DDRJake as a Dev?

[zedyue]

No worries, the 'balanced for MP' argument is just as rubbish as 'EU4 is patching out all the fun'.

Already said I didn't care about that because it's out of my control. Non-sequitur responses taken as actual arguments hurt me though.

The arguement he was responding to was 'the game gets worse every patch', as a statement of fact.

He responded with 'player numbers are increasing'.

The implication there is that the former is one (or both) of two things:

1) Irrelevant, as 'good' does not mean 'profitable'.
2) Wrong, as people will play things they consider 'good'.


It's also worth noting that multiple devs have said multiple times that the primary balance work for the game, including breaking new ideas and testing, is done in SP, with office multiplayer being supplemental. But that gets ignored ALL THE TIME, because it's not convenient to the narrative that certain people want to make for themselves.

I suppose the implication is itself an argument that I missed seeing but it's still kind of bad. I mean /everyone/ knows Call of Duty is an absolute terrible game this is a joke because they release the same game over and over again this isn't a joke and look at all the players they get! A good game can have almost no players and a bad game can have lots, so it's a crap argument.

 

[Peachrocks]

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 don't take issue with the existence of bugs. It's an inevitability and I or anyone rational should accept that. I take issue with how bugs are prioritized.

Paradox has a track record of putting bugs that people like DDRJake find first even though there are many bugs such as vassals not converting provinces being present for more than six months which effects far more people than something that is extremely obviously an exploit, especially when this game has many features which some may very well define as an exploit and in many cases, it's not entirely clear whether it's an exploit or an intended feature. If this happened once or twice, it'd be 'fine whatever' but it has happened on numerous occasions.

Furthermore, I think bugs get an unfair blame for the patch notes which nerf how people want to play the game. Now granted, if the options these people were taking were no brainers and something every player must do to make progress with that nation then yeah, I'd get that, but removing manual exploration for instance making it more difficult for the likes of India and China to westernize in a good time frame, yeah that's not so good, especially when other options are very viable too (and honestly better). This isn't strictly speaking relevant mind you, but it's a misdirected source of hate towards bugs which just adds fuel to that particular fire.

Another source of fuel to the fire is the numerous changes that have no backing to anything the community asks for and come out of nowhere while things the community does ask for and largely agrees on get left out it's rare but it has happened a bit more as of late. Most recently, the change to looting is the most obvious 'why?' change, especially because it takes away a layer of strategy.

Most of all though a good deal of this could be prevented or at the very least an attempt could be made. Community testing is a thing these days. Many bugs or undocumented, unexpected features (such as no more manual exploration) that would otherwise miss the 'check list' get found this way and it doesn't cost Paradox anything other than giving a 'freebie' in the form of the product being tested to those people.

 

[Ilightmaster]

This all thread is a reminder on why we love the game +1




But we started to miss those betas. (if you catch what i mean ^^)

 

[stavro375]

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.

I've begun to suspect that Paradox somehow uploaded the wrong build on El Dorado's release day -- some really basic stuff, like Japan's 1444 start (it was the 1444 start, right?) and the HRE's Privilegia were completely broken, but the fix was released literally the next day. Surely the dev cycle isn't fast enough for changes like that to be made so quickly?

 

[Desertfox]

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

If you have only one professional QA person, then yes that one person can't test it all.

However, some game companies have a group of volunteer beta testers that test new patches before they are sent out to all the users.
Blizzard is such a company. They implement their World of Warcraft patches on a test server, let a small group of volunteer players
play and report bugs for a while, before sending the patch to all the users.

Over the years, I have played WoW on and off for many patches, and can't remember encountering any major bug that would hinder normal gameplay other than the occasional minor graphical glitch or the results of server overload. My WoW character got stuck in the scenery maybe two or three times over many hundreds of hours played but that was easily fixed by teleporting out and did not repeat itself.

Programmer time to actually fix bugs may be a bottleneck, but QA/testing doesn't have to be.

Selling games and DLC's that as a rule are severely bugged on the day they come out is the biggest stain on the reputation of Paradox. Players who buy several Paradox games quickly learn that it is better to wait at least a year before buying or playing a new Paradox game.

 

[Saintlukas]

If you have one professional QA person, then yes that one person can't test it all.
However, some game companies have a group of volunteer beta testers that test new patches before they are sent out to all the users.
Blizzard is such a company. They implement their World of Warcraft patches on a test server, let a small group of volunteer players
play and report bugs for a while,
before sending the patch to all the users. Over the years, I have played WoW on and off for many patches, and can't remember
encountering any serious bug that would hinder normal gameplay other than the occasional minor graphical glitch or the results of
server overload.

Programmer time to actually fix bugs may be a bottleneck, but QA/testing doesn't have to be.

comparing blizzard to paradox feels a bit like.... Compared construction companies to Joe the Carpenter

 

[leadshooter69]

So what changed in the last year that they finally fixed it now?

Just now, in over a year, they had enough time to fix it? And didn't have enough time to fix it for patch 1.9, which was specifically released to fix these kinds of bugs?

And if they had time to fix such a low priority bug, why didn't they also fix this one (http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...on-to-annex-Berar-targets-Brabant-s-provinces) which I reported around the same time as my last bump to the refinery one, and is just as easy to fix? I guess these kinds of bugs need to be around for over a year before the developers can take enough time to fix them.

Put you self in their shoes, I am a developer so I can help (though I'm sure paradox works at least somewhat different than my company).

You are working on a cool new feature for the next DLC/patch. You are putting a lot of thought into that new feature such as how to make it work, how to make it better, how to fix a major bug with it that popped up, etc. Do you stop everything to fix a new player reported bug? Unless its a critical bug probably not as you would lose your train of thought everytime a bug popped up. If you did fix every reported bug, that new feature is now going to take longer to make. This is because you not only took time to fix the bug but now you have to take time to remember all the little details of what you where working on before. If this happens a lot then that feature will never get done in a reasonable amount of time, if at all.

What you hopefully do is make a note of the bug to fix later.

While some of the bugs might be fixed by developers when they aren't working on something else, they do build up over time. Paradox might even have a developer or team of developers devoted to fixing the bugs, but the bugs will still build up. For patch 1.9 they probably fixed as many bugs as they could, but there will always be more bugs.

Just look at the bug subforum to get an idea of how many bugs there are.

Some of the unfixed reported bugs are still relevant months later but a lot might not be anymore, whether unintentionally fixed by something else, being a part of a no longer used system or something else. Do you check to see if a bug reported months and months ago is still relevant and fix it? Sometimes but not always and some unfortunately do fall through the cracks since there are so many. If it gets re-reported then it gets another swing at being noticed and fixed, like how when you bumped the first reported bug after a year and they fixed it.

Paradox is still a company and even if they hired enough developers to fix every reported bug by the next patch, the developers time would be better spend creating new features to bring in more money. Bug fixing and new features are competing for the same resources (developers) and they have to find a good balance between the two. I think they have done a pretty good job at finding that balance, maybe not perfect but perfection is hard to achieve.

 

[AurochsAway]

I've begun to suspect that Paradox somehow uploaded the wrong build on El Dorado's release day -- some really basic stuff, like Japan's 1444 start (it was the 1444 start, right?) and the HRE's Privilegia were completely broken, but the fix was released literally the next day. Surely the dev cycle isn't fast enough for changes like that to be made so quickly?

Fixing Japan was probably just one number in the code somewhere, which someone probably changed and tested. HRE Privilegia would've been harder though, but I imagine it wouldn't be that hard. It's not like a larger patch where they change a lot behind the scenes.

 

[leadshooter69]

I've begun to suspect that Paradox somehow uploaded the wrong build on El Dorado's release day -- some really basic stuff, like Japan's 1444 start (it was the 1444 start, right?) and the HRE's Privilegia were completely broken, but the fix was released literally the next day. Surely the dev cycle isn't fast enough for changes like that to be made so quickly?

They might have done the check list testing for Japan/the HRE earlier, made a late change to liberty desire, then missed it because they didn't fully test the systems afterwards. The liberty desire is very new and Japan/the HRE might not have been a problem before so they could have not thought to check them after making the change.

 

[Desertfox]

comparing blizzard to paradox feels a bit like.... Compared construction companies to Joe the Carpenter

It is not a matter of size, it is a matter of how you organize things. Sending a potentially bugged patch to a small number of users first for feedback is a superior choice than sending it to all users at once.

 

[Marox]

It is not a matter of size, it is a matter of how you organize things. Sending a potentially bugged patch to a small number of users first for feedback is a superior choice than sending it to all users at once.

I know CCP has a test server for EvE Online, so I guess that can be used as a smaller size example. However, this only seems to be a thing that mmos do so would it be different for a regular game?

 

[Golladan]

Put you self in their shoes, I am a developer so I can help (though I'm sure paradox works at least somewhat different than my company).

You are working on a cool new feature for the next DLC/patch. You are putting a lot of thought into that new feature such as how to make it work, how to make it better, how to fix a major bug with it that popped up, etc. Do you stop everything to fix a new player reported bug? Unless its a critical bug probably not as you would lose your train of thought everytime a bug popped up. If you did fix every reported bug, that new feature is now going to take longer to make. This is because you not only took time to fix the bug but now you have to take time to remember all the little details of what you where working on before. If this happens a lot then that feature will never get done in a reasonable amount of time, if at all.

What you hopefully do is make a note of the bug to fix later.

While some of the bugs might be fixed by developers when they aren't working on something else, they do build up over time. Paradox might even have a developer or team of developers devoted to fixing the bugs, but the bugs will still build up. For patch 1.9 they probably fixed as many bugs as they could, but there will always be more bugs.

Just look at the bug subforum to get an idea of how many bugs there are.

Some of the unfixed reported bugs are still relevant months later but a lot might not be anymore, whether unintentionally fixed by something else, being a part of a no longer used system or something else. Do you check to see if a bug reported months and months ago is still relevant and fix it? Sometimes but not always and some unfortunately do fall through the cracks since there are so many. If it gets re-reported then it gets another swing at being noticed and fixed, like how when you bumped the first reported bug after a year and they fixed it.

Paradox is still a company and even if they hired enough developers to fix every reported bug by the next patch, the developers time would be better spend creating new features to bring in more money. Bug fixing and new features are competing for the same resources (developers) and they have to find a good balance between the two. I think they have done a pretty good job at finding that balance, maybe not perfect but perfection is hard to achieve.

That really depends on how they're organized and internal communication. Which I think is where their failing is coming from. It's not like Paradox has only 1 developer that does everything. Paradox has a couple of developers that are credited as "scripting and research" and these are usually the ones that come up with the events. I think these are the ones that should handle the fixing of bugs like the mission one pointed above.

But at the same time those scripters should make sure that the events they implement can, at the very least, trigger.

Did you know that when El Dorado was released there were a bunch of Exploration and Seven Cities events that couldn't trigger because they were using improper triggers? The exploration ones have already been fixed. But the Seven Cities ones are still broken. In the modding sub-forum there is a player-developed tool that catches such errors. Surely Paradox has something similar. I know the tool isn't perfect and will not catch every error in events (for example there is currently an event that checks if your capital is in almost every continent at the same time, so it can't trigger), but it will catch a lot of them.

They might have done the check list testing for Japan/the HRE earlier, made a late change to liberty desire, then missed it because they didn't fully test the systems afterwards. The liberty desire is very new and Japan/the HRE might not have been a problem before so they could have not thought to check them after making the change.

According to Wiz, the HRE thing was supposed to have been implemented but missed release. And the Japan thing was tested and working when initially implemented but later the number were tweaked.

His exact words:

we'll change it so revoke privilegia vassals consider their LD individually to Emperor instead of collectively, and reduce LD on Daimyos.

Japan was tested and was fine at the time, but numbers were tweaked after the testing. In regards to privilegia, they were supposed to consider LD individually, but it didn't make into patch.

In the case of the HRE issue, what happened there? Did they forget about it until they were reminded by the release? When the LD mechanic was mentioned in the developer diary, within hours people asked how this would affect the HRE once privilegia was revoked. And Wiz was active in that thread at the time. It can't have been a case of priority if they rush to fix it the day after release.

And with Japan, when the numbers were tweaked, were the testers not informed? That seems like the logical thing to do when you change something.

It is not a matter of size, it is a matter of how you organize things. Sending a potentially bugged patch to a small number of users first for feedback is a superior choice than sending it to all users at once.

Paradox has a group of beta testers that are a part of this very community. You may know some of them yourself.
El Dorado:

§BETA TESTERS
Mikael Hagman
Djordje Zivanovic
Keith Bennett
Alexander Keül
Bernd Wolters
Francesco Teruzzi
Yoshihiko Hayashi
Guillaume Hébert-Jodoin
James Roughton
Cyril Achcar
Thomas Perkins
Raphael Silnicki
Guðmundur Steinar Jónsson
Ali Alper Duman
Anthony Seekatz
Tuomas Tirronen
Rajeev D. Majumda
Nicolas Fouqué
Seyfullah Kaya

Art of War:

§BETA TESTERS
Anthony Seekatz
Francesco Teruzzi
Bill Whelan
Seyfullah Kaya
Tom Perkins
Anton Panas
Djordje Zivanovic
Bernd Wolters
Mario Zadravec
Guillaume Hébert-Jodoin
Rune Vestergaard Borrits
Stephen Adams
Can Ömer Türk
Søren Toft
Alexander Keül
Dieter 't Mannetje
Richter Sundeen
Markus Grebe
Andrew Feeney-Seale
Lukasz Damentko
Yoshihiko Hayashi
Rajeev D. Majumdar
Zi YE
Benjamin Hill
Tuomas Tirronen
Raphael Silnicki
Jakub Mozgawa
Patrick Haberlag
Michael Niezgoda
Christopher Lee
David Hazlett
James Roughton
Ali Alper Duman
Nicolas Fouqué
Utku Aydin

 

[DarkCruor]

Who was it in one of the olden Paradox streams said that the Q&A team weren't exactly the best players!? (I think this was during one of the HoI3 or CK2 streams lol. I think it was Johann himself or was it Jakob?)

You better watch out in the MP matches!

 

[leadshooter69]

That really depends on how they're organized and internal communication. Which I think is where their failing is coming from. It's not like Paradox has only 1 developer that does everything. Paradox has a couple of developers that are credited as "scripting and research" and these are usually the ones that come up with the events. I think these are the ones that should handle the fixing of bugs like the mission one pointed above.

The thing is that the "scripting and research" guys still have new features to build out. Even if it is their responsibility to fix the bugs they still don't have time to fix ever minor bug that pops up, when they pop up. Internal communication could be an issue and if it is I hope that they are working to make it better.

But at the same time those scripters should make sure that the events they implement can, at the very least, trigger.

Did you know that when El Dorado was released there were a bunch of Exploration and Seven Cities events that couldn't trigger because they were using improper triggers? The exploration ones have already been fixed. But the Seven Cities ones are still broken. In the modding sub-forum there is a player-developed tool that catches such errors. Surely Paradox has something similar. I know the tool isn't perfect and will not catch every error in events (for example there is currently an event that checks if your capital is in almost every continent at the same time, so it can't trigger), but it will catch a lot of them.

I really do hope that they have tools to test their events. If not.... *shivers*. I am curious about the improper triggers, could you tell me more about it?

According to Wiz, the HRE thing was supposed to have been implemented but missed release. And the Japan thing was tested and working when initially implemented but later the number were tweaked.

In the case of the HRE issue, what happened there? Did they forget about it until they were reminded by the release? When the LD mechanic was mentioned in the developer diary, within hours people asked how this would affect the HRE once privilegia was revoked. And Wiz was active in that thread at the time. It can't have been a case of priority if they rush to fix it the day after release.

And with Japan, when the numbers were tweaked, were the testers not informed? That seems like the logical thing to do when you change something.

The HRE/Japan bugs were definitely a boner on their part but at least it was hot fixed pretty fast. I hope they learned from it to reduce the chance of similar stuff in the future.

 

[baizen]

Art of War:

§BETA TESTERS

Christopher Lee

Christopher Lee as in Saruman Christopher Lee? :O

(so related to the discussion...)

 

[Golladan]

The thing is that the "scripting and research" guys still have new features to build out. Even if it is their responsibility to fix the bugs they still don't have time to fix ever minor bug that pops up, when they pop up. Internal communication could be an issue and if it is I hope that they are working to make it better.

I really do hope that they have tools to test their events. If not.... *shivers*. I am curious about the improper triggers, could you tell me more about it?

Although if they use a tool like the validator in the first place, many of those bugs wouldn't make it to the testers. Of course they will still be those that a tool like that won't catch.

The exploration and 7 cities events are primarily province events. So the triggers should be those that work in a province scope. Many of them are supposed to check for the tech group of the owner of the province. And that trigger is a country scope trigger. But the events aren't switching scope, so they're checking the tech group of the province, which just doesn't work.

One of the biggest offender is province event seven_cities_events.308, which has this for trigger:

		OR = {
			AND = {
				is_empty = no
				technology_group = sub_saharan
				technology_group = north_american
				technology_group = mesoamerican
				technology_group = south_american
				technology_group = andean
			}
			is_empty = yes
		}

So it's checking whether the province is empty, or the province is owned and is all of those tech groups at the same time. The proper way should be:

		OR = {
			AND = {
				is_empty = no
				owner = {
					OR = {
						technology_group = sub_saharan
						technology_group = north_american
						technology_group = mesoamerican
						technology_group = south_american
						technology_group = andean
					}
				]
			}
			is_empty = yes
		}

The province is empty, or the province is owned and its owner is one of those tech groups.

Event seven_cities_events.410 wants to trigger events 411 or 412 as one of its options. Events 411 and 412 do not exist.

Those are just some examples. Those errors the validator can catch.

I've done my fair share of modding for VeF. And my general practice is that when I add something, I check that it doesn't create any errors in the error log and run it through the validator to find errors before I send it off to the testers.

The HRE/Japan bugs were definitely a boner on their part but at least it was hot fixed pretty fast. I hope they learned from it to reduce the chance of similar stuff in the future.

Hopefully. But I won't get my hopes up too much.

I've done some testing myself. So I know that to expect a bug free game is asking too much. I know that MMOs tend to have big bugs that can only appear once the servers are loaded with people. I know that internal testing finds significantly more bugs that ever make it out to the public. I know there will be obscure bugs that will only show up once thousands of people get their hands on the game or that require someone like DDRJake or Arumba to discover.

But there are some bugs that I just cannot forgive. Those where you actually have a program that will tell you there is something wrong, what, and where. Those where you implement something and you have to know it's going to affect something in a big way (HRE LD one, and Japan). Those that you will run across by literarilly starting up the game and checking x feature or just playing it (Japan, many of the custom nation bugs like Europe not getting trade goods properly in custom setup, the broken consolidate regiment button, etc).

 

[birincikalite]

Weird how player numbers keep increasing. People sure must hate fun!

Would you mind sharing the numbers any time soon?

 

[spinoza013]

Who was it in one of the olden Paradox streams said that the Q&A team weren't exactly the best players!? (I think this was during one of the HoI3 or CK2 streams lol. I think it was Johann himself or was it Jakob?)

You better watch out in the MP matches!

DDRJake admits he's not great at MP.

 

[LastSalian]

I'd rather Paradox concentrate on single player game balance and making the game FUN again, instead of caring about some kid that can find exploits that do not affect me. All they seem to care about these days is MP exploit fixing.

More loss of fun after each patch, cannot expand my nation in single player due to multiplayer people complaining, cannot explore the planet anymore using ships due to... I have no idea... still so many ai issues, but they do not care because they only play MP and see youtubers.

EU4 used to be fun, until 3-4 months after release, then the game balance for MP only and the pointless exploits from youtubers that is forced on single player users has ruined everything. Guess I have to just hope HOI is fun on release, I have given up on EU.

+1.

Hadn't played the game in ages and decided to try it out again after like ~4 patches. The game is more Waitersalis than ever. In my Japan game as a Damyo, as soon as I started a war, the 80% of the other Damyos joined the defendant side against me; however, I couldn't take ally anyone due to the offensive war malus. RQ.

Later tried as the Emperor. Fast forward to be able to annex my vasals. I annex some. Then I discovered that my newly annexed provinces have more autonomy than those conquered from Ainu. Wow. No worries, I just decrease autonomy. Couple of year later, peasant rebels. Good bye to my manpower. Ok, hire mercenaries. Get some provinces from Korea. Then the real fun begins, 2 Ainu rebel stacks of 10K and 11K in provinces with 1 base tax!. Defead those and then 3 peasant rebels show up again. Defeat those and 2 Korean rebels show up in the Korean provinces. My army is a stack of 13K, no manpower and 3 loans close to be due, so Korea decides is a good time to DOW me to get their provinces back. And I only annexed Ainu and took 3 provinces of Korea in 60 years to become such a mess. RQ.

Currently the game in SP is basically fast forward til you are sure you will not implode due to rebels. A LOT of artificial difficulty that is not balanced around the effort / reward equation. It's not about making WC possible with every nation including OPMs, but to make the SP experience agile and rewarding.

Back to the OP's topic , I'm glad DDRJake made it to get into PDX. I believe he is a SP guy, so if he happens to be part of the product design, we should expect good changes coming.

 

[Camtheman]

Yeah most balance changes seem to revolve around MP, which is laggy garbage for most connections, and I don't like playing on speed 2 or 3 all of the time.

50% idea group limit?

Clearly biased toward MP people taking 'too many' military ideas.

Exploration manualization?

Biased against early colonization, a nerf to both MP and SP.