I don't speak for the team, but for myself (along with the rest of this post), I work on the game because I love the game and I want to play a better game. I don't care about financial incentive too much as I already have a day job in programming which pays well. Paradox has been shifting their core game to a different vision than what many in the team and the community who play HoI2 enjoy, which varies from person to person. I didn't want to move over to HoI3, and I'm generally not too fond of the more recent paradox games that have been published.
Like I said, learning to mod or research and
getting good at it and then helping contribute is more helpful for us. There was an initiative earlier to try and start a community improvement mod like system where we could push WIP features and such, but that didn't really work out, so we've now given up on the idea. (Even if we do occasionally get contributions, which isn't that frequent and usually only by a small group of players, we usually can only use a even smaller portion without considerable time invested looking over it or modifying it to meet quality standards. Research assistance is ALWAYS useful though, but converting research->ingame data takes time as well, and getting more people who know how to do that conversion would be useful. It took me countless weeks of free time to convert research already provided to me->in game content for Chinese ministers) (Also before someone asks about training, our team is very very tiny right now, we don't really have the resources to train anyone either, so you'd really have to learn by doing or looking at existing code, sorry).
Other than that, I dunno...I'd like to see less occurrences of questions on forums by people who didn't read the modding documentation or pinned posts, but that's inevitable on forums because people on the internet never read FAQ's or stickies.
I'd also like to see less complaints directed toward the team (or other modders) about us not working hard enough, but that's a given on the internet as well because some gamers are believe they are entitled or whatnot (and to be honest, I don't like the two year delay between 1.03 and 1.04 either). It's not a great motivator to work on the game if I come home after working 12 hours and see that stuff.Edit: I welcome complaints about patch release speed now. Please complain away, I can't support the slowness anymore.
On money, (to the best of my knowledge) it's possible that one of the members on our team gets a small amount of money for working on the engine, but I can't recall if he does, and it's insignificant and not really affected by sales. Buying 5 copies of the game won't really help us since none of us depend on DH for our lives and most of it goes toward the license for the engine from Paradox. Not to say that you should pirate the game, but just that one copy is fine. Anyway, I got my current job in part due to working on DH because one of the persons interviewing me played the game, so it's not too bad.
