PC Update 1.10.2

[PDX-Trinexx]

Hello everyone! Today we're releasing Update 1.10.2 for Crusader Kings III. This update is aimed primarily at addressing balance issues with the University activities introduced in 1.10, but we also took the opportunity to knock out some outstanding issues elsewhere.

As always, if you run into issues after this update, please let us know on our bug report board.

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Update 1.10.2 Changelog

Balance

• Rebalanced costs of the University interaction.
  • While remaining one of the most expensive Activities, the cost has now primarily moved onto the options; the lowest option reduces the base cost, the normal option costs significantly more, and the good option almost doubles the cost of the activity. This should lower the barrier of entry, while letting the activity remain an effective gold sink.
• Removed the extra cost for having a higher tier title from the University Activity.
• The books gained from the highest University Activity books option are now better.
• The skill point gained from the University Activity books option is no longer random, but is instead based on your education. This should make it easier to improve a skill you care about.

Interface

• The Player must now have promised a Grand Wedding in order to plan one.

Bugfixes

• Added warning about potential hostage execution when offering to join another character’s war.
• Fixed University costs accidentally scaling up by almost an order of magnitude in later eras.
• Betrothals will no longer stop you from promising a new Grand Wedding if the old promise was related to someone who is now dead.
• Hostages departing toast message will no longer be doubled when Defender wins a war.
• Activities can now be planned even if you have insufficient funds to start them.

 

[KatoCatV]

Oh yeah!
My current game will no longer be a remake of Tim Burton's Corpse Bride

 

[399311]

Can you balance the values of the treasures?
For example, knight combat power, direct jurisdiction and character combat power, the bonus of treasures causes the values to start to inflate.

 

[Xshayarsha]

While it may be intentional, it would be nice to be possible to plan a Grand Wedding when one of the characters is involved in activity. You have to wait for Grand Wedding anyway, so why not add that another activity's time to the waiting time?

 

[ck3enjoyer]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ent-other-than-default.1589630/#post-29113110

Unfortunately still not fixed.

 

[Dark-est]

This patch came quite late tbh.

 

[Danon2]

More intensive optimization is urgently needed

 

[Flockingbird]

Thanks for the fixes!

The Player must now have promised a Grand Wedding in order to plan one.

Promised at the time of betrothal? IIRC, deaths during the betrothal period weren’t the only events players reported made it impossible for them to fulfill their promise. I’m going to take my game offline to avoid this update until it’s clear that promising a grand wedding doesn’t risk bugging-out that game.

I quite liked upgrading to a grand wedding when I got the ‘both parties available to wed now’ notice, so I hope someone mods this back in—and that I find their mod!

 

[volthe92]

Any chance of reordering or reworking the list of situations? While hostages can be interesting, we don't need three different situation lines being clogged with hostage interactions when most of the times we don't want to demand a hostage from 10 counts or dukes that border our kingdom. The situation menu was very nice before hostages were a thing, but now are very cluttered with unnecessary repetitive interactions.

 

[Asphodel-Sun]

Not sure if this is a side-effect of the patch, but I find death by childbirth to be extremely common since this update. It seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

 

[cavveman]

Not sure if this is a side-effect of the patch, but I find death by childbirth to be extremely common since this update. It seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

Can't be from this update. Nothing touched birth with this update. Last possible change was 31/8. When patch 1.10.1 was released.

 

[leobanksjr]

Are the Blademaster traits gaining experience points now fixed? Don't see that in the outline.
Couple of traits I remember were being buggy.

 

[PrimaItalia]

Game constantly crashes after this update.

 

[BrotherJonathan]

• The Player must now have promised a Grand Wedding in order to plan one.

That one did seem kinda weird to me.

 

[Herennius]

I'm glad to see another patch and...still I dearly hope it is not the last one for W&W. While the fixes to the University are nice and welcome, I think there are still serious outstanding issues elsewhere, be it for example the gameplay around hostages (the more I play, the more chaotic things seem become with hostages teleporting to new courts by marriages or events) - or what @ck3enjoyer emphasized here again (which is BTW also affecting the university activity, as the AIs will deafult to well-behaved learning instead of having the chance to become Goliards, unless the player happens to reload in between the AIs decision and the activity start):

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ent-other-than-default.1589630/#post-29113110

Unfortunately still not fixed.

It also still has the "In Review"-label. Of course, that might be just the truth, but OTOH it has happened on the past that bugs for unkown reasons never lost the "In Review"-label, like the one here https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...t-duel-discount-of-10-rather-than-50.1588998/
Ideally we would receive some kind of feedback, like "please post more examples" - or just the info that it got logged.

I know that labeling bugs or responding to them is adding to the QAs workload, so it is a kind of dilemma for them (as it eats time for other stuff like investigating them or communicating with devs and so on), but as player of the game it is a bit frustrating, when a report ends up in that state or when you have the feeling that "your" bug getting visible attention at all seems to depend quite a bit on luck (mainly posting at the right time). I know that this isn't the fault of the QA people, which surely do their best and probably caused by the sheer number of reports to deal with (including invalid or less-then-ideally set up ones, which e.g. lack a savegame for easy reproduction of the issue), but it is really not encouraging at times to report bugs

 

[Flockingbird]

Game constantly crashes after this update.

Had a similar problem; found the following two bug reports. Switching from DirectX11 to Vulcan in Steam game-settings for CK3, loading up the game, then exiting and switching back to DirectX11 fixed my crashing issue. My thanks to the folks in these two threads for reporting their solution.

Game crashes getting worse

Information I have verifed my game files (Steam only) Yes I have disabled all mods Yes I am running the latest game update Yes Required Summary Game crashes getting worse Description Had random crashes since patch release. Saw that it was an...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Game crashes on startup since 1.9, got worse after 1.10

Information I have verifed my game files (Steam only) Yes I have disabled all mods Yes I am running the latest game update Yes Required Summary Game crashes on startup since 1.9, got worse after 1.10 Description Crash on startup Steps to...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Are the Blademaster traits gaining experience points now fixed? Don't see that in the outline.
Couple of traits I remember were being buggy.

This (powerful!) mod will take care of that if your character has the gold:

Steam Workshop::Blade Mastery

steamcommunity.com

This does the same for physicians:

Steam Workshop::Useful Court Physicians

steamcommunity.com

 

[WtfStopRebellingAlready]

Now release the patch that removes the 'crash on death' bug so I can actually PLAY THE GAME that I and the other 100 people who made bug reports bought all these overpriced DLCs for.

 

[Shevvek]

Now release the patch that removes the 'crash on death' bug so I can actually PLAY THE GAME that I and the other 100 people who made bug reports bought all these overpriced DLCs for.

Beyond insulting to customers for PDX to post marketing for a new DLC when dozens of customers have been literally unable to run the game since the previous DLC, and they haven't even updated the known issues list, let alone released a bug fix.

I've spent hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours on Paradox games over the years, and I used to think if Paradox was releasing a game then I could just assume it would be great. Lately I have come to assume that anything released by Paradox will be a buggy unplayable mess that never gets fixed.

It's just unbelievable. It would take 5 minutes for an employee to respond to a bug report and acknowledge crashes as a known issue and give a status update on when it may be fixed or how to workaround it. But it's been complete radio silence for months. Look at the bug report forums and filter for the most recent reply by a developer. Is there even a single person working on bug reports?

 

[Flockingbird]

Beyond insulting to customers for PDX to post marketing for a new DLC when dozens of customers have been literally unable to run the game since the previous DLC, and they haven't even updated the known issues list, let alone released a bug fix.

I've spent hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours on Paradox games over the years, and I used to think if Paradox was releasing a game then I could just assume it would be great. Lately I have come to assume that anything released by Paradox will be a buggy unplayable mess that never gets fixed.

It's just unbelievable. It would take 5 minutes for an employee to respond to a bug report and acknowledge crashes as a known issue and give a status update on when it may be fixed or how to workaround it. But it's been complete radio silence for months. Look at the bug report forums and filter for the most recent reply by a developer. Is there even a single person working on bug reports?

Frustrating, certainly. Frustrating for QA and the devs, too.

If you’ve reported a bug, & provided all the relevant information/game files, and the bug hasn’t been fixed, they aren’t ignoring the problem. It’s possible they haven’t been able to replicate it yet, or they’ve replicated it but they are still trying to fix it. Sometimes they’ve found what looks like a fix, but testing reveals that the proposed ‘fix’ breaks something even more important, in which case it’s back to the drawing board. One thing for sure, they’re not ignoring bug reports that prevent people from playing!

It helps to have a general understanding of the complexities. I’ve found these threads and posts helpful.

CK3 Dev Diary #92: Anatomy of a Game: From Report to Resolution

Hello, everyone, and welcome back the Dev Diary. Let's have a little talk about the Anatomy of a Game (Development)! I'll be your host for today, @jakeowaty, current QA Lead on Crusader Kings 3, and I'm joined by Elisabeth, known as @PDXOxycoon...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Thread with similar complaints, and interesting dev replies; hit ‘show only dev replies’ if you prefer that:

Probably worth slowing down the cadence of DLC releases

I really don't like being someone who whines on forums about games not being up to my standards. I really love CK3 and appreciate all the work that's gone into it, and have really enjoyed the new content in Tours and Tournaments. However, I can't...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

May 15, 2023, Wokeg:

As for the bugs, yeah, it's sadly a complex situation. I've got a half-drafted reply to a post on this from Friday that I let stew over the weekend (honestly I just wanted some time away from CK things to frantically yoyo between Zomboid, Kenshi, and Barotrauma), but in brief there's a few basic problems that tend to cause these types of issues:

1. As with regencies here, a last-minute fix in one place somehow breaks something attached to it in a way that doesn't error and isn't obvious unless you're looking for it. QA does sweep everything, generally multiple times, but eventually there's always a last sweep for any particular area of the title. If someone changes something afterwards that's supposed to be a safe or hyper-necessary fix and doesn't realise they've borked something elsewhere that isn't firing an error, it can introduce errors that would (and generally are) caught immediately at any other stage of development but might not be right at the end.
2. Density of play time vs. testing time. Cumulatively, it's not hard for QA to rack up thousands of hours of testing time over the course of development, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to tens of thousands of players, sometimes more, on day 1 of a release. I think Code calculated that the playerbase had beaten the internal testing hourage count in the first 20 minutes of play? The level of brute-force testing across every conceivable hardware arrangement and for every possible style of play basically guarantees unearthing anything and everything immediately. If QA are a floodlight shining in the darkness to try to find bugs, release day is an atomic explosion blasting away the night and creating huge irradiated mothras.
3. QA might well report something and then it doesn't get fixed. Sometimes, the reasons for that are bad (when I was an external QA for various other companies, before working here, I got a lot of "not that big a deal", "no one will ever find that", or "cannot reproduce ergo won't fix" bugs that I would... not regard as particularly legitimate takes on issues raised), sometimes, they're good ("we literally don't have time", "that looks like a really bad fire but I'm currently trying to put out this, significantly larger fire first", "that's a problem but if we try to fix it quickly and do a bad job we might break all these other things at the same time" - happily more the type of thing I had when I was a QA at Paradox, and the type of responses I try to give as a designer), but either way, from the player's end, you just see a bug that obviously should've been caught and fixed.

... none of which are really excuses, per se, because if everything's running smoothly then you shouldn't run into #1 very much at all, #2 shouldn't be too big of a deal because you've given QA time to sweep'n'resweep'n'triplesweep, and #3 just shouldn't happen because you're settling into a nice, controlled release, but I hope they function as decent explanations.

Thread about QA with informative dev replies:

Question and criticize on how the QA team works

Reading the threads in Bug Report forum and I found that times and times QA staff says something like "Unfortunately we have not been able to reproduce this on our side. Could you please attach the save file in which this issue occurs?" Well...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

As to QA not providing bug-report updates: there simply isn’t enough time. This issue gets raised periodically, and that’s what it boils down to—it’s a better use of QA’s time to work on fixing the bugs than reply to forum posts, though QA members do try to do the latter when they can. In a perfect world, they’d do both, but in this one, they focus on fixing the bugs.

 

[Shevvek]

Frustrating, certainly. Frustrating for QA and the devs, too.

If you’ve reported a bug, & provided all the relevant information/game files, and the bug hasn’t been fixed, they aren’t ignoring the problem. It’s possible they haven’t been able to replicate it yet, or they’ve replicated it but they are still trying to fix it. Sometimes they’ve found what looks like a fix, but testing reveals that the proposed ‘fix’ breaks something even more important, in which case it’s back to the drawing board. One thing for sure, they’re not ignoring bug reports that prevent people from playing!

It helps to have a general understanding of the complexities. I’ve found these threads and posts helpful.

CK3 Dev Diary #92: Anatomy of a Game: From Report to Resolution

Hello, everyone, and welcome back the Dev Diary. Let's have a little talk about the Anatomy of a Game (Development)! I'll be your host for today, @jakeowaty, current QA Lead on Crusader Kings 3, and I'm joined by Elisabeth, known as @PDXOxycoon...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Thread with similar complaints, and interesting dev replies; hit ‘show only dev replies’ if you prefer that:

Probably worth slowing down the cadence of DLC releases

I really don't like being someone who whines on forums about games not being up to my standards. I really love CK3 and appreciate all the work that's gone into it, and have really enjoyed the new content in Tours and Tournaments. However, I can't...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

May 15, 2023, Wokeg:


Thread about QA with informative dev replies:

Question and criticize on how the QA team works

Reading the threads in Bug Report forum and I found that times and times QA staff says something like "Unfortunately we have not been able to reproduce this on our side. Could you please attach the save file in which this issue occurs?" Well...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

As to QA not providing bug-report updates: there simply isn’t enough time. This issue gets raised periodically, and that’s what it boils down to—it’s a better use of QA’s time to work on fixing the bugs than reply to forum posts, though QA members do try to do the latter when they can. In a perfect world, they’d do both, but in this one, they focus on fixing the bugs.

I mean I'm well aware of the time constraints. I actually work in IT myself, and one thing I can tell you is every help desk I've ever seen has a bare minimum expectation that reports of serious issues get an acknowledgement in reply, or at least a general post updated with major known issues.

Beyond that, this isn't some gameplay issue where characters behave in weird ways or a button isn't labelled correctly. Dozens of paying customers LITERALLY haven't been able to RUN THE SOFTWARE for MONTHS since the last DLC release. Pretty much every other game company I know would be prioritizing a hotfix for crashes to desktop over anything else. If there's some reason it can't be replicated or the fix is taking longer than expected, they should COMMUNICATE THAT. The community is filled with technical people who would be happy to help troubleshoot the issue or provide more data. Paradox has not even bothered to take the time to say "we hear your concerns and we are working on it but it will take some time." In absence of even that very low level of communication I fail to see why I as a paying customer should give them the benefit of the doubt.

And frankly, if they are so understaffed they don't have time to update a known issues post for months, and they also are unable to fix crashes in a timely fashion, I have to question Paradox's budgeting decisions. This doesn't look like a QA issue to me, it looks like a management-level issue.