Forum rage

[Feeblezak]

I didn’t even know what any of this was about so i checked Leviathan on Steam.

I don’t think i’ve ever seen a rating that bad.

 

[general_nabo]

We, as costumers, can't speculate about the organization of a company. We can make 2 things:
- speak with the company giving them our RESPECTFUL point of view.
- decide if to buy or not to buy their product depending on the quality of their product.

But we can't speculate or insult them.

 

[Leinad965]

I stand corrected on that point then, but still, 57% is barely positive. I wouldn't brag to my friends and family about getting 57% on a test. Anyway, I still love the devs. I just wish that they could get the proper support they needed to truly release their ideas in the state in which they were intended to go out to the customers.

DLC reviews on Steam are heavily misleading. Lot of the comments are to the patch, not to the DLC mechanics. And a lot of down votes are about pricing, where reviewer checks the price and say, "it should cost <insert price/2>" or "it should be in base game for free" and ticks downvote. So always base game has higher rating than DLCs.


Edit: Slightly diffent it is for Imperator. DLC of Epirus does not work well with Imperator 2.0 update (Epirus cannot lead army, missions wants to help nations which are already consumed by Rome, difficulty is different than presented, ...), but it has very positive reviews with comments with "fair price", "free for preorders" and "Imperator is increasingly shaping up to be a solid paradox game"

 

[podcat]

I posted some thoughts around the article on reddit yesterday so might as well repost here:

1. Its a bit unfortunate that stuff gets mixed up with our dev diary notes and responses to Leviathan and other games because it muddies the water a lot when trying to discuss the problems. What happened on HOI is that we had a lot of feedback on the second part of the Poland diary. Some of it was because we failed to explain how some stuff worked, some of it was good feedback which are are looking into fixing, but a lot of it was phrased in really horrible ways to devs which makes people wonder "is it worth wading through this feedback to find the important stuff?". If you want to be heard a good way is not to start by insulting the other side - its human nature, and devs are human beings.
   This doesn't mean that its trying to downplay people not being happy with a release or say that negative feedback is toxic etc.
2. I think its sadly like this because we have lost some trust. Not to make excuses but its harder and harder to communicate well when the community is so big and a lot of us are used to get pretty personal when we talk to fans. Its very easy to get angry instead of constructive when you dont see the other person as a fellow gamer. I would absolutely not place the blame on devs or on fans - in fact both sides are at fault when communication doesn't work out. We need to talk openly, and you need to be constructive and remember that we are people too. When either of those things don't happen stuff breaks.
3. I am also aware that talk is cheap if not backed by action, but it doesnt mean that open communication arent import. As a dev its easy to forget this and go "shit I gotto fix this", and buckle up and do that. And of course fans assume you arent actually doing that because you didnt communicate Its a difficult balance to get right and would be easier if both sides were less willing to attribute malice when its usually simple fuckups i saw the other thread here with people saying we had DLC locked a portrait for spain to make money or something when in fact we had a typo in the name of the portrait etc... but yeah this happens because we dont talk enough for you guys to trust us
4. While I'm at it, I also wanna highlight that we make these games for ourselves and with a community this big (we are close to mainstream on hoi somehow) there will always be people who do not like the direction you go. On hoi especially there is pretty clear dividing lines between hardcore history-only fans and people who play mainly for alt history and it always has been. We think focus trees is a good way to give something to both sides with choices and its a bit frustrating when people think that add X somehow affects the game for people who dont like that part. If you dont like a path personally, there is usually another 5 choices to pick from.

 

[Kosaki MacTavish]

I posted some thoughts around the article on reddit yesterday so might as well repost here:

1. Its a bit unfortunate that stuff gets mixed up with our dev diary notes and responses to Leviathan and other games because it muddies the water a lot when trying to discuss the problems. What happened on HOI is that we had a lot of feedback on the second part of the Poland diary. Some of it was because we failed to explain how some stuff worked, some of it was good feedback which are are looking into fixing, but a lot of it was phrased in really horrible ways to devs which makes people wonder "is it worth wading through this feedback to find the important stuff?". If you want to be heard a good way is not to start by insulting the other side - its human nature, and devs are human beings.
   This doesn't mean that its trying to downplay people not being happy with a release or say that negative feedback is toxic etc.
2. I think its sadly like this because we have lost some trust. Not to make excuses but its harder and harder to communicate well when the community is so big and a lot of us are used to get pretty personal when we talk to fans. Its very easy to get angry instead of constructive when you don't see the other person as a fellow gamer. I would absolutely not place the blame on devs or on fans - in fact both sides are at fault when communication doesn't work out. We need to talk openly, and you need to be constructive and remember that we are people too. When either of those things don't happen stuff breaks.
3. I am also aware that talk is cheap if not backed by action, but it doesn't mean that open communication aren't important. As a dev its easy to forget this and go "shit I gotto fix this", and buckle up and do that. And of course fans assume you aren't actually doing that because you didn't communicate Its a difficult balance to get right and would be easier if both sides were less willing to attribute malice when its usually simple fuckups i saw the other thread here with people saying we had DLC locked a portrait for Spain to make money or something when in fact we had a typo in the name of the portrait etc... but yeah this happens because we don't talk enough for you guys to trust us
4. While I'm at it, I also wanna highlight that we make these games for ourselves and with a community this big (we are close to mainstream on hoi somehow) there will always be people who do not like the direction you go. On hoi especially there is pretty clear dividing lines between hardcore history-only fans and people who play mainly for alt history and it always has been. We think focus trees is a good way to give something to both sides with choices and its a bit frustrating when people think that add X somehow affects the game for people who dont like that part. If you dont like a path personally, there is usually another 5 choices to pick from.

Would never tired to reiterate again, Dan.

You and your team are good devs who did your best to make great games for us all these years, and i thanked you for that. It's just, well, your higher-ups who controls your team and your supply of resources and managing developers can sometimes are a bit annoying with their priority between improving the existing games and creating new ones.

For me personally, when the company are making so much money with a bit bugged games (HoI4 provides 1/5 of PDx's revenue in 2019), sacrifice some money to fixing it would pay off much better in the long run than leaving off as it is and instead gambles in form of creating an entirely new franchise. That way, more people would love to buy the unbugged games, and in turn more money for the company to create new games.

And with such a heavy workload for your guys, to both fixing the existing bugs, creating new high-quality contents for us, and also reworking old contents, the company must lend a hand for you in form of more resources and more devs. Share the burden so the stress can be lessened, especially in these trying times. I'm in no way competent enough to be one of the devs, even i put my SFNR mod on a hiatus because of my college life. But i still trying my best to provide support, constructive criticism, and a plausible suggestions to make HoI4 spicier because i love playing the game as a form of relieving stress from college life, and i would more than happy to help you all as a fan to build the game in our intended way.

Again, don't afraid to ask the company for more content designers, tech designers, programmers, and artists. In an example from a very well-known film (rats aside), L*nguini and C*llette can't cook enough food for their customers, so more helping hands is a logical solution for such big task.

 

[batata1]

Looks like even Podcat has quit buying Paradox DLC

 

[podcat]

You and your team are good devs who did your best to make great games for us all these years, and i thanked you for that. It's just, well, your higher-ups who controls your team and your supply of resources and managing developers can sometimes are a bit annoying with their priority between improving the existing games and creating new ones.

I know you mean well but the "evil bosses" cliche needs to go. I know its an attractive thing to cling to but without knowing how a company works it can be very misdirecting. If the hoi team releases a buggy release that is ultimately my fault because I am responsible for hoi4. Do people ask me if we can make more money? yes of course its a business ;D but if I would ever get overruled and told to release something I havent signed off on I wouldnt be working here.
We, and all teams at PDS, are always trying to hire and its super hard to find good people, especially during COVID, and also often more manpower doesnt make stuff go faster or better, its a common fallacy.

Looks like even Podcat has quit buying Paradox DLC
View attachment 713247

Someone reminded me i get them for free ;P

 

[general_nabo]

For me is very simple, paradox made not just games but pieces of ART. This games are very complicated to create. There will be bugs always. But they don't sell you cheap jewelry, they sell a diamond that polish trought the time, that's why i dont care about bugs in the beggining because i know they will fix eventually. Is a matter of time. If some day a game is bugged as hell and i see that paradox don't care about it my romance with paradox will be over. But nowadays is a girlfriend that only give me good moments. So don't cry. Communication is key.

 

[Kosaki MacTavish]

and also often more manpower doesnt make stuff go faster or better, its a common fallacy.

Well, Gab told us this:

I really wanted flamethrowers to give bonuses to fort attack and urban fighting, but unfortunately the way terrain modifiers work is very much tied to subunits on the code side. I pushed pretty hard on this, but when every day of code work uncovers three more days of code work that needs to be done, sacrifices must be made before they endanger the entire feature.

Codeworking is for the programmers, right? Let's see how many worked for them in past two DLCs... only 8 (including you). And even less for content designers, which is 6 (Gab, Meka, Buzz and other 3). But unless you guys actually has 15 content designers working for Barbarossa including my guy, then i would be a bit relieved.

And you already told us that you have listed the suggestions from us in past 5 weeks (for this patch alone), but have limited time to implement them unless you all burdened yourselves heavily. In my view, you clearly needs more men to help implement that. But well, you do you, you are the game designer (and one of the 8 programmers) after all....

Thanks for listening, anyway. I only hope your stress can be relieved a bit.

 

[XYN]

Well, Gab told us this:

Codeworking is for the programmers, right? Let's see how many worked for them in past two DLCs... only 8 (including you). And even less for content designers, which is 6 (Gab, Meka, Buzz and other 3). But unless you guys actually has 15 content designers working for Barbarossa including my guy, then i would be a bit relieved.

And you already told us that you have listed the suggestions from us in past 5 weeks (for this patch alone), but have limited time to implement them unless you all burdened yourselves heavily. In my view, you clearly needs more men to help implement that.

Thanks for listening, anyway. I only hope your stress can be relieved a bit.

Adding programmers can be tricky. With every programmer added, the added costs of communication harm their individual efficiency, because every additional programmer is not an autonomous unit unless his job is very narrow and self-contained.

"Only" 8 can be quite a lot. I doubt that PDX games are such massive, uhm, leviathans, as players portray - throwing more programmers at them might do more harm than good.

 

[Kosaki MacTavish]

Only 8 can be quite a lot. I don't think PDX games are such massive, uhm, leviathans, as players portray - throwing more programmers on them might do more harm than good.

Fair enough, but then again, there is time constraints, and double task to fix existing bugs and creating new contents (preferably without additional bugs). Achieving those two (preferably three) within the time constraints are surely hard, i do not want to overestimate the capacity of any programmers here, unlike some of my fellow Indonesians who wants to hire a programmer who can do bajillion things that better suited for a supercomputer.

 

[Simon_9732495]

For me personally, when the company are making so much money with a bit bugged games (HoI4 provides 1/5 of PDx's revenue in 2019), sacrifice some money to fixing it would pay off much better in the long run than leaving off as it is and instead gambles in form of creating an entirely new franchise. That way, more people would love to buy the unbugged games, and in turn more money for the company to create new games.

Business decisions are not easy.
As a reasonable business owner that cares for his employees, you want to create a sustainable profit to be still able to pay the wages for your people in 10 years.
To be able to do this you have to decide what to do with the profits today.
Investing in only one game that runs good today, would be putting all eggs in one basket...
Diversifying investments might be a good idea... But not too much of course...

Do you know enough about the business figures of PDX to judge that?

 

[Kosaki MacTavish]

Do you know enough about the business figures of PDX to judge that?

*looking at a certain game that has... a bit of problem... just recently

Yeah.

Diversifying investments might be a good idea... But not too much of course...

Already too much if i can say....

 

[cotne22]

Investing in only one game that runs good today, would be putting all eggs in one basket...
Diversifying investments might be a good idea... But not too much of course...

Considering what they did to imperator, it feels like they're doing neither and both at the same time.

 

[podcat]

"Only" 8 can be quite a lot. I doubt that PDX games are such massive, uhm, leviathans, as players portray - throwing more programmers at them might do more harm than good.

I am not gonna comment on the numbers and whos working on what other than to say that its all wrong but I do wanna say that 8 programmers is A LOT. HOI4 base game was made primarily by 3 programmers even if a lot of ppl chipped in towards the end on various bits

 

[Kosaki MacTavish]

I am not gonna comment on the numbers and whos working on what other than to say that its all wrong but I do wanna say that 8 programmers is A LOT. HOI4 base game was made primarily by 3 programmers even if a lot of ppl chipped in towards the end on various bits

Ah well, you do you..... Would love to have a chat with one of the content designer some time...

But well, for another time. Now it's time to appreciate Gab's work. I'll pin a screenshoot later from that game.

 

[XYN]

I am not gonna comment on the numbers and whos working on what other than to say that its all wrong but I do wanna say that 8 programmers is A LOT. HOI4 base game was made primarily by 3 programmers even if a lot of ppl chipped in towards the end on various bits

Yeah thought as much.

For some reason it reminded me of the guy who thought that God told him to make a blessed operating system, so he made it alone.

 

[CraniumMuppet]

Well, Gab told us this:

Codeworking is for the programmers, right? Let's see how many worked for them in past two DLCs... only 8 (including you). And even less for content designers, which is 6 (Gab, Meka, Buzz and other 3). But unless you guys actually has 15 content designers working for Barbarossa including my guy, then i would be a bit relieved.

And you already told us that you have listed the suggestions from us in past 5 weeks (for this patch alone), but have limited time to implement them unless you all burdened yourselves heavily. In my view, you clearly needs more men to help implement that. But well, you do you, you are the game designer (and one of the 8 programmers) after all....

Thanks for listening, anyway. I only hope your stress can be relieved a bit.

I have seen very different quotes about how many people working on the team there are, and no one has ever been within the 50% percentile of being right.

Only throwing numbers at a problem is also a fallacy. Yes there is a point where understaffing becomes a serious problem and adding more people does indeed help, but that also comes with the caveat that those people need to be trained, gain experience with the code base and also work as a cohesive unit within the larger team. Programmers need to work effectively with Design, QA, Content design, UX and Artists to deliver a whole. There is also a critical mass where overstaffing becomes an issue and you get into "bloat" territory.

Every project in the history has a problem of priorities and if every solution was "throw more bodies at it" we would see that method being employed more frequently. As an example of this, think about how 5 Mils in HoI4 with full efficiency might produce as much equipment as 10 with no efficiency. Its a metaphor to be sure but what I am trying to say is that "its always more complicated".

I think its in human nature to assign blame to "understaffing", or "bad managers" or "bad business execs" because its easy. Its nice to have a scapegoat, hell its also easy to blame QA because then you have the mindset of "only if they fixed X specific issue this would all be fine" whereas the truth is that often more complex and requires a holistic view, which of course you can't if you are just a bystander and don't have insider knowledge.

An example of this is a recent popular thread about Jose Diaz missing. Now I did check and I did report this back in 2020, so why wasn't this fixed you ask? From a consumer POV its easy to assign blame to QA since we missed it, but we did not. Ok, so was it the content designers who did not fix it? No, because they were probably knee deep in other fixes and somewhere along the line it was missed.

What we (specifically I) should have done is to communicate better that this is an important fix, and pushed more for its inclusion. I should have communicated better with my peers about what is important and why, but in this case its not an issue of manpower, its an issue about communication. My point is not to assign blame to anyone, my point is that when you look at it from your POV, it might be easy to assign blame to either QA or CD's, but the truth, and the fix is more complicated and requires changes to how we as developers communicate with each other. Of course sometimes we miss stuff, thats just human, but the stuff I see that no one else see (look at my tank designs from the tank diary ;D )

This is something that has gotten very hard as of late with Corona, but we have taken strides and efforts to increase communications with each other, despite it being hard doing so.

Now, with all that being said its not like we are perfect. I love HoI and I love working with the team, and I love working on something that gives people joy, but that also means that developers are also the most critical of their own work. I just feel that whenever people post here its easy to assign blame to X or Y, but there is always a boarder context that you do not see, and maybe we should talk about it more?

I dont know, I dont have all the answers, but its just my perspective.

 

[podcat]

An example of this is a recent popular thread about Jose Diaz missing. Now I did check and I did report this back in 2020, so why wasn't this fixed you ask? From a consumer POV its easy to assign blame to QA since we missed it, but we did not. Ok, so was it the content designers who did not fix it? No, because they were probably knee deep in other fixes and somewhere along the line it was missed.

For perspective also why this didnt get jumped in prio (age of a bug has no impact on prio generally)
- its not particularly gameplay critical. you can play fine, its just sucky with no portrait
- it applies to the (by far) less popular branch of spain. for people with no DLC. So the least popular part for people who dont like spain enough to buy the spain dlc
Remember when fixing one bug, you arent fixing another because time is linear
Reasons to prio it:
- after investigation it turned out to be simple
- it was pretty quick to solve and test

 

[Zauberelefant]

I don't support abuse of anyone, but for a company with $60m of annual profit to be publishing articles complaining about its customers is pretty ridiculous, especially when the abuse is on company run forums. It seems obvious they're trying to distract the conversation their botched DLC release of EU4 Leviathan.

It's well known that there is toxicity on the internet. Other companies suffer far worse (e.g. female journalists). They should be providing training for employees so that they are not surprised, or overly upset, by the inevitable small minority of abusive comments. If I were their boss I'd tell them not to care about anything on the forum except as a source for ideas. The way they know if they've done a good job or not is if the DLC sells and secondarily generates positive reviews on steam. What a tiny minority of forum users think is a long way down the list.

Wait, you are suggesting that Devs are not well trained enough to handle abuse and the internet is a bad place and others have it worse?

Have I missed the part were people abusing others, calling them names, sending death threats are just mean assholes and should be banhammered til the cows come home?

In my opinion, the problem with abuse is never the victim's soft heart, it's the abuser. Everyone has a choice how to voice their opinion, but no one is entitled to spew toxicity, especially about a Computer Game.
Take your business elsewhere, that's cool. Show the world your low standards, not cool.