I understand that people have been away and that everyone is entitled to their vacation, but you also have to understand that many people have been dealing with some of these issues for over six weeks. No one should have expected any meaningful information to come out the first week you were back, but I think it was a reasonable expectation to expect something substantial this past week. When that didn't happen, people started to vent their frustrations. It is a matter of opinion on whether you think the content in this past week's DD was substantial or not, but I personally do not believe it was.
If anything good comes from this thread, I hope Paradox at least considers dedicating a community manager to the game, at least on a temporary basis. It would take a lot of the burden off all the developers and let them focus on their work. They should absolutely still engage and participate in the forums, but they should not be obligated to or take the full wrath of the community when there is a hot issue. That is what the community manager is there for - to be the punching bag.
Anyway, just my opinion and general attempt to help out.
I do think it's great that developers read the forum, But, I second the suggestion of dedicating a community manager to the forums . They are a lot cheaper than developers and a good one can help synthesise the feedback.
My mentor taught the most important equation in life.
Satisfaction = Reality - Expectations. If expectations are too high you'll never be satisfied.
I had fairly high expectations for both Stellaris and HOI IV. Stellaris is nowhere close to what I expected the AI to be bad but is even worse than I imagined, and while the early game is fun the middle game is simply boring.
In contrast, HOI IV has actually exceeded my expectation. I didn't expect much from the AI, so I'm not too disappointed that while the tactical AI is competent that global AI is pretty bad.
At this point, HOI IV is what it is. I'm very much enjoying the game as sort of sandbox game. I'm not expecting the AI to provide much of a challenge. Players need to come to grips with what the game is and is likely to remain through this most of this year.
I'm delighted that you are providing the ability to buff individual country, especially because I specifically asked for it. I believe this feature combined with other things like not have the AI send 100 divisions to Africa or Denmark, better divisions builds will make it possible to setup fairly challenging single player games.
Of course, it will still be possible to exploit the broken systems of the game. But if you are playing the Japanese and realize that CL are the uber ship, then in makes no sense to both buffs the US and the UK, while only building CLs.
I do think it is important for Paradox and the community manager to set expectation properly. Players who are expecting HOI3 OOBs, features from HOI2, or Oil rules are simply going to be disappointed. On the other players who think that doing something about Oil or supplies in order to stop countries from deploying hundreds of understrength divisions have a legitimate complaint. The solution to the problem of small countries having way too many divisions may or may not involve oil, maintenance etc.
I'd suggest in the next couple of weeks, one the developer diaries summarize the feedback that you guys have gotten, and try and set expectations on what things should be improved in the short-term, what's likely to be addressed in the long-term and possibility with a DLC, and what isn't going to be changed. So people can start developing mods if that's what they want.
