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.

 

[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.

 

[Wizzington]

Appreciate the willingness to accomodate mine and many others request. It is still worth pointing out though that coring with claims is still on average 68% more, while diplomatic annexation will be 124% more than what it was.

Yes, this is WAD. We wanted diploannexation costs to be about on par with coring costs in terms of points, it was lowered because they were on average higher.

 

[Me_]

Hm...historically, the Archdukes of Austria had become Kings of Germany and Bohemia after integrating Bohemia into their own realm...I think that it would be plausible to install an option for the curent Emperor to become King of Germany (and thus getting a free upgrade in Title) once Bohemia doesn't exist any more and thus there is no King left inside the HREmpire. Or to give Austria a way to upgrade once they get a PU over Bohemia.

I may be wrong, but if you inherit Bohemia, you get their electoral status, which means you can become king.

 

[Wizzington]

It is certainly fun to try .... is this still tiny when compared to number of games that go to 1821?

Miniscule by comparison.

 

[juckil]

You missed out a bug there Paradox, the 10 ADM points per development when coring.

 

[Grand Pope Papa]

Not in hotfix, but we're releasing a larger patch later in June that will have +1 diplomat for all rank 2+ countries and +1 free leader for all rank 3+ countries (keep in mind you don't have to have Common Sense to be rank 2).

Than please change Venice idea that gives +1 diplomat, so they wont have 4 diplomats at the start. That is a little excessive for a small republic. PLEASE

 

[Wizzington]

Will uploading to the Workshop work again after this patch, or is that something you're hitting later this month? What I am referring to is the workshop removing the "supported_version" tags from .mod files, last seen widely in... 1.10?

Please read the OP before replying.

 

[RobRoy3]

Than please change Venice idea that gives +1 diplomat, so they wont have 4 diplomats at the start. That is a little excessive for a small republic. PLEASE

Well, the small Republic was sort of the founder of the modern diplomatic corps. And they don't get their diplomat until their second national idea, after six other ideas, and the first idea group is delayed, and everything's more expensive... So I don't really see any Venice-specific problem and would hope there is no Venice-specific nerf.

If giving a dip to all Tier 2 governments is perceived as overpowered, I'd like to see a return to the unique building system, too. Still trying to figure out why that had to go?

One week doesn't change much without releasing the product to the public. Do not use the new version until there is a patch or hotfix and pretend it is an open beta now.

Yeah. For better or for worse, most releases are going to have issues right at release. If you don't like dealing with them, or dealing with the excited, rude, hyperbolic forumites (both whiners and fanboys), waiting a week or two is really the best idea.

 

[Cooplowski]

Lancaster.

Honestly I'm still not convinced about its utility, but since so many people seem to want it, and we couldn't delete the Lancaster tag... I figured why not.

And here I was hoping one day the war of the roses might be an actual war some day.

 

[NeverHelm]

Nice to see the biggest issues resolved. Also, the insight into QA is quite helpful. I hope people pay attention to this.

 

[Mef]

And there are also the additional hours played by beta testers.

 

[Dnote]

- Fixed a bug where the AI would declare suicidal wars due to incorrectly calculating defensive call acceptance

This will be nice, it's been a little crazy. Shame the exploits are going away before I can take advantage of them though

 

[Grand Pope Papa]

Will you improve the AI when it comes to sieging. A lot of the time they will siege a province, leave it and than Zone of Control will just take it back. Or siege a fort, leave it and than I can easily take it back because it has no garisson.

 

[wickermoon]

Not in hotfix, but we're releasing a larger patch later in June that will have +1 diplomat for all rank 2+ countries and +1 free leader for all rank 3+ countries (keep in mind you don't have to have Common Sense to be rank 2).

You're becoming quite sexy right about now, Wiz!

 

[OShmelev]

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.

It is clear things, as a QA manager, I can only advice you some practices, which you already know, may be

For first - I tink bugs is normal thigs, it is unreal to find them all, and I loyal to Paradox, and thank you for perfect games.

May be it is good idea to make preorder available for EU DLC (and others) and give beta-test acces for people who bought preorder? (thats give you prerelease user testing whith loyal players, who will be sure that game is not finish and bugs - normal thigs)
You have a huge people resource who want to get quality product, and want to help, but I think you didn't use it at all on prerelease phase.

And one more thing - you can stimulate players who found bugs by free unit pack or other minor content etc (as motivation to good work or as apology for discomfort) to prevent similar situations.

Sorry for bad english.

 

[happymix91]

Not in hotfix, but we're releasing a larger patch later in June that will have +1 diplomat for all rank 2+ countries and +1 free leader for all rank 3+ countries (keep in mind you don't have to have Common Sense to be rank 2).

I'm very sad, because restriction of diplomat and leader indirectly buffed innovative, diplomatic, and aristocratic ideas. Isn't +1 diolomat for all king-rated countries too much for government rank?

How about ressurect unique buildings and allow it only for higher ranked government? Unique buildings which need 500 or 1000 ducat, 100 or more mp and certain level of government + tech level are reasonable for +1 diplomat or +1 leader, I think.

 

[Grand Pope Papa]

I'm very sad, because restriction of diplomat and general indirectly buffed innovative, diplomatic, and aristocratic ideas. Isn't +1 diolomat for all king-rated countries too much for government rank?

How about ressurect unique buildings and allow it only for higher ranked government? Unique buildings which need 500 or 1000 ducat, 100 or more mp and certain level of government + tech level are reasonable for +1 diplomat or +1 general, I think.

Or just make give them maintanence of 1 ducat/month like forts have

 

[Grand Historian]

Wow, thanks for the insight into how Paradox works. Your DLC model is actually one of the reason why I love Paradox games so much; since you'll continue making them as long as there's an interest in the game, there's always room for improvements, overhauls and bugfixes down the road. Speaking of which, is fixing the Orthodox events MTTH (or whatever has greatly reduced their frequency) on the to do for the patch?

 

[Wizzington]

The 10-page thread, if that's what you're referring, is from several weeks ago and just got necroed when it became apparent that the problem got not better but worse in 1.12.

I really have no idea what Wiz and the rest of the dev team can be thinking with this, it's really outrageous. It should have been screamingly obvious that the loss of huge AT gains from carpet-sieging would need to be counterbalanced by something.

AT gain from battles was doubled, seems we need another non battle source though.

 

[Viriato0909]

Only a tiny tiny TINY percentage of games ever resulted in world conquest.

Yes Wiz. But I have to say whenever I play a major power, the possibility of WC is something I want to keep alive for as long as possible. With the increased annexation costs, compounded by the previous changes to HRE and vassal liberty desire mechanics, I'm not convinced WC is still viable without some major exploits being discovered.

Inflating annexation costs worsens the double penalty incurred by fast and aggressive expansion (not to mention the very arguable -3 dip rep for 10 years). In addition to reputation malus and coalitions forming, we're faced with painfully expensive coring / annexation. Like conceding a penalty and being sent off. Twice.

I entirely agree with extremely difficult to achieve WC. Not with it being made virtually impossible. EU4 does have WC achievements, after all (yes, I have the WC one and would like to have another go whenever I'm in the mood). Other than this, I'm perfectly chuffed with the ever greater depth of the game.