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AI Debt spiral

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I agree with @Atomcreator I would have expect them to (atleast) put a sticky on the forum with Known Issues. Then we know what will be addressed or not. Now it's 8 weeks of complete silence. That way longer than the long lasting Swedish holidays. So they are doing this on purpouse, and they should not hide behind the holiday period. They just want our money, but not the drawback of communicating or fixing bugs.
 
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lordgoof said:
Anyone with a brain realises that releasing a major update before your entire team takes a vacation is terrible. One day paradox will start realising that their shitty attitude towards customers affects the bottom line. And if the mods hate this time of year every year for the same reason maybe they should pass on that feedback too. It's like someone up top lacks basic business common sense.

Your think after the drama of a pathetic imperator release they would reevaluate, but alas the same lousy business sense prevails.
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well...they have boss at the helm with a “gambling” industry background so by all
means, try to connect the dots and how that worked out for them so far from the top to the bottom within their business model
 
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Atomcreator said:
Many companies use online customer service agents these days.
They manage communities, foster relationships and present as a face of the company.
They also liase with all areas of the business to pass on current customer concerns on a proactive level, not allowing frustration and anger to take hold.
A lot of what we have seen with AI debt spiral is exactly that, Frustration at being ignored.
They manage all announcements on all platforms, not just an odd remark on twitter, which a number of people don't use, myself included.

These are now very legitimate jobs, IF a company is concerned about its reputation and keeping customers happy.
If all they care about is the bottom line, then so be it.
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yeah but Pdox got real cocky after EU3 and HOI3 and their mannerism and form of communication drastically changed for the worse since. Went even so far where they took at swipe at Creative Assembly for Empire:TW’s AI in those days when to date they haven’t been able to produce anything superior themselves in that department, even after numerous promises and marketing stunts a la DLC/patches buffet that take months to come out only to break more things to fix (if at all) for ALL of their games which are just reiteration of the same game in a different flavor and version numbers
 
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EarlKonrad said:
Yes, that is correct. And it is also worth mentioning that the incorporation of those mechanics (estates aside but their integration to the base game was rather iffy at the start) was seen a step in the right direction (at least in this forum). But it took how many years for that to happen? Also, it took Johan getting into the team for them to decide that it was a bad idea trying to maintain two code bases for government types & reforms.

I'll give them credit that that was a step on the right direction but it also begs the question of why not incorporate other crucial features locked behind half a decade old or even the entire DLCs. For example, why not roll American Dream, Res Publica, Wealth of Nation and Conquest of Paradise into the game?

American Dream is a very small, old and hidden DLC that marginally improves USA and nothing more. They can't touch USA because the country has an entire DLC dedicated to it, even though said DLC is below today's standards.

Res Publica marginally makes republic better and is also extremely old. I do wonder if one of the reason that they don't touch factions and barely address the republic issue is because of this DLC (it adds events, dictatorship and factions).

Than we have Wealth of Nations which is kind of useless nowadays because its selling point, TC, is also available for those who own Dharma.

Lastly, CoP, the first DLC released and one which had some great ideas that also show how PDXs development priorities changed with time. What this DLC do is add a MP sink for NA tribes and some unique buildings. These additions are cool in theory but America in general is very buggy and haven't seen any meaningful improvement or bug fix since El Dorado came out. Rolling the mechanics from this DLC into the base game would certainly help with some of the bugs associated with it.

I'd also add that rolling SLCs into the base game would attract new blood as a consequence of the general price of admission going down and the store front getting de-cluttered (is this even a word) as a consequence of there being less stuff to buy. I know there is no hard evidence one way or another but I think we can agree that a long standing issue with PDX is the amount of stuff you can buy for each of their games.
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I could not agree with you more.

I have never liked Paradox's new DLC policy. It creates bugs, incredible variation across different permutations of the game, and creates strong limits on what Paradox can actually do with their DLC. I am dead set against free-standing mechanics, i.e. mechanics that do not really interact with other game mechanics. Everything should be properly connected, either directly or indirectly, but Paradox can not fully integrate DLC mechanics with each other because they do not want their DLC mechanics being reliant on other DLC mechanics.

For example, there are a lot of people waiting for CK3's first DLC, where they believe the Eastern Roman Empire will be properly fleshed out. At the moment the Byzantines play too much like the rest of Europe despite having a fundamentally different governing system.

Call me skeptical. Paradox probably won't be able to run two vastly different versions of the game (I. e. one version where the Byzantines play like the Western Europeans, and the other where they play completely differently). Their DLC policy will likely force them to create only superficial differences between East and West.

Their DLC policy angers costumers, worsens the quality of their game, and keeps them from transiting to sequels in a timely manner. I understand why they do it, but I think there are ways they could improve on this system. Automatically incorporating old DLC into the base game is one way. Separating smaller DLCs and larger must-buy expansions would be another. Fully committing to the subscription model is a third, albeit my least favorite option. There are plenty of other models they could adopt, and I hope they do so soon.
 
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Ivashanko said:
Fully committing to the subscription model is a third.
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That would be the surest way to guarantee I never touch their products ever again.
 
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atwix said:
answer of Johan:

"Most Gamedirectors would prefer using beta-patches regularly. The problem is when we release DLC it is just not possible. If we have committed to a date, its locked in."
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"Just not possible" is a very sly misdirection. According to who? The government? The laws of the cosmos? The almighty creator?

This just means that Paradox decided to keep a DLC release date locked in once it has been committed to. There are of course reasons for that. A release date needs to align with marketing, other Paradox releases, releases from third party competitors, seasonality, etc. All of those come down to money. This statement only shows that Paradox values the money it would lose by delaying the release higher than pissed off customers. "Just not possible" just means that quarter numbers and stockholders are valued higher than customers.

Willem IV said:
I agree with @Atomcreator I would have expect them to (atleast) put a sticky on the forum with Known Issues. Then we know what will be addressed or not. Now it's 8 weeks of complete silence. That way longer than the long lasting Swedish holidays. So they are doing this on purpouse, and they should not hide behind the holiday period. They just want our money, but not the drawback of communicating or fixing bugs.
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Right. Also, forum staff did respond to the issue by adding notices to neondt's posts to keep trolls/angry DLC buyers away from targeting him because he was the only dev who dared to show his face.

So why not also create a sticky to the effect of what you mentioned? It's clear that they did not have the knowledge/authority to make any statements on bugfixes and were only trying to do damage control. Which means that management has failed to come up with any communication strategy at all. The very minimum would have been to craft a short message, acknowlege the problem, promise to fix the issues as first priority, and then inform everyone who interacts with the community about that, so appropriate announcements can be made on the official forums AND on social media (on their actual feed, not random replies). That this has not happened is the root failure here.

Also, someone should have probably told neondt that his efforts are appreciated but that talking about further content while gamebreaking issues are being ignored is not a good look and that he should wait a few weeks until he resumes dev diaries on that.
 
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zbyrne said:
If PDX cares so much about ensuring their workers get their break [...], then maybe don't do something like release a major expansion which many people will pay for and play on release when you are not on hand to deal with issues. Release Emperor after the break.
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Then PDX would have released it in late August / September which is exactly when CK III is going to be released. That's surely not good from a simple business perspective since consumers might have to decide for either of these products. However, from a broader perspective, the state of Emperor at release (+ 2 months later) will definitely have repercussions on PDX as a whole. Many customers (me included) already stated that they will not buy CK III at start since PDX is unfortunately unreliable concerning product QA.

Even worse, PDX was infamous for being particularly bad at it (around 10 years ago) and somewhat built up trust within the last decade. But now, many customers are really (to say the least) annoyed and angry about a full-priced DLC which makes the game almost unplayable. Whoever was responsible for these decisions and however difficult they may have been to make, trading trust for money is no good option on the long run.
 
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Failtier said:
Then PDX would have released it in late August / September which is exactly when CK III is going to be released. That's surely not good from a simple business perspective since consumers might have to decide for either of these products. However, from a broader perspective, the state of Emperor at release (+ 2 months later) will definitely have repercussions on PDX as a whole.
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Well, yeah. They considered the CK3 bottom line as more valuable than angry EU4 customers.

They also could have delayed Emperor further. This just lays bare further fundamental issues with this DLC though. It already had been significantly delayed. And even though Emperor is one of the most content dense DLCs we've had (maybe even the most), one is left to wonder which of these features accrued all the development time the DLC already took. They surely are complex, and made sense to me in my mind, imagining the repercussions balancing all those changes and adjusting the AI to them. But either those things did not receive nearly the attention they should have (or that the development time suggests) or a lot of it was very misguided. Still, to me this points to fundamental mismanagement: clearly, the combination of time, person hours and features we have resulted in sub par, badly tested features. So either give more time, allocate more people, or cut down on features early. Apparently nobody was willing to do either of these things, so here we are.
 
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Leoreth said:
Well, yeah. They considered the CK3 bottom line as more valuable than angry EU4 customers.

They also could have delayed Emperor further. This just lays bare further fundamental issues with this DLC though. It already had been significantly delayed. And even though Emperor is one of the most content dense DLCs we've had (maybe even the most), one is left to wonder which of these features accrued all the development time the DLC already took. They surely are complex, and made sense to in my mind, imagining the repercussions balancing all those changes and adjusting the AI to it won't have. But either those things did not receive nearly the attention they should have (or that the development time suggests) or a lot of it was very misguided. Still, to me this points to fundamental mismanagement: clearly, the combination of time, person hours and features we have resulted in sub par, badly tested features. So either give more time, allocate more people, or cut down on features early. Apparently nobody was willing to do either of these things, so here we are.
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I would imagine that the most time consuming features were the new Estates and the merc rework, both of which are part of the free update, which yet again exacerbates a problem with their policy of bundling patch + DLC together.

Oh and 1.29 should be taken as part of the dev cycle for Emperor as the devs said (can't remember where) that what was first supposed to be a small patch while working on Emperor resulted in a lot more work than they first anticipated.
 
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Just thought I would share this

1597708193225.png


Why they chose to post this as a reply to a tweet and not as a sticky post on their official forum is beyond me...
10/10 customer relations paradox!!!
 
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Jesus was a communist said:
Just thought I would share this

View attachment 610498

Why they chose to post this as a reply to a tweet and not as a sticky post on their official forum is beyond me...
10/10 customer relations paradox!!!
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My guess is that that's what happens when a company hires a PR firm to do their public relations. They focus on social media -- and mostly twitter because its an easy platform to make a statement and have it spread around -- and have no presence on forums.

For example, how many moderators are on this forum and how many of them are paid moderators that can speak for the team? How about the other PDx forums? As far as I know, having a PR representative step into these forums to mediate between community and devs is rare (only time I saw it was after IR's release).

Lastly, Jake made a comment quite a while ago that the reason why devs barely interact on the forum is because of all the negativity (tbf not everyone can take the criticism and it isn't part of their job to read and answer stuff on the forum) going on and that if people wanted to encourage more devs to want to interact than the best way to do it would be to keep the discussion civil.

I'm not trying to excuse the lack of communication on the forums, but rather trying to make sense of it's lack.
 
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atwix said:
there is a flip side to that coin that people keep on tossing...

Why do people expect freebies that work perfectly from a *capitalist* company? The debt problem is free patch problem, NOT DLC related.

This isn't some Spring break beach where students roam the beach for someone giving free WIFI.. Only for them to complain "the bandwith is BAD!!!!!".

Giving this argument cause I see many people NOT owning the last DLC yelling the loudest on the forum... that 'OMG FIX BUGS NOW!!!!"

The community should be GLAD that this game still gets free bugfixing patches. If it wasn't for people buying DLC, the game would have lost support from devs years ago. First BUY something, and then you got a right to complain.


(disclaimer: I'm not implying here you can't say you won't buy DLC cause you think paradox gives buggy DLC releases. That is something each customer has to decide for themselves)

And to retort your last argument: DLC sales and number of people playing keep on rising with each major DLC released. So with the analogy you do, once can conclude the flip side of the coin is that NOONE outside this forum really cares and just waits for the free patch to fix things, rather then roam for free WIFI.

I for example just find a temporary AI mod fix while patiently waiting for a good 1.31 patch after their vacation is over.

I WILL however concur that 1.29 and 1.30 was the first patches I EVER started looking for mods that fix AI, cause it wasn't fixed "fast" enough. It is indeed a concerning evolution that problems and DLC patches take longer and longer period to get major bugfixing patch.. But that can also be explained cause they tend to throw in MORE free content in those patches last years. But noone praised or praises paradox for doing that...

Hope you folks don't mind the post, but the tone of all the posts in paradox vacation period are starting to get dull. It always the same in summer holiday or in the weeks after DLC releases. I'm just giving a different point of view.
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You must be feeling good to be the open minded guy, the one that is thinking differently. But you are going so far that your arguments look stupid and i kindly say to you that YOU ARE WRONG! Swimming against strong currents doesn t make you better, it is same as pissing in the wind.
Oh, let s all make a fundraising, 2 dollars each, for the bug to be fixed. Really, peoples, how dare you wait for free bugfixes? CONTRIBUTE!
 
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