[Megathread] Leviathan Release Problems

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For the real world the backlash of customers anger is much more tangible than in gaming, and pretty much in every civilized country there is an authority that deals with product quality. In gaming there is little to no such thing, broken games or DLCs upon release are trivial. Now imagine releasing a car in a similar state, a surgery equipment, building a house that falls down.

The issue is the world wide web, it has little overseeing authority. Because if you expect companies to behave without a Damocles' sword over their head, think again. If Paradox would be fined, be sure that the top brass will enforce a high quality product policy upon release.

Else, who cares? The wage is the same, vacation days the same, so why bother?
EU vs EU4 trial?
 
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they probably become distant because they get bombarded with comments by us, and it doesnt even need to be toxic commentary. if you got 1000 DMs a day it would be straight up impossible to answer all of them.

Allow me to point out that this is a forum. The customers of Paradox are meant to come here, share their thoughts of the product, discuss changes - both those made and those that could be made. If you see this as "bombardment" then what is the point of a forum. Forums are made for discussion not, back padding. I'm not saying that they should answer every single thread. But this forum is filled with excellent players who care enough about the game to essentially use their spare time to provide feed back on something they care about. The devs should utilize this massive resource they have. Instead, through silence, ignoring critcism and becoming more distant, they've managed to squander this resource.

you might say: but its their job to listen to customer feedback! - maybe it isnt, maybe they have got a feedback department, maybe nobody looks at feedback, maybe all the forum-interactions we have with the devs are just happening because they want them to happen.

I believe they do want feedback. But who knows, considering how little they interact with their community you may actually be right. Perhaps, in their hubris, they've become immune to criticism. Perhaps the criticism has become too harsh. What I do know is that if you consider all criticism to be "non-constructive feedback" then you've justified yourself in not engaging with your customers. Problem is that its a self-reinforcing effect. No dev interaction --> hostile players who feel that they aren't heard --> devs don't like the hostility --> no dev interaction --> repeat ad nauseam.


but it can get quite annoying to keep answering the same questions and having to deal with criticism that you cant answer or isnt even your fault. if i was a dev i would probably just be annoyed by the people and try to do my work as good as possible and thats it.

The criticism on this forum is rarely against individuals. Its against mechanics, parts of the game, specific policies (like the DLC policy), the large amounts of bugs or something else. It doesn't really matter if there isn't any particular "culprit". It isn't about that, it's about player grievances that the Devs would be wise to take note of. That is not to say that all proposals can or should be implemented, but many different and well-thought out proposals are made here.


theres a pretty high chance that pdx is just understaffed

Paradox has become a very large company with large profits, they should be able to afford staff. But I honestly don't care if they are understaffed, it doesn't excuse their increasingly poor quality products.
 
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So far only Rights of Men, Rule Britania and El Dorado have Mostly positive rating, Everything else is like this:

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Mixed, Mostly Negative, Mixed, Mixed, negative etc. Constant complains of stillborn features, lack of balancing, complete lack of QA plagued Paradox for years and even new studio have been created problems seem to got even worse. If things continue like this EUIV will become second Stellaris, with mountains of issues, disjointed features that nevre work together and tech debt so great that people doubt it could be salvaged without making Stellaris II from the scratch.
Stellaris is amazing what doy you mean
 
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either way, dont harass anyone. everyone is allowed to criticize, just dont make it personal/insulting. its not that hard to contain one's criticism to the product.

It's perfectly fair to also criticize the makers of the defective product as a whole. For example: Paradox should know better by now but after a few good years of releases at the beginning of CK 2 and EU IV they've gone back to the bad old "don't buy at release because the release is always bugged to hell and back" days of the 2000s.
 
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Now imagine releasing a car in a similar state, a surgery equipment, building a house that falls down.
You can't seriously compare something that is potentially life-threatening and a botched release of a patch and DLC.
The stakes aren't the same so of course the approach on how to deal with it are different.
 
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And you have evidence that it was the case with this release that the higher-ups said release it even though it's FUBAR? Or was it just incorrect information from the dev team to the higher-ups about when it would be ready then cowardly NOT telling the higher-ups they needed to push back release because it isn't going to be ready on time? Both of those are very real possibilities.
You have never worked in IT, have you?
 
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We are not forced to work, we are willing to do so. It is called responsiblity and decency. If tens of thousands of people rely on your software, you do not want to let them down.
That just sounds unnecessarily mean towards the devs, they shouldn't have to work overtime to pay for a decision that was probably done by management. Paradox should have just delayed the release date of the DLC (maybe they wanted to rush this out before PDXCON). The whole situation probably sucks even more for the developers who have to fix this mess than it does for the players (we can just not buy the DLC/refund and play something else).
 
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You can't seriously compare something that is potentially life-threatening and a botched release of a patch and DLC.
The stakes aren't the same so of course the approach on how to deal with it are different.
Those were just example, it's true that a bit too radical compared to gaming. The stakes aren't the same, but in my country for example there is a product quality agency that will fine companies for the most insignificant things if they don't follow standards.

Imagine a company knowingly selling a broken or untested product to thousands of customers, no matter in what niche, hell would be let loose against it. Now in gaming there isn't anything close to such kind of accountability.
 
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Collpase in consumer confidence can flat line a business
Yes, but nobody will die because the patch is broken, that's what I meant.
I agree with the general point, I just disagreed with the example.
 
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Dear Paradox,

to be honest this DLC and patch should be marked as a Major Incident in your system with Priority 1.
It makes the game unplayable with our without the DLC and should be fixed ASAP.
 
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Paradox has become a very large company with large profits, they should be able to afford staff. But I honestly don't care if they are understaffed, it doesn't excuse their increasingly poor quality products.
btw, if the numbers wikipedia has are correct, PDX is not a big company with "unlimited" ressources(as many seem to think). i work at a company with a similar employee-count and we make more money than them, also we are losing money
 
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I agree. I bought this new DLC a few hours ago. It feels more like a open beta. Placeholder textures, weird unit models that are almost 80% black, text messages in the wrong place. Event bugs. I first thought Paradox has uploaded the wrong files, like a old version of the game with hot code.
 
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This patch is pretty much viable evidence that PDX does not load their game in 1444, let alone start the timer, use console commands, or run observer games. Disregarding all the balance and gameplay issues, the fundamentals are just broke.

Some absolutely egregious crap out of the many:

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Literal placeholder images and lack of localization in several areas, including Sikhism and government reforms.

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Australian & Polynesian natives using westerngfx because they were not given proper graphics without the DLC (not even N.American native models)


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Polynesian tech group not having any graphic assigned to it. I had to dig into the code to make sure that the group even existed. Also, Aboriginal tech group uses High American icon (are you that lazy).

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Ayutthaya not getting Siam formable at all without the DLC, since their missions (along with other SEA majors) are locked behind the DLC. Totally legitimate to have a work in progress line in the official patch release!! (also, look at that file name, classic Portugese move).

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Missionary Strength +100% still in the game, despite being noticed by many people during the streams as a bug.

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Governing Capacity can flow negative, making the Tribal polities in the Champa highlands some of the easiest tags to WC with.

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Literally no PROV_ADJ localization for some of the new provinces.

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No unit model definitions for many new tags, not even the "generic" Lan Xang units from the Buddhist pack that is given to literally everyone, even the Shan states and Champa.

There is so much more, but find it yourself. Maybe actually go in-game instead of just loading up the title screen to make sure it doesn't crash?

Also, this isn't a horrendous fundamental bug, but you know I have to complain about this:
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"guys culture is not related to language anymore"

* proceeds to make patch that has culture with language more than logic, ruining the previously far superior monolithic SEA culture group

Obviously, Vietnamese in Chinese group is the first thing I'm removing, for the sake of sanity.

This is like seriously shocking. It should lead to resignations and firings right?? How can they be this lazy
 
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Another good one is all of the new missions that lack art. No, really, there are quite a few (I counted ten among different nations) that are empty spaces.

Also the big banner telling you the new stuff when you boot the game? The last sentence is obstructed by one of the buttons.
 
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I can assure you that we do not take these matters lightly - and again I won't try to make excuses.

Assuming that the development team is just shrugging it off and laughing all the way to the bank is rather presumptuous however. The team consists of a number of people recruited from the community - people that joined Tinto for the love of the game and a desire to make it the best it can be. Sometimes things don't work out in the best way from the start however.

I once again promise that everyone involved is working really hard to have a patch out as soon as it is possible, but we do not believe in the abuse of workforce.
 
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I can assure you that we do not take these matters lightly - and again I won't try to make excuses.

Assuming that the development team is just shrugging it off and laughing all the way to the bank is rather presumptuous however. The team consists of a number of people recruited from the community - people that joined Tinto for the love of the game and a desire to make it the best it can be. Sometimes things don't work out in the best way from the start however.

I once again promise that everyone involved is working really hard to have a patch out as soon as it is possible, but we do not believe in the abuse of workforce.
Abuse of customer though.......
 
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Abuse of customer though.......

Not quite comparable. It's quite easy to refund the expansion and roll back the game to a previous patch version.
 
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So, the tags you can form with the federation mechanic are generic client states, which would be fine (though I think it's absurd we don't have ways to form real tags with the federations since they were already there in the case of Iroquois and Huron). Thing is, all of them use Western unit models and you can't change them.
 
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