A Paradox Employee Contacted Me Regarding Current Backlash on Forum

[Knotz]

If on unnofficial business, why identify as staff with the same username? By claiming he is there as representative of PDX he is claiming to be on official business.

He is in a PR positions and gets payed to stay silent? They have a tiny team on Stellaris, pulling away programmers to other projects, but they pay a Community Embassador to remain silent? Where is the logic in that?

Probably not to indulge/foster communication that they deem undesirable, for much the same reason threads routinely get swept away to megathreads. People kept complaining about sectors, decision makers knew they couldn't/wouldn't fix it so they let the mods know they should be quarantined. Same with performance. Allowing a discussion is the same as acknowledging a problem, acknowledging a problem presupposes that you'll do something about it (at least in a consumer/producer relationship), if the executives decide that they do not want to spend the resources to fix the problem it's better to not have the conversation. Hence, you get a community ambassador who has the remit to remain silent on official channels.

Part of why I'm skeptical that it's legitimate is that if Paradox does not want to acknowledge this then it was a misstep for him to talk about it/mention his job.

It is nowhere close:

A Community Embassadors job is to get feedback, feel and direct the mood of the community. By the current situation we can see that feedback has not yet been got, the community mood has not been felt, as the negative reaction was apparently a big surprise and the community mood has not been directed as people are pissed.

A cashiers main job is to cash, being face to the customer is secondary. HHowever, with a cashier I get immediate interaction when I have a problem, I am not hitting a brick wall for years, so things don't escalate. And if they do, I can ask for the manager and usually get to talk to him and solve the issue.

Please tell me how you can even remotely compare these.

Because both the cashier and the community ambassador are consumer facing positions that do not have any actual power.

 

[Ixal]

Obviously it isn't like they can just hire more people [especially right now] to help out.

Paradox is currently creating and staffing 2 new studios in Malmö and Barcelona. "Right now" is not an issue.

Maybe outsourcing EU4 and Imperator that way, in addition to the CK3 release, will allow more staff to be shifted to Stellaris, but by now I want more than a hypotetical maybe.

 

[Mauer]

Why would they contact some random discord server instead of using their own?
I've seen enough threads get locked for arbitrary reasons to be very skeptical of them wanting conversation move elsewhere they don't control.

 

[Oscot]

Tfw you stopped playing Stellaris over a year ago because the "every empire plays the same so the game has low replayability" meme, which was the great forum complaint of the time, bored you out of it.

And you return to see if anything's fixed to find that "every empire plays the same so the game has low replayability" isn't even on the list of the top 30 forum bugbears any more.

Can anyone more contemporary than me clarify if this is because the replayability has been improved, or is it that everything else got worse?
'Cos it looks like the latter. :/

 

[Garfazz Steamfang]

Tfw you stopped playing Stellaris over a year ago because the "every empire plays the same so the game has low replayability" meme, which was the great forum complaint of the time, bored you out of it.

And you return to see if anything's fixed to find that "every empire plays the same so the game has low replayability" isn't even on the list of the top 30 forum bugbears any more.

Can anyone more contemporary than me clarify if this is because the replayability has been improved, or is it that everything else got worse?
'Cos it looks like the latter. :/

Both honestly. Empires still too similar in gameplay and ethos are not really diferent they added some civics and origins but too few to enjoy a real replayability. But right now the game is plagued by the bad AI and performance issues. Moreover people seems to notice that mid-game is empty. Outside of war you still don't have nothing to do. Economy is irelevant, diplomacy is non existant, internal politics is a joke and even exploration is stuck because of neighboor empires frontiers issues.

Stellaris is a nice looking but empty shell and that necroids fluff will only add more color on the shell without filling it.

Paradox is currently creating and staffing 2 new studios in Malmö and Barcelona. "Right now" is not an issue.

Maybe outsourcing EU4 and Imperator that way, in addition to the CK3 release, will allow more staff to be shifted to Stellaris, but by now I want more than a hypotetical maybe.

The thing i don't understand is that Stellaris is supposed to be their most selled game so why would they have little staff in the team? Seems pretty unproductive.

 

[exi123]

[...]

The thing i don't understand is that Stellaris is supposed to be their most selled game so why would they have little staff in the team? Seems pretty unproductive.

And thats the thing for me. If i look at the Steamstore, the basegame is there for 40€ stil. I havent played the base game once (i joined in right after Utopia), is it worth the investment? Anyway...

As i wrote somewhere else, for a game with so many sold copies and with this huge potential customer base the afford they put in looks way to off. There could only be two reasons in my opinion:

- They try to keep a little income while developing the game in the background to give a comeback next year with a big 3.0 update. Conspiracy could be Wiz is working on that... just kidding. In the radio silence was a little tweet about the state and that they stil have big plans for the game.

- They alreay moved on to another project (Stellaris 2) and just milk the game. But that could never be said in public, who would buy the DLCs in that case?

If the second thought is the case, i wont go for another Paradox game in future. I am on "Standby" for Stellaris and other titles now, and the trigger to come back is well known.

 

[Coconut_Cookie]

Tfw you stopped playing Stellaris over a year ago because the "every empire plays the same so the game has low replayability" meme, which was the great forum complaint of the time, bored you out of it.

And you return to see if anything's fixed to find that "every empire plays the same so the game has low replayability" isn't even on the list of the top 30 forum bugbears any more.

Can anyone more contemporary than me clarify if this is because the replayability has been improved, or is it that everything else got worse?
'Cos it looks like the latter. :/

Oh this is still the case. I think it boils down to your choices having very little impact. There aren't that many game mechanics that are linked in a way that choices can have big impacts across multiple mechanics. For example planetary development is mostly confined to the planet itself, it doesn't really matter what else there is in the system, distance to other systems doesn't really matter, factions don't really matter, the governor appart from one or a few percentage bonus(ses) doesn't really matter. There's also a lot of traits, traditions and acension perks that are clearly sub optimal picks so there's never really a reason to pick them. If mechanics were linked a bit more than you could create situations in which you have to weigh different pro's and con's against eachother. In EU3 I really liked the slider and national idea events because they also imposed a long term change on your country by changing one of the sliders a single step.

The only actors you interact with are other space faring nations and the galactic community (interaction with uncivs is still quite limited). Interaction with other empires is fairly limited, there's no cold war state like in Endless Space so you can't have some aggression without declearing war and war itself and the way you claim systems is heavily in favour of opportunism. The galactic community is a nice addition but the ai seems to vote (semi)randomly so there's no diplomatic conflict between specific actors because everyone just seems to do whatever. In my first game with Federations a subject nation had spend 100 influence to put a law on the agenda that increased the size of the council but it's master wasn't even close to become that new council member if the law was ever passed. It just didn't make any sense. There's a lot of reasons why every game feels the same in the end, I made a way too long post about it with more examples: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...x-grand-strategy-games.1413767/#post-26839318

 

[hart30]

So - what do we know. What info has the community sqeezed out of the devs, who stayed silent for months?

One dev said that he currently works on qualiy of live features and micro-improvements (so propably ui, migration and maybe sector ai) I expect those dropping out together with necroids and some bugfixes (assimilation lag fix confirmed, hopefully there also will be a fleetmanager fix).

The game director stated, that there wont be military/crisis ai improvements coming out with necroids, but right after that there will come out a opt in beta focusing on the ai with the community as testers included. It is nothing concrete mentioned about the contents, but it is something.

 

[sillyrobot]

So - what do we know. What info has the community sqeezed out of the devs, who stayed silent for months?

One dev said that he currently works on qualiy of live features and micro-improvements (so propably ui, migration and maybe sector ai) I expect those dropping out together with necroids and some bugfixes (assimilation lag fix confirmed, hopefully there also will be a fleetmanager fix).

The game director stated, that there wont be military/crisis ai improvements coming out with necroids, but right after that there will come out a opt in beta focusing on the ai with the community as testers included. It is nothing concrete mentioned about the contents, but it is something.

Yeah, your second point is an over-optimistic reading of what was actually written. Not right after, when they have something.

 

[Zaacplot]

And thats the thing for me. If i look at the Steamstore, the basegame is there for 40€ stil. I havent played the base game once (i joined in right after Utopia), is it worth the investment?

It's often on sale for 5€

 

[Janx14]

Tfw you stopped playing Stellaris over a year ago because the "every empire plays the same so the game has low replayability" meme, which was the great forum complaint of the time, bored you out of it.

And you return to see if anything's fixed to find that "every empire plays the same so the game has low replayability" isn't even on the list of the top 30 forum bugbears any more.

Can anyone more contemporary than me clarify if this is because the replayability has been improved, or is it that everything else got worse?
'Cos it looks like the latter. :/

2.2 did at least diversify Hiveminds and Machine empires from normal empires a bit more (since their economies work similarly yet still differently). Lithoids also effectively provide a little differentiation.

That said, this just resulted in Hiveminds being underpowered and Machines and Synth Ascension empires being clearly superior. And the differences in gestalts is once again their 'lack' of things rather than having their own things.

 

[oreopirate]

The thing i don't understand is that Stellaris is supposed to be their most selled game so why would they have little staff in the team? Seems pretty unproductive.

The entire gaming industry has a bad habit of over working, underpaying, and understaffing games. Unfortunately, it is the Industry standard, and I would be frankly surprised if the team for Stellaris included more than five people who touch code.

 

[Kayden_II]

From Jamor ( former producer of Stellaris before Obidobi ) after the vacation after the release of the MegaCorp-DLC and its update: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/dev-team-were-back.1144790/#post-25047454
From Grekulf ( current game-director of Stellaris after Wiz ) in the latest dd #186: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-the-art-process.1429333/page-2#post-26974964

Take from that what you want, but note how "bold" it is to release DLCs and the accompanied updates, but "too risky" to do the same with patches.

 

[Hundar]

From Jamor ( former producer of Stellaris before Obidobi ) after the release of the MegaCorp-DLC and its update: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/dev-team-were-back.1144790/#post-25047454
From Grekulf ( current game-director of Stellaris after Wiz ) in the latest dd #186: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-the-art-process.1429333/page-2#post-26974964

Take from that what you want, but note how "bold" it is to release DLCs and the accompanied updates, but "too risky" to do the same with patches.

the funny thing is, in both cases they didnt fix much

 

[Spartakus]

From Jamor ( former producer of Stellaris before Obidobi ) after the release of the MegaCorp-DLC and its update: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/dev-team-were-back.1144790/#post-25047454
From Grekulf ( current game-director of Stellaris after Wiz ) in the latest dd #186: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-the-art-process.1429333/page-2#post-26974964

Take from that what you want, but note how "bold" it is to release DLCs and the accompanied updates, but "too risky" to do the same with patches.

Couldn't help but notice this bit in Jamor's post:

Your constructive feedback on the betas has been helpful, please keep it up. Thanks for your patience, and remember: we don't just push something out the door and forget about it, we're Paradox, we support games and the people who play them for the long haul.

 

[Dragatus]

I'm skeptical about a rogue community developer contacting you over Discord. Very.

This. If PDX wanted people to join a Discord server they'd be asking us to join the official Stellaris server.

 

[Franton]

I'm a bit late, and haven't read the entrie thread, so I'll keep it short:

In no particular order, these are the most important things that IMVHO need to be addressed.

Please ...

1. ... give us better tools to manage lists of all kinds: outliner, leader list, species list, you name it. We urgently need the ability to sort, find, and filter items on any list in the game. Meanwhile, give us usable scroll bars, not those half-hidden 2 pixel bars that are near impossible to hit and use on a large screen. Even better: let us specify lists with items that fulfil specific criteria, e. g. any planet with an issue (unemployment, free building slots, overcrowding), unmanned science ships, species with unused trait points, etc..

2. ... stop locking pops into a stratum! It's ok to let them be unhappy for having to move to a lower stratum, but it doesn't make sense for them to stay unemployed and starve while lower stratum jobs are available! Let's face it: unless your pops are living on social welfare, they will starve!

3. ... streamline game mechanisms to a level that the AI can actually deal with efficiently! While I very much appreciate the complexity of the game, it's prety obvious that the AIs don't! Some game mechanics, such as Strategic resources, don't seem to have been introduced properly to the AIs - at least I've never seen them build any buildings to produce strategic resources of ay kind. Consequently, they rarely upgrade buildings due to lack of resources.

 

[ToneyT]

The problem with performance is that the design choices that led to it were absolutely disconnected from the technical side.
The only way the problem is going to get fixed is by literally throwing the system out and making a new one. It needs a 2.0 level of revamp.

 

[Spidee]

So - what do we know. What info has the community sqeezed out of the devs, who stayed silent for months?

One dev said that he currently works on qualiy of live features and micro-improvements (so propably ui, migration and maybe sector ai) I expect those dropping out together with necroids and some bugfixes (assimilation lag fix confirmed, hopefully there also will be a fleetmanager fix).

The game director stated, that there wont be military/crisis ai improvements coming out with necroids, but right after that there will come out a opt in beta focusing on the ai with the community as testers included. It is nothing concrete mentioned about the contents, but it is something.

Sorry, where was the game director's statement made? Sorry for the hassle.

 

[Kayden_II]

Sorry, where was the game director's statement made?

In the latest dd #186 as a response: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-the-art-process.1429333/page-2#post-26974964

EDIT:

The game director stated, that there wont be military/crisis ai improvements coming out with necroids, but right after that there will come out a opt in beta focusing on the ai with the community as testers included.

The second part is a pretty ... optimistic interpretation of what grekulf ( game-director of Stellaris ) had stated. Just in my opinion, as usual. EDIT-END