For BBA, instead of Switzerland, why didn't the dev take this chance to revamp Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania?

[CraniumMuppet]

I am, there was a now-deleted thread in which the director said they had 5-6 members. However, he also said that we didn't have the context necessary to understand that number, so we should be mindful of that when talking about it.

That was people involved in patching at that point in time. Not the full team.

People always speculate how big the team is at any given point. I have never seen anyone come close to the real number at any given time.

The last "estimate" given as a fact for example that I read was off by an order of magnitude, so don't believe what most people on the internet tell you, for they are almost certainly wrong

 

[CraniumMuppet]

Sure would be nice if there was an actual person from the company on the forums that has the knowledge, so we wouldn't have to speculate...

The general public don't need that information. Even if I said how many you wouldn't get the right perspective.

If I say we have 5 QA testers (spoiler that's lot the true number) you wouldn't get any info about

1. Seniority
2. Personality
3. Speciality
4. Outsource or in house
5. Knowledge of the game
6. Knowledge of the project
7. Their current life situation
8. Their actual responsibilities
Etc.

Attributing a number and treating them as all being equal is what would happen if I gave people hard numbers. It's not something players should need to care about and frankly it's not something a company is usually willing to disclose, for good reason, because you would be missing the context. Same as Arheo said, context matters more than numbers.

 

[CraniumMuppet]

I'm sure that's all very interesting to a hiring person, but at the end of the day, they are human being hired to do work in a field they specialise in, putting in man-hours, and the whole "hoo hoo hee hee let's giggle at the forum people being wrong with their guesses again"

Wasn't intended as a "giggle". It started as a misunderstanding, I explained how the number related to one another. It comes up all the time in different discussions and about how big or how small the team is, and it leads to weird expectations and either an underestimation or overestimation about how game development works by boiling everything down to "the size of the team".

As for the rest of the your post I don't really have anything to say. You have the right to feel that way

 

[CraniumMuppet]

I seem to recall the devs posting telemetry showing minors were way more popular with the player base than people on the forum believed.
Same with difficulty settings, btw. It came as a genuine surprise to many here how many people played on the easiest difficulty setting.

HoI4 isn't a railroaded WWII game, it's a WWII-era sandbox game, the same way most PDX games are sandboxes. Content for minors like Switzerland wouldn't add much to War in the West, but it makes perfect sense in Hearts of Iron IV.

Minors v majors are almost an even split and has been converging over time iirc. So minors become more popular over time

People who play on >= veteran difficulty is around 2%