Are devs ignoring community concerns about Trade/GDP?

[benis1996]

I am really disappointed in the focus of the new dev diary... It seems they are focusing on minor balance issues rather than low-hanging major fixes to the game...

Will the devs implement the suggested fixes for trade/GDP? I am concerned these will be ignored and then overlooked in future DLCs/Patches.

It seems the community generally wants trade to use the post-trade prices rather than the average prices and GDP to subtract input price values (since the former leads to an overexpansion of trade, higher profits than should exist, and weird situations where trade both ways in the same good is profitable)(and GDP as measured in the game now is totally meaningless as a statistic as it double counts value produced in certain sectors).

 

[RELee]

Next question.

 

[benis1996]

View attachment 912432
Next question.

Confused, are you a dev?

 

[FranklyJustNess]

Kinda yeah, of course they are quite busy right now and the trade issues are not the highest on the priority list; there are other things that feel more wrong.

But also if you go back to the original DevDiary on Trade Revision, people (myself included) were discussing that "hold on, that doesn't look right" and the comments went through quite a bit of conversation on potential causes, etc., back then Wiz actually commented, that it was a situation where everything is working as designed and it's just a decision of gameplay over accuracy, which really felt like missing the whole point and ignoring the discussion.

So yeah, not really surprising to me, that it continues receiving little feedback.

 

[KingCarrot]

I think they are focusing on things that are downright broken first.
Only afterwards will they handle other issues.

You say low hanging fruit, but in software development you still have to test a lot, so it is not really that easy....

 

[Nirmara]

Wiz stated here that they have a fix currently in QA to fix the trading algorithm so that's one issue that should get be fixed by patch 1.1.

It's worth keeping in mind that we only got hotfixes so far i.e. fixes for major urgent issues along with a few low-hanging fruits that likely did not require much effort from the QA team.

As annoying as the trading prices or the GDP calculation are, they do not qualify as either. Those two features can also impact a bunch of other systems as well so it's far from trivial to test and will also likely require balancing elsewhere. It makes much more sense to do that as part of a larger patch where other changes are being made.

 

[Jamaican Castle]

Tinkering with a complex interrelated system that's already got a whole layer of bugs from release doesn't strike me as low-hanging. Call me crazy but that seems like it would actually take a fair amount of time to fix in a way that doesn't make everything worse.

 

[FryFroFella]

I'm sure they see the critiques and have made notes of them and opinions vary and theyre otherwise very busy scrambling to pull everything together. Theres an internal logic to development of anything requiring as much division of labor as a video game that doesnt/cant be fully transparent, due to logistical priorities/happenstance as much as explicit policy. Not defending Paradox at all, just bordering on naive to act like a company are your pen pals ignoring your suggestions.

 

[MatthewP]

For GDP, there was a thread arguing for using a definition closer to the IRL one (it’s never going to work quite like real life because the game fudges production/wage/etc numbers in multiple areas). Like the OP here, it was very light on gameplay justification for why it’s a good change. It was mentioned on the thread that the current calculation was WAD according to the devs, and it seems to be a deliberate that it favors industrialized nations, which is obviously thematic. I could be wrong, but I don’t think we’ll see any movement there without a strong gameplay-based argument for it.

 

[durbal]

For GDP, there was a thread arguing for using a definition closer to the IRL one (it’s never going to work quite like real life because the game fudges production/wage/etc numbers in multiple areas). Like the OP here, it was very light on gameplay justification for why it’s a good change. It was mentioned on the thread that the current calculation was WAD according to the devs, and it seems to be a deliberate that it favors industrialized nations, which is obviously thematic. I could be wrong, but I don’t think we’ll see any movement there without a strong gameplay-based argument for it.

It's not thematic and it doesn't even necessarily favor highly industrialized nations -- it favors nations that consume their own outputs in long production chains. If you made a super advanced society producing the most advanced end products but imported all your raw goods you have a lower GDP than another nation that was vertically integrated and produces the same amount of final goods. It's just flat out wrong and warps diplomacy, minting, and a few other things pointed out in that thread.

Making it work like real life isn't hard. The game just needs to subtract input good prices from output prices. That's it. Why they left it completely wrong is a mystery to me especially since this was pointed out by people in the dev diary.

 

[PedroLuiz]

For GDP, there was a thread arguing for using a definition closer to the IRL one (it’s never going to work quite like real life because the game fudges production/wage/etc numbers in multiple areas). Like the OP here, it was very light on gameplay justification for why it’s a good change. It was mentioned on the thread that the current calculation was WAD according to the devs, and it seems to be a deliberate that it favors industrialized nations, which is obviously thematic. I could be wrong, but I don’t think we’ll see any movement there without a strong gameplay-based argument for it.

I think people expect gdp to be close to realistic numbers when you use that as a metric
Like me, I looked up the British gdp at the time and it was on the ball-park of a somewhat good player
But now that I know that the game overinflated gdp part of my immersion is broken

 

[Sernista]

lol paradox hasn't tested "a lot" since they fired their QA team years back. Thats why their recent releases are such incomplete buggy disasters

I hadn't heard about this, and I'd seen a dev post that said such things had never happened - do you have a link or something I can use to read what happened? It's really hard to tell the real stories from forum rumors without seeing the reporting.

 

[durbal]

I hadn't heard about this, and I'd seen a dev post that said such things had never happened - do you have a link or something I can use to read what happened? It's really hard to tell the real stories from forum rumors without seeing the reporting.

Paradox got rid of the QA people in their publishing branch I think.

 

[MatthewP]

It's not thematic and it doesn't even necessarily favor highly industrialized nations -- it favors nations that consume their own outputs in long production chains. If you made a super advanced society producing the most advanced end products but imported all your raw goods you have a lower GDP than another nation that was vertically integrated and produces the same amount of final goods. It's just flat out wrong and warps diplomacy, minting, and a few other things pointed out in that thread.

I’m pretty sure this is wrong. If you build 1 end product factory, one intermediate factory and one resource producer in a supply chain, and I build 3 end product factories in the same chain my gdp will be much higher than yours. This is because my 3 factories ignore input costs and get full output value, whereas you are only getting that benefit once. Is there some reason I’m missing that the source of input goods would matter even though only total output value is considered for gdp?

edit: I actually see that what you said is literally true: if my nation has 3 end product factories and yours has the same 3 factories plus all the production chain for them, yes you will have higher gdp. But I doubt that you really meant to make that comparison, since it obviously should be true (my economy is a subset of yours so clearly should have less GDP). I think you probably meant to make the comparison I assumed above, but I guess you can clarify.

Making it work like real life isn't hard. The game just needs to subtract input good prices from output prices. That's it. Why they left it completely wrong is a mystery to me especially since this was pointed out by people in the dev diary.

I certainly agree changing it would be easy. What’s missing is the case that it would improve the game. But anyway, I now understand you have a different interpretation of how the math is working. Maybe if you can explain why yours is right and what imports have to do with it then I’ll change my mind on this part.

I think people expect gdp to be close to realistic numbers when you use that as a metric
Like me, I looked up the British gdp at the time and it was on the ball-park of a somewhat good player
But now that I know that the game overinflated gdp part of my immersion is broken

I think making the calculation closer to real life doesn’t really get you there anyway. All the prices and quantities of goods are just made up.

 

[DukeLeto42]

In a comment on a question about the overflow errors and 1.06 one of the devs commented that it wouldn't be fixed until 1.1 because doing so would completely brick saves. Given how integrated it is into, well, everything and the complexity of getting it on track, I suspect trade is in the same boat.

 

[aksan5354]

I think they are focusing on things that are downright broken first.
Only afterwards will they handle other issues.

You say low hanging fruit, but in software development you still have to test a lot, so it is not really that easy....

Yes indeed. Changing calculation may be a piece of cake but the AI needs extra effort to adjust. And of course the QAs are gonna be busy.

 

[benis1996]

Ah maybe I underestimated the amount of testing that would be necessary to "balance" the changes to trade and GDP I'm suggested.

However, as someone pursuing a PhD in macroeconomics, i can tell you that even though GDP cannot be calculated exactly in the same manner as in reality, it still has an effective analog in the game.

The purpose of GDP in economics is to measure the total value of goods and serviced produced within a country. In economics, there are 3 general ways of calculting this: summing up the total value of produced goods/services, summing up income, and summing up net expenditures. These three methods are equivalent in theory because of how they are defined by macroeconomics. The value of produced goods in an economy has to flow as income somewhere, and all income must come from somewhere (net expenditures). In the game, of course, this is not true by design and one cannot use all three of these methods to calculate GDP.

However, as some of you suggest, giving up because of this is not the right solution! One of the three methods can still be used in the game to measure the total value of produced goods/services.... i.e., literally the total value of produced goods/services.

For those who still disagree, explain to me what the purpose of GDP is in the game currently and how the current calculation method fulfills that purpose. The only argument I see in the above comments is "the devs intended it to be this way". Last time I checked, most games are reevaluated and game mechanisms change/adjust over time as the devs improve the game. The current method measures nothing relevant to the player and even worse, displaying "GDP per capita" is incredibly misleading. Honestly, what does GDP per capita mean in the present game and how does this help me as a player?

 

[johnty5]

I hadn't heard about this, and I'd seen a dev post that said such things had never happened - do you have a link or something I can use to read what happened? It's really hard to tell the real stories from forum rumors without seeing the reporting.

Paradox Interactive (the publishing organisation) got rid of its QA team. Paradox Development Studios (the organisation in charge of in-house games like Victoria 3, EU4, Stellaris, CK3 and HoI4) haven’t got rid of their QA teams.

The person you’re talking to doesn’t understand it’s two different organisations under the “Paradox” umbrella.

 

[johnty5]

Wiz stated here that they have a fix currently in QA to fix the trading algorithm so that's one issue that should get be fixed by patch 1.1.

It's worth keeping in mind that we only got hotfixes so far i.e. fixes for major urgent issues along with a few low-hanging fruits that likely did not require much effort from the QA team.

As annoying as the trading prices or the GDP calculation are, they do not qualify as either. Those two features can also impact a bunch of other systems as well so it's far from trivial to test and will also likely require balancing elsewhere. It makes much more sense to do that as part of a larger patch where other changes are being made.

Just a warning on this. Wiz hasn’t said that they’re going to change the trade prices from using the average - he’s said that they’re going to fix the circular trade route issue which is caused by using the average prices.

 

[Brynjar]

Paradox Interactive (the publishing organisation) got rid of its QA team. Paradox Development Studios (the organisation in charge of in-house games like Victoria 3, EU4, Stellaris, CK3 and HoI4) haven’t got rid of their QA teams.

The person you’re talking to doesn’t understand it’s two different organisations under the “Paradox” umbrella.

They also were not fired afaik, but were offered other responsibilities in accordance with Swedish labour laws. Some/many chose to leave the company instead. That was around April-May 2019, but Paradox releases were a mess long before that.