Recently, perhaps just due to selective attention or whatnot, the Paradox community has become a place subjectively seemingly more and more prone to unproductive and unhelpful rhetoric. Having first been introduced to Paradox with Hearts of Iron II, I have since never found a gaming company so effectively able to produce games that are both immerse and detailed, while also avoiding the engagement in what has, in the last decade, defined the relationship between game developers and game buyers. I have frequently used the forums, but mostly just to enhance my own experience. However, I figure that, as a diehard fan of many of the games produced here, the rapid increase in the use of deliberately aggressive rhetoric occurring, I decided to finally register because there seems to be a mutual breakdown of communication occurring. Aknowledging that I havent been on the forum, I still believe this trend is large because without seeking it, the level of conflict has literally made itself visible to people who like me, who neither go on the forums, or engages much at all with the politics that can surround games. From my preception, it appears that rhetoric has progressed from benign internet trolling to vastly ironic and unresponsive arguments by both admins and users that is so far removed from the actual problems that caused it, that there seems to be essentially unresolved issues because there is a lacking awareness of exactly what is making users unhappy alongside frustration by developers who are facing nonlinear and ambiguous (due to the fact that they face no single coherent argument of what's wrong, but a bunch of arguments stressing different and occasionally conflicting wants of the community) criticisms. These sorts of disconnects mean that developers just feel generally as though these critiques are more or less just attacks on their work, in an industry that is known for provoking strong reactions from consumers.
Specifically, the amount of fighting that has appeared to slowly permiate out of the Europa forum has seen valid complaints which, in increasing fashion, get derailed by other upset fans who have no intention of resolving the problem, instead channeling frustration into aggresion. Logically, if one is a passionate game designer who is facing a lot of analysis at one time, it makes a lot of sense that being repeatedly harassed by people would provoke a large response. People who make valid critiques, who are followed by someone who is derogatory, are themselves denied of the ability to voice complaints as the main point of the discussion turns more to justifying behavior than solving problems.
This is not to come off as targeting fans or developers as the source of the problem. I absolutely would hate to see the community become so violently unable to communicate between the designers and the users that the games made fall apart because the audience is gone. People can't just continue to yell arguments that often arent even responsive to eachother. Paradox fans have always seemed very different from fans of other games. In part, I see this as coming from the nature of what Paradox produces; games that take deliberate commitment to learn as they embody complex and very exciting concepts. Paradox makes games that attract people who have specific appreciations and, from what I've seen from others, I can say that many fans here suggest in their dialogue that these fans are incredibly smart. Therefore there is no reason that the whole community should have to watch this sort of unpleasant dichotomy, because posts here routinely demonstrate incredible levels of problem solving that can not continue to exist simultaneous with widespread and intrinsically unuseful conflict.
Perceptually, I'm concerned that many criticisms are becoming self fulfilling. Fans who know what they as individuals want may collectively provide no congruent problem, presenting criticisms in a sphere that is not representative of a substantial portion of costumers, and on top of that, these criticisms can be conflicting and in doing so, a perception that the community as a whole is being ignored. Problems like this exist everywhere. Through highschool and college, my engagement in public speaking activities, most passionately debate, has taught me how to identify where arguments go wrong or why solutions seem impossible. Not to sound pretentious, I've just always identified certain trains of defensive behavior that I was exposed to in competing in debate, as the competition rewards people for being able to make arguments that can actually both make advocacy and hold importance, and how to quickly identify the most common reasons that those are impeded on.
Communication is something that is profoundly underdeveloped in society today. One can find it frustrating when discussions that would otherwise promote critical thinking seem absent as coherency is rarely maintained. The fact that I happened to make an extensive effort into understand how logic and arguments interact is not common. No society today seems to actively recognize the importance of interaction in problem solving; even the most respective intellectuals today are frequently competitive in warranting their claims. Ultimately, communication tends to break down when arguments are unclear. This doesnt mean simply that fans are making stupid and aggressive statements; the ambiguity I've observed here seems to also press on the person making the claim. Being unable to effectively understand the important issues that one is arguing means that the responses they get seem unresponsive, and persisting on incoherently constructed requests perpetuates the frustration of receiving responses that increasingly do not reflect what was being argued/B]
The pillar on which collective construction relies on for utility depends on people constantly encouraging improvement by pointing out problems. But this is not constructive if the complaints are both diverse among the critiquers and ambiguous to the individuals themselves, as gradually, discussions about games we enjoy become arguments where developers have work they put passion and time into become increasingly criticized rather than critiqued. When people are no longer engaging to mutually produce better work, they become defensive of their work.
Video games are unique in the way that they intersect artistic expression and game, so that consumers see a product being legitimized for profit, and the designers have their work constantly barraged by insults that dont even remotely seek to do more than perpetuate the problem. Comparisons to companies like EA, or between games like Europa and games that appeal to the lowest demonator, I believe, are relatively unfounded. I'm not trying to attack anyone, but literally every comparison between Paradox or a Paradox game and notoriously profiting corperations or games that deliberately dumbed out content for dlc money or access that I have seen have used examples with obviously flawed contrasts.
Looking at a company like EA, which buys companies who become successful previously solely so they can make the money that the other company did are much different than developers who regularly have historically produced games that are fun rather than games engineered for wide appeal. When Sim City came out, EA claimed that the always online feature was not dlc, because the game used cloud computing to generate unique people with one job and house per person. The game was unplayable for 2 weeks, and EA's response was mostly around preemptively reminding people that they dont do refunds. Worse yet, when the game did work, people literally proved that there was no computation occuring, the game could be rigged to do everything but save for indefinite times, sims could be observed going from the closest open jobs to the closest unoccupied house disproving the necessity, and people even found a script labeled population fudger which served to inflate the almonacs to make the numbers of people in the city appear 10x what they where. This was so poorly covered, the game didnt even adjust employment stats to match the inflated number, and even today the game still will show a city with 100,000 people never having enough workers since only 8,000 people had jobs, and no one was unemployed in the stats. EA has never aknowledged this, instead efforts where made to release a mac game that wasnt in any way adjusted to run on a mac, and was unplayable. On top of that, 1 year later, a friend of mine purchased it for mac to discover that they have never patched the problem, that around 30% of people on Macs can not run the game because it wont function properly, those that can only do so due to powerful machines that still fail, and EA classically responds to any request for help with a no refunds policy.
It is absurd to claim that a company that has largely been hampered by overly complex games, in making them more accessible or broadening their audience, have even a remote reminiscence to a company that literally purchased the rights to a game that was already huge, then actually lied to costumers about features it offered to justify DRM that broke the game, which they refused to refund, and continues to sell copies claiming to work on a system that they both know that it does not run on, and refuse to offer support. That ignores the poor features in the game, which EA responded to criticisms of by the (no former) CEO proclaiming in an interview that people where just mad because they didnt want to accept that games are different now and that EA is just more modern than people can accept. Johan and others are real people that participate, to any extent, in the community. Companies like EA dont even design much of what they sell, instead taking popular games and forcibly dumbing them down, releasing DLC's to recover any drop in sales, and forcing those DLC's to be purchased through invasive DRM measures.
Similarly, people look to the first-person sellout call of duty to justify massive reaction against any attempts to make a game that more people would enjoy due to the perception among gamers that casual gaming inevitably drowns out hardcore gaming. I argue this isnt even true. Inherently, casual gaming will surpass other forms because of how visible it is, but casual gaming usually is appealed to more deliberately. Companies look for great concepts which they can dumb down so people will buy, exploiting genres. Small game studios, however, who continue to release complex games, are absolutely not at the level that is suggested.
Even looking at the Total War franchise as predicting the danger of DLC reliance, a correlation I have seen more than once here, is grossly inappropriate given that I recall the game being awful by Medieval Total War II, before it had DLC. And the company received its stereotype from Empire: Total War's shitty AI long before DLC. It shouldnt surprise people that people who use the massive popularity of franchise alongside frenzies of pretty graphics would (a) have business models that would exploit DLC's for money not used to improve the game (Empire Total War is still bad, but they never even really fixed it. Not that they just ruined it more,patches just never solved its issues or really addressed them) and (b) those same business practices would use multiplayer as a failsafe for a broken game. Johan claims to focus on multiplayer, and has had to for a while, and provides a decent warrant for that. Creative Assembly retroactively marketed a broken game as multiplayer since they instead had already allocated resources to produce a sequal and didnt want to fix the problems it has.
The best way to actually be heard is to act with the intent of providing a different outlook that could help someone make an enjoyable experience better. Unfortunately, the unsavory business practices of certain companies that construct games to appeal are associated with things like online play and dlc, so that when decisions on patches were explained in such a way that it even referenced a similar concept, people immediately jumped to bad corperate policies. The fact is, the developers were accused of business of that sort directly. Irony rests in that because companies that just want to have games be bought also dont really care enough to explain directly, and to preserve the integrity of what they do, they certainly would avoid directly pressing their intent.
I disagree that the teams that design games are solely businesses looking to make money. Not only is that a cynical view of work (implying business people tend to enter a profession because they make money), it fails to account for the ambiguous standing of videogames as being both massively produced revenue sources, and, like much of what is done on media, occasionally done out of passion. Some users literally have announced they are boycotting what they see as profiteering. Literally, the solution they give is to deter paradox using money as coercion. That belief suggests that either, if that was a motivator for designers, they are okay with buying games made solely for profit if they listen to fans out of fear of losing money, which is what causes games to get dumbed down, or that the actions to make profit are so distasteful that they don't want to spend money because money is important to them. Either way, when the only reason companies change is because enough people where disgusted with them that they began losing money, the changes made are visibly forced and clearly motivated, creating an awkward relationship where they get money to pretend to think like those funding them, without legitimately believing it.
Therefore, people who are unsatisfied with changes in the game ought to present problems that they cause specifically, and seek to solve the issue rather than to vent. Although this seems directed at users, its not meant to be. However, the way that problems of communication perpetuate, and the unique amount of personal pride many take in things they produce, mean that the best agents to stop this dichotomy are those who critique. Critics can far more easily change their methodology so that they are working with developers, than can developers convince critics to change the way they give feedback.
As a final note, the most frequent causes of the failure of people to interact arguments are pretty consistent. When arguments dont interact, one might as well just not say anything. By interaction, I am looking at the ways in which people argue that some feature is bad because it does xyz thing, and the response they receive. If two people arguing opposite views both have points that are non mutually exclusive, and they give no reason why one is more important than the other, it is very frustrating for both as there is no way to win when both persons have arguments that are only drawn out so they are both probable. The conversation ends there and that is damaging. Instead of getting upset, its just always easier to solve the problem.
Arguments generally avoid this when they draw upon a factor that is unique. When I see people talking about how DLC's ruin the game because they couldnt start their game with DLC's, while that is true in that case, that isnt part of a recent trend in paradox games, which I have consistently seen less crashes with over time. Arguments as to why a patch proves that the new games are just getting worse arent good arguments if the warrant is applied against a patch that reinstated features from previous generations, for example.
Arguments that then dont correlate the differences that are unique to the current situation to its impacts on the game itself will frequently come accross as personalizing it, since a claim is made about a new feature, that they dont like, for some reason.
Lastly, another link must be made between why that feature of the game is important. People can't know what they are trying to argue if they dont know what their advocacy would actually look like. If Europa or Victoria had AI capable of replicating actual leaders of that time, it would be unplayable without also being practiced in the act of what the game is. If the AI in FIFA 15 actually performed as well as Barcelona, it wouldnt be fun because Barcelona consists of people who make a career out of it. So where does the line exist between accuracy and accessibility? Computers draw on math to derive functioning, and generally, good AI to me is AI that is both stupid and conforms outside of the drive to outdo the player (IE roleplaying).
Basically, by comparing what it actually is we want, we can tease where descripencies lie, and also clear up ambiguity over what the goal of these games are to portray, as the current trend suggests people are filling in the blanks. If people percieve Paradox to be failing to produce games that meet what they believe Paradox has defined itself as what is desired, one may be mislead to believe they're just selling out, when in reality, the lack of discussion just resulted in false interpretations.
I'd really like to hear from anyone, including anyone from Paradox, who would want to support more healthy environments for everyone. Truly there is no reason not to think that this is a problem of game theory; blaming the other for not understanding the point of the game, or for making the game poorly, makes everyone unhappy until developers distance themselves.So in closing, the reason that this is essentially is because the best way one incentives a game studio to abandon creativity and reject virtue of craft is to create such a hostile relationship that developers no longer are in any way connected to the people who play their games. At that point, game design is done with no understanding of the costumer first hand, in comparison, and the distance of both the audience and maker mean both are passively unhappy
'
Specifically, the amount of fighting that has appeared to slowly permiate out of the Europa forum has seen valid complaints which, in increasing fashion, get derailed by other upset fans who have no intention of resolving the problem, instead channeling frustration into aggresion. Logically, if one is a passionate game designer who is facing a lot of analysis at one time, it makes a lot of sense that being repeatedly harassed by people would provoke a large response. People who make valid critiques, who are followed by someone who is derogatory, are themselves denied of the ability to voice complaints as the main point of the discussion turns more to justifying behavior than solving problems.
This is not to come off as targeting fans or developers as the source of the problem. I absolutely would hate to see the community become so violently unable to communicate between the designers and the users that the games made fall apart because the audience is gone. People can't just continue to yell arguments that often arent even responsive to eachother. Paradox fans have always seemed very different from fans of other games. In part, I see this as coming from the nature of what Paradox produces; games that take deliberate commitment to learn as they embody complex and very exciting concepts. Paradox makes games that attract people who have specific appreciations and, from what I've seen from others, I can say that many fans here suggest in their dialogue that these fans are incredibly smart. Therefore there is no reason that the whole community should have to watch this sort of unpleasant dichotomy, because posts here routinely demonstrate incredible levels of problem solving that can not continue to exist simultaneous with widespread and intrinsically unuseful conflict.
Perceptually, I'm concerned that many criticisms are becoming self fulfilling. Fans who know what they as individuals want may collectively provide no congruent problem, presenting criticisms in a sphere that is not representative of a substantial portion of costumers, and on top of that, these criticisms can be conflicting and in doing so, a perception that the community as a whole is being ignored. Problems like this exist everywhere. Through highschool and college, my engagement in public speaking activities, most passionately debate, has taught me how to identify where arguments go wrong or why solutions seem impossible. Not to sound pretentious, I've just always identified certain trains of defensive behavior that I was exposed to in competing in debate, as the competition rewards people for being able to make arguments that can actually both make advocacy and hold importance, and how to quickly identify the most common reasons that those are impeded on.
Communication is something that is profoundly underdeveloped in society today. One can find it frustrating when discussions that would otherwise promote critical thinking seem absent as coherency is rarely maintained. The fact that I happened to make an extensive effort into understand how logic and arguments interact is not common. No society today seems to actively recognize the importance of interaction in problem solving; even the most respective intellectuals today are frequently competitive in warranting their claims. Ultimately, communication tends to break down when arguments are unclear. This doesnt mean simply that fans are making stupid and aggressive statements; the ambiguity I've observed here seems to also press on the person making the claim. Being unable to effectively understand the important issues that one is arguing means that the responses they get seem unresponsive, and persisting on incoherently constructed requests perpetuates the frustration of receiving responses that increasingly do not reflect what was being argued/B]
The pillar on which collective construction relies on for utility depends on people constantly encouraging improvement by pointing out problems. But this is not constructive if the complaints are both diverse among the critiquers and ambiguous to the individuals themselves, as gradually, discussions about games we enjoy become arguments where developers have work they put passion and time into become increasingly criticized rather than critiqued. When people are no longer engaging to mutually produce better work, they become defensive of their work.
Video games are unique in the way that they intersect artistic expression and game, so that consumers see a product being legitimized for profit, and the designers have their work constantly barraged by insults that dont even remotely seek to do more than perpetuate the problem. Comparisons to companies like EA, or between games like Europa and games that appeal to the lowest demonator, I believe, are relatively unfounded. I'm not trying to attack anyone, but literally every comparison between Paradox or a Paradox game and notoriously profiting corperations or games that deliberately dumbed out content for dlc money or access that I have seen have used examples with obviously flawed contrasts.
Looking at a company like EA, which buys companies who become successful previously solely so they can make the money that the other company did are much different than developers who regularly have historically produced games that are fun rather than games engineered for wide appeal. When Sim City came out, EA claimed that the always online feature was not dlc, because the game used cloud computing to generate unique people with one job and house per person. The game was unplayable for 2 weeks, and EA's response was mostly around preemptively reminding people that they dont do refunds. Worse yet, when the game did work, people literally proved that there was no computation occuring, the game could be rigged to do everything but save for indefinite times, sims could be observed going from the closest open jobs to the closest unoccupied house disproving the necessity, and people even found a script labeled population fudger which served to inflate the almonacs to make the numbers of people in the city appear 10x what they where. This was so poorly covered, the game didnt even adjust employment stats to match the inflated number, and even today the game still will show a city with 100,000 people never having enough workers since only 8,000 people had jobs, and no one was unemployed in the stats. EA has never aknowledged this, instead efforts where made to release a mac game that wasnt in any way adjusted to run on a mac, and was unplayable. On top of that, 1 year later, a friend of mine purchased it for mac to discover that they have never patched the problem, that around 30% of people on Macs can not run the game because it wont function properly, those that can only do so due to powerful machines that still fail, and EA classically responds to any request for help with a no refunds policy.
It is absurd to claim that a company that has largely been hampered by overly complex games, in making them more accessible or broadening their audience, have even a remote reminiscence to a company that literally purchased the rights to a game that was already huge, then actually lied to costumers about features it offered to justify DRM that broke the game, which they refused to refund, and continues to sell copies claiming to work on a system that they both know that it does not run on, and refuse to offer support. That ignores the poor features in the game, which EA responded to criticisms of by the (no former) CEO proclaiming in an interview that people where just mad because they didnt want to accept that games are different now and that EA is just more modern than people can accept. Johan and others are real people that participate, to any extent, in the community. Companies like EA dont even design much of what they sell, instead taking popular games and forcibly dumbing them down, releasing DLC's to recover any drop in sales, and forcing those DLC's to be purchased through invasive DRM measures.
Similarly, people look to the first-person sellout call of duty to justify massive reaction against any attempts to make a game that more people would enjoy due to the perception among gamers that casual gaming inevitably drowns out hardcore gaming. I argue this isnt even true. Inherently, casual gaming will surpass other forms because of how visible it is, but casual gaming usually is appealed to more deliberately. Companies look for great concepts which they can dumb down so people will buy, exploiting genres. Small game studios, however, who continue to release complex games, are absolutely not at the level that is suggested.
Even looking at the Total War franchise as predicting the danger of DLC reliance, a correlation I have seen more than once here, is grossly inappropriate given that I recall the game being awful by Medieval Total War II, before it had DLC. And the company received its stereotype from Empire: Total War's shitty AI long before DLC. It shouldnt surprise people that people who use the massive popularity of franchise alongside frenzies of pretty graphics would (a) have business models that would exploit DLC's for money not used to improve the game (Empire Total War is still bad, but they never even really fixed it. Not that they just ruined it more,patches just never solved its issues or really addressed them) and (b) those same business practices would use multiplayer as a failsafe for a broken game. Johan claims to focus on multiplayer, and has had to for a while, and provides a decent warrant for that. Creative Assembly retroactively marketed a broken game as multiplayer since they instead had already allocated resources to produce a sequal and didnt want to fix the problems it has.
The best way to actually be heard is to act with the intent of providing a different outlook that could help someone make an enjoyable experience better. Unfortunately, the unsavory business practices of certain companies that construct games to appeal are associated with things like online play and dlc, so that when decisions on patches were explained in such a way that it even referenced a similar concept, people immediately jumped to bad corperate policies. The fact is, the developers were accused of business of that sort directly. Irony rests in that because companies that just want to have games be bought also dont really care enough to explain directly, and to preserve the integrity of what they do, they certainly would avoid directly pressing their intent.
I disagree that the teams that design games are solely businesses looking to make money. Not only is that a cynical view of work (implying business people tend to enter a profession because they make money), it fails to account for the ambiguous standing of videogames as being both massively produced revenue sources, and, like much of what is done on media, occasionally done out of passion. Some users literally have announced they are boycotting what they see as profiteering. Literally, the solution they give is to deter paradox using money as coercion. That belief suggests that either, if that was a motivator for designers, they are okay with buying games made solely for profit if they listen to fans out of fear of losing money, which is what causes games to get dumbed down, or that the actions to make profit are so distasteful that they don't want to spend money because money is important to them. Either way, when the only reason companies change is because enough people where disgusted with them that they began losing money, the changes made are visibly forced and clearly motivated, creating an awkward relationship where they get money to pretend to think like those funding them, without legitimately believing it.
Therefore, people who are unsatisfied with changes in the game ought to present problems that they cause specifically, and seek to solve the issue rather than to vent. Although this seems directed at users, its not meant to be. However, the way that problems of communication perpetuate, and the unique amount of personal pride many take in things they produce, mean that the best agents to stop this dichotomy are those who critique. Critics can far more easily change their methodology so that they are working with developers, than can developers convince critics to change the way they give feedback.
As a final note, the most frequent causes of the failure of people to interact arguments are pretty consistent. When arguments dont interact, one might as well just not say anything. By interaction, I am looking at the ways in which people argue that some feature is bad because it does xyz thing, and the response they receive. If two people arguing opposite views both have points that are non mutually exclusive, and they give no reason why one is more important than the other, it is very frustrating for both as there is no way to win when both persons have arguments that are only drawn out so they are both probable. The conversation ends there and that is damaging. Instead of getting upset, its just always easier to solve the problem.
Arguments generally avoid this when they draw upon a factor that is unique. When I see people talking about how DLC's ruin the game because they couldnt start their game with DLC's, while that is true in that case, that isnt part of a recent trend in paradox games, which I have consistently seen less crashes with over time. Arguments as to why a patch proves that the new games are just getting worse arent good arguments if the warrant is applied against a patch that reinstated features from previous generations, for example.
Arguments that then dont correlate the differences that are unique to the current situation to its impacts on the game itself will frequently come accross as personalizing it, since a claim is made about a new feature, that they dont like, for some reason.
Lastly, another link must be made between why that feature of the game is important. People can't know what they are trying to argue if they dont know what their advocacy would actually look like. If Europa or Victoria had AI capable of replicating actual leaders of that time, it would be unplayable without also being practiced in the act of what the game is. If the AI in FIFA 15 actually performed as well as Barcelona, it wouldnt be fun because Barcelona consists of people who make a career out of it. So where does the line exist between accuracy and accessibility? Computers draw on math to derive functioning, and generally, good AI to me is AI that is both stupid and conforms outside of the drive to outdo the player (IE roleplaying).
Basically, by comparing what it actually is we want, we can tease where descripencies lie, and also clear up ambiguity over what the goal of these games are to portray, as the current trend suggests people are filling in the blanks. If people percieve Paradox to be failing to produce games that meet what they believe Paradox has defined itself as what is desired, one may be mislead to believe they're just selling out, when in reality, the lack of discussion just resulted in false interpretations.
I'd really like to hear from anyone, including anyone from Paradox, who would want to support more healthy environments for everyone. Truly there is no reason not to think that this is a problem of game theory; blaming the other for not understanding the point of the game, or for making the game poorly, makes everyone unhappy until developers distance themselves.So in closing, the reason that this is essentially is because the best way one incentives a game studio to abandon creativity and reject virtue of craft is to create such a hostile relationship that developers no longer are in any way connected to the people who play their games. At that point, game design is done with no understanding of the costumer first hand, in comparison, and the distance of both the audience and maker mean both are passively unhappy
'
