How to disable the "you must restart to play mulltiplayer" annoyance

[clockworkBabbag]

That shouldn't be Paradox's decision to make, even though they have the authority to do so. If you load up an invalid/incompatible Mod, the game will crash and you can load it again. There's no need to ham-handedly force all Mods that don't have a certain string in the Descriptor to not load. Many Mods are abandoned and will never be updated for the game. You'd be very surprised as to just how many Mods are claimed to be "incompatible", but aren't.

It's BS. Mods that harm the game can be turned off if they do.

You do realize that Paradox has received complaints from people who thought the latest patch broke the game when the problem was incompatible mods, right? Here's at least one example: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-the-tech-support-forum.838620/#post-18941200

And don't you dare even think about trying to argue for a position so mind-bogglingly stupid here as "it's those users' fault for not understanding, so Paradox shouldn't have fixed it." It's not only entirely reasonable for the average user to think that the thing that actually updated (the game, not the mods) is responsible for the problem, but that's basically throwing out the concept of tech support because the user doesn't understand the issue as well as people who happen to be less ignorant about how this specific game works.

The EU4 team - as the entity responsible for making sure customers have a good experience with this product that they paid for - not only has the authority to make decisions designed to ensure as much as possible that mods don't mess with the integrity of the game, but they have to some extent an obligation to do so. No, you can't always expect mods to be stable, but you can at least expect them to be compatible with the latest major patch (which is all that's required - first two version numbers are the only ones you need. Minor patches shouldn't change mod compatibility at all) and it's not at all unreasonable for a game developer interested in cutting down on ambiguity on the user's end about what's causing problems to restrict mods based on what version they were updated for. There is no good/easy way for a computer to be able to decide what is or is not going to be compatible without being told. This is a frequently-updating game, with patches that can change literally anything, and those patches can therefore potentially make any mod incompatible. There has never been any guarantee for any game with mods that an old, unsupported mod is going to remain compatible with all versions of the game in the future. And it's not like you can't manually change the supported_version value for mods that you know will still work.

The EU4 team has made the design decision to ensure that nobody in the future will mistake incompatible mods for a problem with the base game, and they have obvious reasons for doing so (namely, that it is objectively a problem that people were encountering). The cost of this is that mods need to be actively updated or they will no longer be supported. The only way people are now going to be using unsupported mods is if they manually force the mod to be allowed, which is also the only situation where you can expect people to unambiguously realize that the mod is the problem instead of the game.

You are not the only person who plays this game. There's a very wide customer base out there, and with the Steam Workshop mods are readily accessible regardless of the user's familiarity with technical aspects of modding. There's an expectation that things will just work, and if things stop working when the game updates people are going to assume that the problem is that the game updated. Now, an argument could be made that the current implementation of this design decision is clunky and too restrictive. But that's not at all what you were saying; you said that the design decision as a whole was stupid, and uncharitably assumed that there was no need for it to be done (I mean, really, why would the developers have put this in if it wasn't a problem?). And the anti-paternalistic argument used in this thread both for the OP's complaint and for this little de-rail don't quite seem to work when we're talking about a product being provided - one that the developers have an obligation to ensure has a stable, consistent experience for everyone.

 

[Kwami]

This is a solvable problem.

1. Require a "supports versions BLAH" in the mod file. This part is already done.
2. Have the game check the supported version against the game version. This part is already done.
3. If the versions don't match, then disable the mod and put a little "wrong version" icon on the mod. This part is half done.
4. Most importantly, allow users to enable disabled mods.

See? I fixed it. If you want to be extra annoying, then make a popup window about to make the user confirm that (s)he's about to possibly break the entire universe, or whatever.

 

[grommile]

4. Most importantly, allow users to enable disabled mods.

Allowing users who don't know what they're doing to enable disabled mods will throw away all the gains in tech-support noise reduction that the "supported version" field achieved, because do you seriously think that people read warning popups like those?

Forcing the user to enable the mods using a text editor puts them firmly in the realms of conscious agency.

 

[Kwami]

Allowing users who don't know what they're doing to enable disabled mods will throw away all the gains in tech-support noise reduction that the "supported version" field achieved, because do you seriously think that people read warning popups like those?

Forcing the user to enable the mods using a text editor puts them firmly in the realms of conscious agency.

But the current system also forces mod authors to forever update their mods to support the latest patch, even when the mod would work perfectly fine without an update. That's very annoying, especially for graphical mods that almost never break (e.g. map borders).

My suggestion is a compromise, and it's the system that many other successful games have employed.

 

[clockworkBabbag]

Allowing users who don't know what they're doing to enable disabled mods will throw away all the gains in tech-support noise reduction that the "supported version" field achieved, because do you seriously think that people read warning popups like those?

Forcing the user to enable the mods using a text editor puts them firmly in the realms of conscious agency.

Forcing a user to manually re-enable a mod with a big, visible icon and a pop-up that they at least have to take a second to click through every time a major update happens accomplishes all you need in terms of being "in the realms of conscious agency" for this situation: people will be far more likely to realize that the problem is with the mod instead of the base game.

I mean, I was worried that I was being too cynical about the average user with my earlier post, but this is something else. I think you'll find that the number of people that incompetent is a tiny fraction of the user base, not a majority.

 

[Ricox]

I'm aware, but you get crashes regardless of it anyways. Sometimes, however, taking the risk that your game is going to go OOS in 30 minutes is better than forcing seven people to restart because someone's internet went out.

Also, again, clicking singleplayer by accident and having to restart the game is, legitimately, the dumbest thing ever.

If you have a proper rig to run the game, it's going to load in less than half a minute in the worst case scenario. What's the big fuss about restarting? My game crashes a lot when I'm going back to main menu for some reason, very annoying when checking bookmarks, but whatever, starts up very quickly afterwards.

 

[grommile]

I mean, I was worried that I was being too cynical about the average user with my earlier post, but this is something else. I think you'll find that the number of people that incompetent is a tiny fraction of the user base, not a majority.

Windows was quite an effective training tool for persuading people to just click through dialog boxes without really reading them properly.

 

[clockworkBabbag]

Windows was quite an effective training tool for persuading people to just click through dialog boxes without really reading them properly.

And as I said before, you are fantastically cynical in a very bad way if you think forcing users to go through any act at all in order to re-enable mods isn't going to make them more aware that the mods might be incompatible instead of blaming it on the game. There are not that many people in the world who are that obtuse, and there is no point talking to you about this if you're going to insist that a significant number of people are somehow so stupid that they wouldn't notice that their mods have been forcibly disabled when they have to go through the physical act of re-enabling every single one of them after an update. The issue with people complaining to Paradox about the base game being broken when trying to load up incompatible mods isn't that they didn't notice a warning, it was that there was literally no indication that a mod was incompatible.

This is an especially terrible argument for you to make since your entire premise of "people just click through stuff without looking" logically leads, if it were true, to people not noticing that mods are disabled the first time they load up the game and just hitting play. So it'll load up fine without mods, they'll go out and re-enable mods, and then the game will crash if they're incompatible. Contrary to what you seem to believe, people actually are capable of putting two and two together in that situation and realizing that the mods are the problem.

It's also, you know, probably not as true as you think at all. Pop-up warnings are hard to ignore, and if you were really trying it's possible to make a small delay before it can be closed. It's not possible to try and design foolproof systems for the tiny fraction of people who refuse to pay any attention at all to the most blatant of warnings. Please stop thinking that everyone is too dumb to function in society with literally no evidence, it's really not a healthy attitude.

Paradox's only responsibility here is to make sure that it's as clear as possible whether or not a mod is compatible with the current game. It's not their responsibility to babysit everyone, especially when said babysitting leads to making it incredibly inconvenient to play older mods that might not be supported but still happen to work just fine.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

But the current system also forces mod authors to forever update their mods to support the latest patch, even when the mod would work perfectly fine without an update. That's very annoying, especially for graphical mods that almost never break (e.g. map borders).

My suggestion is a compromise, and it's the system that many other successful games have employed.

Depends on how they change the map borders, and what else they do under the surface.

I prefer that mods have to be consciously updated and checked for compatablity - after all, if the base game changes how it draws or calculates borders, then just blithely updating the "works with" number won't help - the mod maintainer will have to account for this before putting it out again. It's also a very, very quick check for the mod maker/maintainer to make if it is that simple a mod, and only changes that one thing.

 

[Kwami]

Depends on how they change the map borders, and what else they do under the surface.

I prefer that mods have to be consciously updated and checked for compatablity - after all, if the base game changes how it draws or calculates borders, then just blithely updating the "works with" number won't help - the mod maintainer will have to account for this before putting it out again. It's also a very, very quick check for the mod maker/maintainer to make if it is that simple a mod, and only changes that one thing.

Sure, but...

1. Mod authors don't always stick around. So, users end up modifying the "works with" string manually, or not using the mod at all, even if it would otherwise work just fine. As a side effect, the convenience of subscribing to mods is gone in this situation.

2. Having the option to enable incompatible mods still requires a conscious action.

 

[clockworkBabbag]

Depends on how they change the map borders, and what else they do under the surface.

I prefer that mods have to be consciously updated and checked for compatablity - after all, if the base game changes how it draws or calculates borders, then just blithely updating the "works with" number won't help - the mod maintainer will have to account for this before putting it out again. It's also a very, very quick check for the mod maker/maintainer to make if it is that simple a mod, and only changes that one thing.

Yes, the mod maintainer needs to always do that work as long as they're the one responsible for the mod. But that's not who Kwami's proposal was intended to benefit. That was for the end users, especially in situations where the mod is no longer technically being maintained and hasn't been updated, but it still technically works for the current version.