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Merrivale

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Oct 9, 2003
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I'm afraid I already know the answer to this question, given recent history, but perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Do you plan to have message settings in Vicky 3 @Wizzington ? A critical part of good gardening is information but everyone wants slightly different amounts.
 
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Going off the Steam screenshots, it's reminding me of CK3. It seems to have something like that issues alert, and that same style of notification that shows up on the right.
Yeah, I'm not getting my hopes up either.
 
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Message settings, a proper ledger, and pie charts. Pie charts everywhere.

Good rule of thumb: you should have at least one pie chart on every screen.
 
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I tried to ask about this already in the Dev diary 0 thread, but since this topic is of great interest for me too, I'll copy-paste that text here:

Somewhat cautious question though to temper my expectations: will Victoria 3 have (at least somewhat) similar customizable message settings system that for example V2 and EU4 have or will it work more like HoI4 or CK3 where there is no customization (and thus players might feel like they are bombarded with useless info and / or don't receive the info they feel they need)?
 
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Message settings, a proper ledger, and pie charts. Pie charts everywhere.

Good rule of thumb: you should have at least one pie chart on every screen.
Looking at the few released screenshots (for example this), there's a book-looking button in the upper right corner below another button. The upper button looks like a usual menu icon, but that open book would be quite logical icon for ledger. (Or some in-game encyclopaedia, I suppose...)
 
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I agree that message settings are a huge quality of life feature, and even though I won't get my hopes up given more recent games, we should still keep saying it.
 
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Yes, message systems were great in EUIV and CKII but wee axed and dumbed down to stone age in HoIIV, Stellaris and only with CKIII we saw some, meager imprevement.
I think this is my biggest issue really, they didn't replace it with something better or even different that they thought was better. It just turned into, "well you just have to pay close attention to the entire world." I won't get into my whole spiel about alerts and common occurrences, but the short version is that an alert is useless for something that happens constantly and pretty much simultaneously (space station under attack in Stellaris--you want to tell me which space station buddy?)

Stellaris is actually mostly OK without them, although it would benefit from having them. I know Vicky 3 won't be the same game as Vicky 2 but I shudder at thinking of trying to play it without message settings.
 
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I think this is my biggest issue really, they didn't replace it with something better or even different that they thought was better. It just turned into, "well you just have to pay close attention to the entire world." I won't get into my whole spiel about alerts and common occurrences, but the short version is that an alert is useless for something that happens constantly and pretty much simultaneously (space station under attack in Stellaris--you want to tell me which space station buddy?)

Stellaris is actually mostly OK without them, although it would benefit from having them. I know Vicky 3 won't be the same game as Vicky 2 but I shudder at thinking of trying to play it without message settings.
This far pretty much everything I've read about Victoria 3 has seem nice or awesome. I fear that Paradox will indeed again go the same way as with HoI4, Stellaris and CK3 and not give players the ability to customize what information (and how) the game presents to them and this will make playing the game tedious constant scanning around at low speed (or constantly manually pausing), sapping my enjoyment of an otherwise excellent game...
 
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Yeah, CK3 and Hoi4 not having message settings makes me pretty pessimistic. As far as I am aware so have they not even mentioned them for those games, not even a "we think it scares new players too much" or whatever comment to one of the many complaint threads. It really sucks and the lack of notification settings is honestly one of the main reasons I have barely touched CK3 since launch.

Imperator did get message settings which is great but I think that's just because Johan for all his faults is extremely old school and pushed for that.
 
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Yeah, CK3 and Hoi4 not having message settings makes me pretty pessimistic. As far as I am aware so have they not even mentioned them for those games, not even a "we think it scares new players too much" or whatever comment to one of the many complaint threads. It really sucks and the lack of notification settings is honestly one of the main reasons I have barely touched CK3 since launch.

Imperator did get message settings which is great but I think that's just because Johan for all his faults is extremely old school and pushed for that.
Yes, Johan pushed for it. I did a quick search because I vaguely recalled John saying it would have a ledger because he personally liked ledgers, and found the post. How do we force Johan into the Vicky 3 team? https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...message-settings-in-ir.1101735/#post-24300282
But yeah, I haven't been able to find any mention of why they aren't in CK3 or HoI4 either. And of course, nothing about them for V3. Which is absolutely frustrating since they're essential for me.
 
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Yes, Johan pushed for it. I did a quick search because I vaguely recalled John saying it would have a ledger because he personally liked ledgers, and found the post. How do we force Johan into the Vicky 3 team? https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...message-settings-in-ir.1101735/#post-24300282
But yeah, I haven't been able to find any mention of why they aren't in CK3 or HoI4 either. And of course, nothing about them for V3. Which is absolutely frustrating since they're essential for me.
Well I can tell you why they aren't in HOI4 and it's likely the same reason they aren't in CK3 but I wouldn't know for sure there. Paradox multiplayer games are of course played without pausing. Pop-ups force more pausing. Everyone who works at Paradox plays multiplayer for balance testing. So everyone at Paradox plays without pausing. So the mandate is to eliminate pop-ups as much as possible and use flashing alerts instead. This is also why you don't get a ledger. That's not a direct quote, but we went back and forth with Podcat about this a lot when the game was released. At the time there were promises made about creating a new, better system that gave the same sort of information without a pop-up message.

Apparently message settings also eat up dev time, which is the reason why we don't have them anyway since OPTIONAL settings allow people to play however they'd like.

Quite frankly the other reason why is what you are going to see happen to this thread. It'll get about 50-100 likes and agrees, will quickly drop off the top of the forum, and then every once and a while someone will come along and say "Hey we should have message settings" which will get another big chunk of likes and agrees and then drop off again. For very people are the lack of message settings a deal breaker, as in they won't buy the game and won't play the game. So Paradox is free to ignore the few folks for whom it is. Message notifications and settings are basically never mentioned anymore on the HOI 4 forums. They'll wait it out, it'll vanish as a constant complaint, and that'll be that.
 
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I find it regrettable that a lot of games are designed around multiplayer now, especially since the paradox-concept of real-time with pause works so badly in multiplayer. I don't want to play these games as if they were RTS. I don't like RTS. And the fact that paradox games are now forced to function as if they were RTS means that there are a lot of good things that will never be in these games again.

I personally would really, *really* like it if there was an option to enable auto-pause in multiplayer. I know I am probably not the typical player in this regard, but IF I decided to play paradox games in multiplayer, it would probably not be in a giant group, but with only 2 or 3 friends. And in this context, speed 4 + autopause (like I would use in singleplayer) would still be a much more enjoyable experience than speed 2 and still feeling rushed all the time.

And yes, I will very likely still buy and play this game even in the absence of message settings, so from a business perspective it could be argued that not including them is the correct call. I will still find it incredibly frustrating that the game will not be as good as it could have been.
 
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Well I can tell you why they aren't in HOI4 and it's likely the same reason they aren't in CK3 but I wouldn't know for sure there. Paradox multiplayer games are of course played without pausing. Pop-ups force more pausing. Everyone who works at Paradox plays multiplayer for balance testing. So everyone at Paradox plays without pausing. So the mandate is to eliminate pop-ups as much as possible and use flashing alerts instead. This is also why you don't get a ledger. That's not a direct quote, but we went back and forth with Podcat about this a lot when the game was released. At the time there were promises made about creating a new, better system that gave the same sort of information without a pop-up message.

Apparently message settings also eat up dev time, which is the reason why we don't have them anyway since OPTIONAL settings allow people to play however they'd like.

Quite frankly the other reason why is what you are going to see happen to this thread. It'll get about 50-100 likes and agrees, will quickly drop off the top of the forum, and then every once and a while someone will come along and say "Hey we should have message settings" which will get another big chunk of likes and agrees and then drop off again. For very people are the lack of message settings a deal breaker, as in they won't buy the game and won't play the game. So Paradox is free to ignore the few folks for whom it is. Message notifications and settings are basically never mentioned anymore on the HOI 4 forums. They'll wait it out, it'll vanish as a constant complaint, and that'll be that.

Oh yeah, the multiplayer thing. It's definitely frustrating to me that Paradox designs the game around the small group that plays multiplayer at the cost of singleplayer gameplay. Duels during battles is a fairly highly requested feature in CK3 from what I've seen on the forums for example but it would work really poorly in multiplayer so I guess that is never happening even though people appreciated it back in CK2.
 
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Looking at the few released screenshots (for example this), there's a book-looking button in the upper right corner below another button. The upper button looks like a usual menu icon, but that open book would be quite logical icon for ledger. (Or some in-game encyclopaedia, I suppose...)
They mentioned that there is a "Vickypedia" in game, so that's probably the button for it
 
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Please please please devs, message settings are nearly essential for a smooth non frustrating game experience. I will be extremely sad if we don't get robust message and alert settings.
 
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