Their QA is a joke. Seriously it is... Most of the game features are half baked outcomes of a short brainstorming session.
DDRJake as a Dev?
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Their QA is a joke. Seriously it is... Most of the game features are half baked outcomes of a short brainstorming session.
Since DDRjake is anti greyskin and Byzantium, his being a dev is not all good news.
Sounds like great news to me. HRE and Byzantium have had it easy to far too long.
jake Dosent look half bad.
and it was inevitable that he would be hired.
Congrats jake.
There is a joke for certain but it might not be their QA. For all we know their QA points out most if not all these obvious problems and they just get overruled and the product gets pushed out the door. This is why I'm not automatically excited by DDR Jake being hired because it may not mean anything other than making him a scapegoat. Time will tell if it does anything for the community but based on certain Paradox employees responses to certain questions, and lack of answers in some cases, I do not foresee change from the questionable design choices being made.
Very unprofessional politics then, again...
But that explains all my criticism about the recent course of Paradox. An inhouse multiplayer session is NOT a replacement for professional QA
Paradox has a QA department; representatives are quite active in the Bug Reports forum, for instance. For all we know they do just fine a job. And for all we know the programmers do, too.
Sometimes you're just forced to make unrealistic release dates, or something unexpected goes wrong. The recent set of updates have had some really bad issues for sure, but they've also been on rapid turnaround. That sort of goes in-hand.
EU is a complex game. "Proper" QA / bugfixing for something with this many interwoven & moving parts would require a team beyond what Paradox Studios can reasonably afford. The games are just too niche for that. Something's gotta give -- either complexity or reliability.
Sometimes you're just forced to make unrealistic release dates, or something unexpected goes wrong. The recent set of updates have had some really bad issues for sure, but they've also been on rapid turnaround. That sort of goes in-hand.
EU is a complex game. "Proper" QA / bugfixing for something with this many interwoven & moving parts would require a team beyond what Paradox Studios can reasonably afford. The games are just too niche for that. Something's gotta give -- either complexity or reliability.
I don't think you are the right person to judge about what Paradox Dev Studios can afford - with all respect.
So they have a QA department, then we have these options:
1) QA does its job, Paradox doesnt listen -> Unprofessional
2) QA doesn't do its job, Paradox exclusively tests via multiplayer office games with 1 guy representing QA -> even more unprofessional
3) There is no QA -> unprofessional.
If Paradox wants to take on bigger projects they need to expand and get their stuff straight. If they don't do that EU5 will be again built on the very same faulty design and marketing approach as EU4 which I prefer to call EU3.5
So they have a QA department, then we have these options:
1) QA does its job, Paradox doesnt listen -> Unprofessional
2) QA doesn't do its job, Paradox exclusively tests via multiplayer office games with 1 guy representing QA -> even more unprofessional
3) There is no QA -> unprofessional.
If Paradox wants to take on bigger projects they need to expand and get their stuff straight. If they don't do that EU5 will be again built on the very same faulty design and marketing approach as EU4 which I prefer to call EU3.5
Seeing as he has his location as Stockholm, one has to wonder how long it will take him to learn Swedish.
It would be interesting to know if Jake's position is newly created or if he fills in a vacancy left by a former QA member. I.e., did additional resources get allocated to QA efforts? If so, then that would be a pretty strong hint that they really do want to improve program robustness. If not... well, I think they probably picked a good guy for the job, so there's that. Still a good sign.
Of course I don't know the details about their budgets. But information about sales data / frequency of play isn't too hard to get rough numbers on, and we do know that the EU4 dev team is (or at least was at one point) four members. That's an extraordinarily small team for making a game, so it stands to reason that QA would be similarly small.
Again, the fourth option you weirdly excluded:
4) QA + dev staff is too small to be able to fix things quickly enough to get the game as bug-free as you'd prefer while also developing new content to sell to keep the team in business
PDS is essentially an indie studio attached to a small but growing publisher. Most indie games are small and simple for exactly this reason. So if you want a less-buggy EU, we need either a more widely-selling EU or a simpler EU (and the former probably requires the latter, honestly).
Don't you think their profit now is far higher than a indie dev studio's profit and they should think about evolving into a real dev studio? In order to do this, they need to make sure every department has enough personel.
However if they wish to stay that "kinda indie" studio its a bad decision and you - as the customer - cannot expect any improvement of their upcomming games.
However if they wish to stay that "kinda indie" studio its a bad decision and you - as the customer - cannot expect any improvement of their upcomming games.
Congratulations, you've posted the single dumbest thing I've ever read on these forums! Have a cookie.
There are some bugs that are pretty simple to fix that have stuck around for a very long time (even after being reported). Many of them are so simple and small that even a modder can fix them. See this one for example:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...-in-American-Missions-has-impossible-triggers.
Reported in 2013. Re-reported after Art of War and before the 1.9 bug fix patch. And it didn't get fixed until 1.11. This was literally changing one word with another (3 or 4 times in the file).
And frankly, there have been many bugs lately that should never have seen release. The HRE Liberty Desire issue in 1.10 comes to mind.
I don't know, your post seems offensive and out of topic enough to get the cookie i guess.
If you (or the person I was quoting) are genuinely offended by what I said, I really don't know what to say.
When it comes down to it the tobacco refinery mission bug is a pretty low priority one to fix. Just because something is an easy fix doesn't mean that it'll get done fast. It still takes time to do, time they might think is better spent elsewhere.