DDRJake as a Dev?
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Weird how player numbers keep increasing. People sure must hate fun!
I work in QA for a different game developer. There are obviously more than just the three options you've listed, but let me just tell you how QA generally works during the development process, to debunk a lot of the negative perceptions in this thread.
Ok, so we have a game, and the company determines that there is a market for additional content (DLC). So the developers need to create that additional content and add it to the base game. During the development process, QA will test basic functionality of the new features while they are being put together. It will be buggy as heck, but the goal is to get it up and running and in a semi-workable state. We expect there to be bugs... sometimes lots of bugs. Once the key criteria of the functionality works, then QA will bug all of the polish issues like alignment, wrong tooltips or whatever else makes it look unfinished, ad hocing around the feature to simulate a normal user experience.
Now, once all of the new features are added to the game, and all of the patch's main bug fixes are included, QA will run a checklist of key functionality FOR THE WHOLE GAME, including new features. Checks include things like:
[ ] User can declare war
[ ] Allies are correctly called to arms
[ ] Attrition is calculated properly
...etc, etc
Notice how I included a check for attrition, which as Arumba discovered after El Dorado was released, was completely broken. When someone from QA goes down the checklist, they would probably just check to see that units can take attrition. They don't check EVERY possible scenario involved with taking attrition, because the checklist would take forever if that was the case. The purpose of the checklist is to ensure that nothing is majorly messed up. Unit took attrition? Check, moving on. Unlike Arumba, they won't be sitting there for 8 hours with a calculator and spreadsheets deducing exact numbers and expectations from every angle. That's just unrealistic.
Bugs are often the knock-on results of other bug fixes or feature evolutions (such as making the disaster system more transparent). As we see from every patch, the EU4 devs fix a lot of bugs. Combined, there is a huge potential for small things to slip through the cracks; the slight changes here causing unwanted slight changes over there. No QA team on the planet could find everything that eventually pops up after release. Even the "bigger" issues. After one hour of release, the user base has already clocked on more man-hours than were put into the entire development cycle of the DLC/patch. And QA is only a fraction of that cycle.
Recall my explanation of the checklist earlier in this post. Notice that I said the checklist is only run AFTER the features are added and the old bugs are fixed. So the build is theoretically ready to be released at this point. The devs throw it to QA to check at the end of feature development. I don't know how release dates are determined at Paradox, but I suspect, like most companies, they are decided well in advance. Management tells the devs, "Hey, have all these features done by this date or we won't make any money". Then they tell QA "Hey, make sure this is ready to be shipped by this different date, or we won't make any money". QA takes the build after feature development ends, runs their checks, and every time they find something, tell the devs "Hey, this is broken, we need it fixed before our release deadline". The devs fix it and QA checks that it is fixed. Rinse, repeat.
Unfortunately, sometimes there just isn't enough time to fix everything. The queue of bugs will be too large to fix before the deadline. The major known issues get prioritized, and the minor ones will be fixed in the next patch or even hotfix.
The dev multiplayer sessions have their own usefullness. They simulate actual user experiences, where some of the more annoying issues can crop up. Simple checklists miss such issues, because they don't look at the game as a whole. The granularity of checklists hides bigger issues. I'm glad Paradox utilizes both.
Ultimately, from an outsider's QA perspective, I think a lot of the hate directed at Paradox after patches is unjustified. The devs are obviously engaged with their project. And the small QA team have an almost impossible task in ensuring the quality of a game which exists in a niche market with a massive feature complexity.
If anybody expects the patches to go smoothly, they're kidding themselves. I don't begrudge the developers for releasing when they do. It ensures new content comes out more regularly. Consumers-as-QA isn't ideal, but let's be realistic in this situation.
Bravo EUIV devs
Bravo EUIV QA
I know what it's like, and you are doing fantastic. Keep up the good work, and I look forward to what comes next
I will just quote this post to say that it's a very good post and gets most things right in terms of the realities of game development and QA. Thank you.
No worries, the 'balanced for MP' argument is just as rubbish as 'EU4 is patching out all the fun'.
Johan said that we make balance decisions from our MP sessions, which people interpreted as that we never play single player and other equally ridiculous inferences. He also said he didn't care about single player in one specific instance of balance, which people misquoted as though it applied to the entire game. I'm very tired of this dumb conspiracy theory, but people want a single imaginary thing to blame for why the game isn't the precise exact game that they personally would prefer to play and this fits the ticket, I suppose.
You can't really remove a conspiracy theory with facts, people believe in conspiracy theories because they want to believe in them and ignore absolutely any facts to the contrary.
Which particular changes is it that you want explained? Mind you, I'm not going to go in-depth on our whole design process because it is not my job to explain every single decision I take as a project lead.
The old looting system had the following issues:
- It was extremely powerful, you could repeatedly 'farm' large countries like Ming for crazy amounts of money.
- It was very poorly understood and explained, most players didn't know how to use it at all (lots of players didn't even know it existed).
- It was very difficult to defend against because all units move at the same speed.
- The AI could not use it (and believe me, if I *had* coded the AI to use it the system would be universally loathed as your entire country would be getting looted in every single war).
- It was a micro-heavy system, and we have been moving away from micro-heavy systems in general.
Calling it historical/realistic is complete bunk, if you think a thousand men stealing the entire tax income of China every six months is historical or realistic then you need to reconsider the meaning of those words.
- It was extremely powerful, you could repeatedly 'farm' large countries like Ming for crazy amounts of money.
- It was very poorly understood and explained, most players didn't know how to use it at all (lots of players didn't even know it existed).
- It was very difficult to defend against because all units move at the same speed.
- The AI could not use it (and believe me, if I *had* coded the AI to use it the system would be universally loathed as your entire country would be getting looted in every single war).
- It was a micro-heavy system, and we have been moving away from micro-heavy systems in general.
Calling it historical/realistic is complete bunk, if you think a thousand men stealing the entire tax income of China every six months is historical or realistic then you need to reconsider the meaning of those words.
A loot bar counting down while you siege might be an alternative to just getting everything on siege victory. I'll be honest and say that I don't consider looting an important feature though, so it's not high up on my list of priorities.
Balance absolutely matters in single player. This is very much a part of our design philosophy, and would be even if we did not have MP at all. You're free to disagree but that's not going to change.
Balance is integral to fun in a strategy game. If there is no balance, you will quickly discover a single winning tactic for everything and the strategy goes out the window.
This change may not have made the game more fun for you, but EU4 is not made only for you. We judged that this change would result in a better/more fun game overall, and there is not a single change to anything that is going to please everyone (nor should you think that because a few people on a forum disapprove that the majority of players feel the same).
You're entirely free to disagree with our judgement, but ultimately it's ours to make all the same.
I've never agreed with that argument at all. Let's say I add a button to the war screen that will instantly wipe out all enemy armies. That's fine right, because if you don't want to zap the enemies out of existance you can just not use it?
Except that if you don't use it, you are playing suboptimally, and strategy games are about optimizing and creating winning strategies. When you can never create a winning strategy that is better than a magic button the game provides, it takes away the very purpose of the game. Obviously this is an extreme example but it's a very real and important concept in game design, such as when shooters have one clearly imbalanced weapon that is better than the others. The fact that it may not bother you personally doesn't mean anything in the broader perspective, and like I said, we're not making a game just for you.
It's not a slippery slope at all, it's a demonstration of the fact that the 'balance doesn't matter in single player because you can always choose not to use unbalanced features' argument is false.
Removing depth from a game is not always bad, and adding it is not always good. If we made you play a connect 2 minigame to unlock each tech level that'd be adding depth, but I doubt anyone would like it.
Yeah but based on the response here, you can pretty much say it was bad
If a few forum responses proved that a change was good or bad, then every major change ever made to EU4 was simulaneously fantastic and utterly terrible.
Agreeing that there are different ways to solve the problem doesn't mean I consider the current solution bad. I think looting is perfectly fine as-is, doesn't mean it couldn't be made better but that's true for most anything.
- Dec 14, 1999
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This weeks MP session was fun. Crushing Jakes country 1v1 and forcing him to lose 20% of his territory was rather interesting.