Fix AI debt spiral / alliance issues. It's been broken for weeks, and it's gamebreaking.

[Silvanel]

I sympathise with this, but I think it has a number of problems. Mainly 1. I’m not sure I like the idea of people being made to postpone their holidays to fix a bug in a game and 2. It assumes that a week is time enough to find the problem (not just a bit of the problem, the whole problem), fix the problem and then make sure changing what might be some fairly critical AI logic hasn‘t actually broken a bunch of other stuff. Seems to me a recipe for making people wait a week for their holidays and then have to wait ages to fix it properly anyway...Could end up in a worst of both worlds situation. While that doesn’t make it a bad idea, it doesn’t make it an obviously great idea either.

I’m not sure a rushed bug fix for this is really in anyone’s best interest. A temporary sticking plaster if possible would certainly be appreciated. Some sort of official view on the scale of the problem and how they plan to address it would help a lot I feel.

Ah well, I’ve managed to get into a Football Manager game for the first time in years as a result...

See the reason i am so upset about this is that i also work in IT and i know that situation like that wouldnt be accpetable both for company i work for and our customers. Granted i work for automotive industry not gaming industry and our customers are corporate not individual people, so the relationship supllier-->customer is tottaly different. But that is exactly the essance of why i am upset. We can be treated like that because as individaul customers we do not have united front and enough power to force supplier to do anything. A corporate entity would have such power.

And while i symptize with the notion that people shouldnt have their holidays cancalled ( although this has happened to me few times) and i also do not blame developers for that i do think there was something seriously wrong with planning for Emperror release. The 1.30.0 as was realeased contained a lot of serious issues so was either undertested (issues not detected) or underdeveloped (issues detected but not fixed due to lack of resources).

And i would like to additionally stress that i do not blame developers for those problems. I blame:
-company as a whole ( so in essence managment for planning/resource allocation)
-myself for buying the product without considerations about its quality and complaining afterwards

 

[mc10]

And i would like to additionally stress that i do not blame developers for those problems. I blame:
-company as a whole ( so in essence managment for planning/resource allocation)
-myself for buying the product without considerations about its quality and complaining afterwards

I blame covid as well as those. Must have been an absurd amount of pressure to release it asap and PDX buckled. While I've been lucky and it hasn't hit me, the player base has been much larger this year (and much more vocal).

I do feel for the employees that need to communicate with the public though, especially the developers who have been wrongly receiving the brunt of the backlash.

 

[Leoreth]

That is a good point. I did not refund my DLC either.

In the end I don't think it's the clamoring of the public who totally cannot wait for the DLC and patch to come out (let's be real, people are clamoring for things to come out asap at all times) but rather that management knew that even if some players will be pissed off, they'd mostly still buy the product and not refund it. People complaining on the internet doesn't cost the company money (in the short to mid term, at least). I am pretty sure that keeping Emperor in a sales cycle that is reasonably far away from Crusader Kings 3 so they do not compete for customers and marketing attention was judged more valuable than the players who might be annoyed.

This isn't the first time that players have been burned by Paradox's insufficient QA and they have learned the lesson that their audience will still stick with them regardless. So the pressure on the people making the decisions to improve things is fairly low. I am not advocating for a boycott and saying that in the knowledge that I am part of the problem. But that is probably why things are the way they are.

 

[Mike1984]

Personally i am less bothered with the bug itself, than with company attitude. I mean there is major flaw with something they sold to us and they could not be bothered to postpone holidays for 1 week for 1-2 developers or hire outside help/move devs from other projects for a week before holidays and crunch bugs?
I mean i do not expect them to fix each and every one of existing bugs but major ones yes.

Sweden isn't the US, companies can't just set unrealistic schedules, fail to test their product properly and then demand that employees cancel their holidays to deal with the mess. And if you actually believe that "hiring outside help" or "moving developers from other projects" (assuming they're not also on holiday...) is a solution for speeding up a fix for a single bug that doesn't have an obvious solution, then you obviously know absolutely nothing about how software development works.

 

[Jesus was a communist]

I for one am properly annoyed at paradox.
I've brought pretty much every DLC since Common sense full price and most other games and DLC to. Never have I felt more like they couldn't care about the customer than after 1.30.
I won't be buying any more paradox games/dlc or paradox published games until they fix the product they sold and offer an apology.

 

[AlphaMikeOmega]

If anyone's interested in the history of EUIV's summer releases, here's some info:

Spoiler

1.30

Version	Release
1.30	2020/06/09
1.30.3	2020/06/23

1.22

Version	Release
1.22	2017/06/14
1.22.1	2017/06/20
1.22.2 open beta	2017/08/03
1.22.2	2017/08/17

1.13

Version	Release
1.13 open beta	2015/06/30
1.13 open beta (final hotfix)	2015/07/09
1.13	2015/08/27

1.7

Version	Release
1.7	2014/07/16
1.7.3	2014/07/31

1.1

Version	Release
1.1	2013/08/13

There is, therefore, precedent for holiday releases during early-, mid- and late-July.

 

[Silvanel]

Sweden isn't the US, companies can't just set unrealistic schedules, fail to test their product properly and then demand that employees cancel their holidays to deal with the mess. And if you actually believe that "hiring outside help" or "moving developers from other projects" (assuming they're not also on holiday...) is a solution for speeding up a fix for a single bug that doesn't have an obvious solution, then you obviously know absolutely nothing about how software development works.

I dont know about labour law in Sweden, however i can tell You this is not US thing, this kind of procedures are pretty normal even in EU. It is allowed in Germany, Poland, Romania, UK and probbaly many more countries in EU. I will also add that as i write that i am working on release of new software for our customer. It is Saturday morning in July.

Also i doubt this issue is as complicated as You claim. A poster in this very tread offered a crude solution to this issue ...

 

[Sunlg103]

I dont know about labour law in Sweden, however i can tell You this is not US thing, this kind of procedures are pretty normal even in EU. It is allowed in Germany, Poland, Romania, UK and probbaly many more countries in EU. I will also add that as i write that i am working on release of new software for our customer. It is Saturday morning in July.

Also i doubt this issue is as complicated as You claim. A poster in this very tread offered a crude solution to this issue ...

I dont know alot about the gaming industry but Swedish labour laws demand minimum of 5 weeks of holidays and atleast 2 of these weeks are allowed to be consecutive weeks of summer holidays and most people try to plan for most of these weeks during the summer and maybe use one of two for Christmas.

 

[Leckan]

Bug really is gamebreaking. Year 1556, if I check the "current wars" page in the ledger there are no wars in Europe atm apart from three small regional wars Ottomans are involved in (vs small Bosnia & Moldavia etc). Such a stalemate. 69 members of HRE exist atm, roughly 100 countries in Europe total. Have felt this "dull" in Europe now for the last 20 or so years. Until 10 years ago Austria (emperor) had no debt, but now it started stacking up quickly. France has stopped trying to push out England from the mainland even though France is strongest nation in the game, and it hasn't been involved in any decently sized land war in Europe for decades, it's only fighting some minor nations in Africa or the Americas sometimes.

 

[Mike1984]

I dont know about labour law in Sweden, however i can tell You this is not US thing, this kind of procedures are pretty normal even in EU. It is allowed in Germany, Poland, Romania, UK and probbaly many more countries in EU. I will also add that as i write that i am working on release of new software for our customer. It is Saturday morning in July.

How many of them allow companies to cancel the holidays of their employees because they set an unrealistic release schedule?

Also i doubt this issue is as complicated as You claim. A poster in this very tread offered a crude solution to this issue ...

Yeah, but Paradox aren't looking for a "crude solution". They're not gonna disable mercs or fundamentally change game mechanics because the AI is broken.

Any solution they come up with is probably going to need to be approved by the game designers, because it will impact behaviour in other areas. It's probably not something a single developer can fix on their own, especially without prior knowledge of the code.

 

[Delpheus]

I noticed this problem and how bad it is just now. I had hungary as a longtime ally since the start of the game, came to their defense against poland to secure that alliance and earned over 30 favors, but when I was attacked Hungary said F U and left me to die. only 700 debt for them but I think thats why.

 

[TheDeadeye]

How about before they go to a vacation a response just saying "we know, we will be working on it and hope to have something out in early August (or whenever).." Though, to be fair, that would probably be met with a bunch of unhappiness. But it would certainly be better than wondering if/when they are going to work on it.

yeah but PDX’s modus operandi has always been utter silence to major shit storms, followed by utter disbelief and denial of aforementioned shit storm and then finally only “selectively” responding and reacting to items (for a “better late than never” PR stunt) and drowning it with fluff, promises and off topic content....of course provided none of them fall during sacred Swedish vacation periods beginning, mid and end of a year.

 

[Mrkew]

The problem of the AI is that it's incapable of declaring bankruptcy. France won a big war against Spain. Spain has 2k debt from it, France has 12k. With the long truce and friendly relations with Burgundy, there is no disadvantage whatsoever to just declaring bankruptcy in this situation, but I don't think the AI will ever be smart enough.

 

[Ninaran]

I dont know about you guys, but its generally considered a bad idea to release a new product/update/etc right before you go on holiday. You dont see Microsoft going on holiday right after releasing a new windows version for example, or a data center right after moving all their servers. Companies usually schedule things so that all their staff is available to deal with any unforseen issues when something big happens.

I mean, imagine if your company just setup this new software for a bank that they use for millions of transactions a day, and then a month later the bank's CEO is calling you and going "hey, where are your guys? the new software keeps locking itself down and sending funds to the wrong accounts, this is a total nightmare." Are you going to tell him "sorry bro, everyone went on vacation, we will fix it when we get back".

Obviously we arent dealing with million dollar transactions here but the same principle still applies...i can tell you that in most countries, vacations would be getting cancelled if a major problem occured. I certaintly cannot imagine any manager or team leader in my life going "oh yea all our vacations are still on schedule, nevermind that we are getting like 5000 calls a day..."

A couple of years back, I was playing a MMORPG, they did a data center move, I dont know how they screwed it up (they were obviously not willing to give us any details), but they couldnt get the servers back up for 1-2 weeks, which is a huge issue for a MMO with subscriptions and all...but they had staff working over night in shifts to try and fix it which was the normal thing to do. Imagine the backlash they would have gotten if they had decided to go on vacation while this was happening...

You want to go on vacation, sure, so time the big product release so that there will be a team present to deal with stuff after the release...you dont time the big product release before everyone goes on holiday. Just imagine how Microsoft's board would react if you suggested that they should release a new version of windows and have everyone go on vacation a month later even if its got tons of bugs.

Why should Paradox care? It's not like we can just go to another GSG. There are none. Unlike with your examples. Why not release a broken mess, charge AAA prices and then go to the beach for a month while everything burns? Not like we have a choice to go anywhere else unless we want to stop playing that genre.

I mean, this isn't the first time. Veeery far from it. Especially if you look at all of their products, not just EU4. They do this all the time.

 

[Jesus was a communist]

Why should Paradox care? It's not like we can just go to another GSG. There are none. Unlike with your examples. Why not release a broken mess, charge AAA prices and then go to the beach for a month while everything burns? Not like we have a choice to go anywhere else unless we want to stop playing that genre.

I mean, this isn't the first time. Veeery far from it. Especially if you look at all of their products, not just EU4. They do this all the time.

It seems to be getting worse though. Eu4 patches always contained some bugs but I've been playing since Common sense and can't remember a patch this buggy or one that's taken this long to get it's major issues fixed.

Things have gotten slowly worse over the past year or 2. At some point they'll hit a braking point and people will stop trusting them.

I personally won't consider buying anything of them again after this mess.

 

[Atomcreator]

Like I promised. This is staying visible until someone at paradox addresses it.

 

[Hootieleece]

I think they are already working on the next patch. The Dev Diaries we had this month don't give me hope that they will create another version of this patch.

 

[delpiero1234]

Things have gotten slowly worse over the past year or 2. At some point they'll hit a braking point and people will stop trusting them.

I personally won't consider buying anything of them again after this mess.

Well said. I already learned this lesson though and have not bought Emperor yet. Been playing EU IV since its release. Over the years the patches got buggier. Emperor's release version looked like a sloppy Alpha version. So many obvious bugs. If they fix the essential issues I'll consider buying the DLC at a sale in the future. Paradox as a game development studio and especially Johan lost my trust long time ago.

 

[grommile]

I think they are already working on the next patch. The Dev Diaries we had this month don't give me hope that they will create another version of this patch.

The dev diaries we had this month have no effect on my hope one way or the other, because they're by someone whose involvement in a potential 1.30.4 would be pretty much exactly zero anyway.

 

[Leckan]

There is a mod on the workshop called BetterAI by "blablaxx", that says the following:

Ahh the famous debt spiral we got used to from the 1.30.X patch. This mod will mostly fix it! For real. Due to nations' focus on debt payback and overall creating a vastly more robust nation you will see the AI bouncing back from various situations or just being able to support insane amounts of troops. Example: Average ottomans supporting 300k+ troops with 250+ income in 1600. Without Quantity ideas picked. Yes. Additional fancy bonus is the AI declaring bankruptcy (if necessary) right after a hefty war in a safely manner to prevent paying back debt endlessly. Not my implementation, but it is more pronounced due to this mod!

Has anyone tried this mod, or could anyone create a separate bug fix mod from it (Blablaxx says it's free to use material as long as you reference him). Or does anyone know what the source is, because Blablaxx says about the debt spiral fix "Not my implementation"?