter]

Mods still dont work for me. Is it because they need to be updated to 1.12.1?

Thanks

 

[Darkhymn]

Excellent explanation. Frankly, these games have been some of the most stable, serious bug free ones that I've ever played. Considering the frequency of updates and the sheer - ever expanding - complexity of these games, that's a feat right out the gate. Keep up the good work.

 

[Heoga]

I'm a software tester myself so fully appreciate the process, the hard work you do, and that there will always be bugs. (Development = old bugs out & new bugs in) I'd be interested in knowing whether, beyond unit testing, you have scripted tests or does the dice rolling system mean you have to fall back to interactive work for further tests.