I guess my point was misunderstood, I wasn't talking about dlcs with focus trees only, I know PDS wouldn't do that. Still, I'm against their inclusion into regional packs, which until now added only flavor stuff (you know, models,sounds, sometimes events&decisions) that did not aim to improve campaign gameplay, especially not for all countries in the campaign. But now in HoI4, NFs carry a lot more weight and improve such an essential part of the gameplay, I think it goes beyond flavors. After all they alter and differentiate country behavior, and you can be affected by that even if you don't control the DLC'ed country, as AI would behave differently (and more in line with historically feasible options, which is what the campaign is all about, and a selling point of the game). Granted that I might be mistaken and overvaluing importance of the focus trees, I've read the dev diaries but haven't watched WWW podcasts yet, then all what I've written will be irrelevant.
Of course PDS is justified in selling them and I'm aware of the work required by that. Yet, patches also require a great deal of work, and I don't see a big gap between what is currently added via patches and new focus trees; it is definitely not like a DLC, say Cossacks, including a wholly new mechanic with estates. Just saying that it would be "nice" if PDS doesn't monetize them, and as comments above show, not doing that would inevitably create conflicts with modders. With the current model, either PDS will allow such mods (podcat's post does not explicitly state that btw), which will make a selling point of regional pack DLCs irrelevant hence buyers may consider them over-priced, or they will take them down, which then will cause some serious stability hits and harm the company's reputation of consumer-friendliness (consumer-lovingliness?).
ps: seeing some attempts to troll, keep civil ppl
edit: A suggestion: Forgot its name but the team making Endless series has a system that can be applied to PDS games. So all DLCs give something like development points, which then used in surveys conducted by devs to decide on further development of the game. Consider this for HoI4, you buy a regional dlc, say M.East and gain 200 dev points. You then use those to push for M.Eastern focus trees and whatever you want, also by sales figures PDS sees the interest in M.East and begins working on that more, with focus trees and all that. In the end you get your M.Eastern flavors and focus trees, plus additional influence on development; PDS' cost for developing M.East is covered and gameplay improvements are delivered to all players, making the game better overall. If you are disturbed by them, yes, still there are free-riders, but all in all this seems fair enough.
keep coming back to this: When you think about it, this has become a necessity for paradox after all. Devs cannot hope to maintain their usual level of interaction with the community, even just the core PDX fans have reached a number that is unmanageable, and I think we can all agree how tiring it gets for devs. Accordingly, my words should not be considered as I haven't pre-ordered hoi4 yet meheh.
