Public Service Announcement regarding 1.4

[numdydar]

Not for money

Although I have absoulutely no evidence that the following is true, given what has happened with Victoria, I suppect the following is what actually happened.

Paradox has always used beta testers from the larger player community. This has worked for them up to the HoI3 release with varying levels of success. However due to the complex increase in HoI3, this did not work out well. Johan has stated that he had been very surprised about the number of issues associated with HoI3 as the Beta testers had not found that many.

Now Paradox is using a professional QA company to test thier products, Victoria 2 has been delayed by three months. It is my belief that the lack of a professional QA enviroment is what caused the poor release of HoI3 not a desire to milk the player community of their hard earned dollars. If that was truely their intent, they certainly would not be asking for feedback on the issues important to us and working hard to fix them.

 

[Colonel Dreux]

Paradox itself may be a company but it still has people working for it. How would you feel if you had worked practically non-stop for 18 months on a single project only to receive constant criticism for it, no matter what you tried to do improve that project after it's release. I agree that the game in version 1.0 was not particularly great, despite having some very impressive aspects. Version 1.3 however is much improved, as I am certain 1.4 will be. It seems to me that some people here just enjoy creating arrogant and incendiary posts and won't be happy until every single change they demand is implemented, no matter how time-consuming or ridiculous those changes may be.

Like I said, that's their problem. They're a nexus of human beings who made and sold the game. If people don't like it, people don't like it. It doesn't matter how hard they worked on it or what they did, or what is going on in their personal lives. They bear total responsibility for the game and whatever success or failure it has.

 

[Colonel Dreux]

This is pretty much what I'm trying to point out.

A) Yes, Paradox is a company. However, said company is not run by Big Blue. The more the devs get treated like garbage, the less inclined they are to continue the free patching of their product.



B) You seem to misinterpret my post as "you aren't allowed to complain". That is most certainly not true. what my post is designed to bring light to are the situations of people who are going beyond simply pointing out their opinions on game issues, and start making comments about dev caring, capability, choice of priorities, or the ever popular "I speak for the majority when I say...".

Kallocian's thread is a good place to see both ends.

For example, post #20 (Nemsys) is a good way to give feedback while indicating that the game state is still one that he is not happy with, and indicates exactly what his vote for "to be changed" entails. It's obvious he is complaining about the game (the line "as some issues really bothered me too much and in general I prefer to wait until the game is more "polished" before launching on any extensive grand campaign" clearly indicates he won't even play a full-trhough campaign yet), but if I was a dev, no part of his post would... say, "lower my morale rating".

In fact, most of that thread is a nice example of how TO do this.

But then...

Post 407 (Nigo), is NOT a way to talk to... well, anyone, really. There's a way to indicate you don't like something and/or how you'd like it changed, and then there's a way to make yourself sound like the superior moral candidate to both the devs and anyone who disagrees with you. Thankfully, such a post happens WAY down the thread, so it's impact to the overall... shall we say, "decency and usefulness" of the thread is minimal.

They're in the game making business and getting treated like garbage by the customer is just part of the job, in fact it's part of every service/product oriented job... your customers may actually think all your hard work adds up to suckage. It is what it is. They need thicker skin if they can't handle their community of gamers taking their game to task.

 

[unmerged(106255)]

I read that most of the community beta testers used the test as their free preview and then bailed.

 

[Dimes]

They're in the game making business and getting treated like garbage by the customer is just part of the job, in fact it's part of every service/product oriented job...

This is where you are wrong in my opinion. It isn't (or shouldn't be) part of anyones job to be treated like garbage.

In my opinion if people can't bother to make their complaints in a polite and clear way, then I wouldn't bother actually taking those complaints seriously...

 

[MadUrb]

I read that most of the community beta testers used the test as their free preview and then bailed.

Then please give a source and dont spread rumours.

I work professionally within software development and was a un-paid member in the beta-test working in my not so free spare-time. Due to NDA I am not allowed to say much but lets be clear that I have seen better (and also worse QA) in my line of work.

Releasing new daily beta builds made testing an entire campaign virtually impossible and other practices could have been used to improve reporting and control from PI, but that is in the past and hopefully PI has learned something...

Being an un-paid volunteer beta tester is not the same as having professional testers so hopefully Victoria 2 will have a higher quality but certain things cannot be tested fully until you make for example a stress-test by using lots of users as is now taking place in the open beta for Star Trek Online (and you should see the problems there...)

 

[Hagar]

Then please give a source and dont spread rumours.

I work professionally within software development and was a un-paid member in the beta-test working in my not so free spare-time. Due to NDA I am not allowed to say much but lets be clear that I have seen better (and also worse QA) in my line of work.

Releasing new daily beta builds made testing an entire campaign virtually impossible and other practices could have been used to improve reporting and control from PI, but that is in the past and hopefully PI has learned something...

Being an un-paid volunteer beta tester is not the same as having professional testers so hopefully Victoria 2 will have a higher quality but certain things cannot be tested fully until you make for example a stress-test by using lots of users as is now taking place in the open beta for Star Trek Online (and you should see the problems there...)

Actually Johan has made a statement along those lines a while back... Delving it up again might prove to be a heck of a challenge, but believe me he did. Obviously that does not apply to the Beta test group as a whole - certainly not to those that stayed on. IIRC 25% of the 100 Betas actually contributed in a positive way.
I'm in the software business myself, and furthermore are quite familiar with the quirks of CORE's unpaid test force, obviously. As such we frequently review our Beta lineup, which proves to work rather well I'd say. QA is always a challenge, but I think it's safe to say that, in hindsight, the QA level for HoI3 could have been better. Areas for improvement are a more selective Beta recruitment - the 100 picks were pretty much random along those that applied as I recall - and more frequent Beta performance review and rotation, IMHO. Perhaps Paradox could have put feelers out to parts of the modding community for possible recruitment, or at least partly. Probably not the easiest bunch to please, but it's better to have some critics in your QA process than those who are easily convinced.

That being said Paradox is doing it's utmost to correct the major problems, so things are likely to improve (if they haven't already). It will be a swell game, it's just not quite there yet.

 

[barleyman]

That being said Paradox is doing it's utmost to correct the major problems, so things are likely to improve (if they haven't already). It will be a swell game, it's just not quite there yet.

Beyond actual misbehavior by game engine or AI there are glaring design problems as well. A modder made a heroic effort to create 3rd party organization management tool to stop you from going insane by the clickfest required of organizing a major military force. Such tool/ui should be part of the core game.

 

[unmerged(83998)]

Are you suggesting that the many complainers who went into nerd rage here on these forums have in any way helped PI to realise that HOI3 isn't the perfect game? Where I'm from being rude and having bad manners is just a fast but sure way to get ignored for being ... well ... rude and having bad manners

I'm quite sure that the fact that HOI3 could use some patching/improving still would have gotten through to PI even if the complaints had been posted in a more polite way. The only thing those posters accomplished was getting me angry at them for being rude and having bad manners...



Ahh seems I wasn't the only one getting upset at the posts

Does this qualify as "nerd rage"? Because from what I've read on these forums, even the most virulent posts stay remarkably civil, unless the harder ones are deleted before I get to read them. I'm used to (being French) a much higher level of verbal violence... so maybe what is unacceptable to you is normality for me.
Anyhow... my point is, when the "ardent follower" population starts using arguments which, in fine can be summed up as :
1) paradox is known to suck at release, it's your responsibility for being stupid and preordering the game
2) the next patch/game/expansion will probably disappoint you, but that's ok you should stay civil and moderate
you know for sure that something very wrong is happening. A "ardent follower" population should believe intrinsically that the game/company is awesome and that complainers just don't understand it. In that regards, the reactions to the first batch of criticism against the supply system were much more "natural" (no it works as designed, you just don't understand it... etc).

If a company manages to screw up to the point that its most "ardent followers" acknowledge the fact that it fails to release products of reasonable quality, and needs close to a whole year of fixing so that their game actually functions, that really is sad.

 

[unmerged(150330)]

Based on my experiences on me and others beta testing 1.3 here publicly, quality issues hardly are the fault of beta testers. For example the mega stack issue was well known before final 1.3 was released. Personally I felt I had a little different vision of what constituted a major game play issue than the developers. However, I guess the premise of that testing was always to fix/hack the absolutely 100% fatal "in your face" type of problems.

 

[oribiasi]

It is pointless to argue about what happened in beta-tests; the information is private, they won't ever be lifting that restriction, and the people who were beta-testers are not permitted to speak about it -- so what's the use? Let's deal with what we know/can talk about, not guesswork.

Obviously one of two things happened: (1) the beta-testers did shoddy work, PI beleived their evaluations of the game as working fine and sent it out as-is or (2) they did great work, PI thought it'd be too expensive to fix all the issues and needed revenue, so they released the game early.

So let's stop beating a dead, old horse and focus on constructive criticism/suggestions. It has been my experience that for the most part, PI listens and corrects their major issues. Not all of them have been fixed yet, but I think they will be. Remember HoI1 and 2, in their 1.0 stages, were NOT fully armed and operational battle stations (nerded out on that last sentence, sorry).

 

[VetMax]

they did great work

They did not
If hey did 1.0 would be playeble. Or at least 1.1c

 

[oribiasi]

They did not
If hey did 1.0 would be playeble. Or at least 1.1c

Ok, then the beta-testers didn't -- so now what? We won't ever know who they are or what happened, so what is the point of being angry about it? Contact Frederik of PI if you want to discuss your purchase, he has made offers before to address client concerns directly. Otherwise, let it go man, it's a video game and they are working on it now.

 

[themousemaster]

Does this qualify as "nerd rage"? Because from what I've read on these forums, even the most virulent posts stay remarkably civil, unless the harder ones are deleted before I get to read them. I'm used to (being French) a much higher level of verbal violence... so maybe what is unacceptable to you is normality for me.
Anyhow... my point is, when the "ardent follower" population starts using arguments which, in fine can be summed up as :
1) paradox is known to suck at release, it's your responsibility for being stupid and preordering the game
2) the next patch/game/expansion will probably disappoint you, but that's ok you should stay civil and moderate
you know for sure that something very wrong is happening. A "ardent follower" population should believe intrinsically that the game/company is awesome and that complainers just don't understand it. In that regards, the reactions to the first batch of criticism against the supply system were much more "natural" (no it works as designed, you just don't understand it... etc).

If a company manages to screw up to the point that its most "ardent followers" acknowledge the fact that it fails to release products of reasonable quality, and needs close to a whole year of fixing so that their game actually functions, that really is sad.

For the record:

A) I disagree that the linked post is civil. while the all-caps 4th paragraph hints at it, the 5th paragraph is where it is obviously unnecessarily overboard.

B) The "ardent followers" don't help a game anymore than the "virulent naysayers"... but BOTH of those types of people are, more or less, internet trolls (whether they realize it or not). I don't expect my OP to stop either of *those* people from posting; I'm just pointing out some (and forgive me for the use of this next word) facts about online posting for, perhaps, the people who actually DO care and may not have realized that their reactions weren't having the desired result.

If anyone wants to point out that there may be some emotionally-charged sentences in my OP ("go punch a tree" comes to mind), it certainly does, but I was careful to inject very specific uses of "feeling" since I was trying to make this post to be read by the "borderline emotional" posters, and a straight-faced medical thesis would've turned people off of reading it by line 2.

If negativity for something went down to 0, that's not an indication of success, it's an indication of a Vulcan Society. However, the pushing of overall negativity in the "towards 0" direction is going to be far more helpful than the, shall we say, "WoW-approach to forums"

 

[Dimes]

Does this qualify as "nerd rage"? Because from what I've read on these forums, even the most virulent posts stay remarkably civil, unless the harder ones are deleted before I get to read them. I'm used to (being French) a much higher level of verbal violence... so maybe what is unacceptable to you is normality for me.
Anyhow... my point is, when the "ardent follower" population starts using arguments which, in fine can be summed up as :
1) paradox is known to suck at release, it's your responsibility for being stupid and preordering the game
2) the next patch/game/expansion will probably disappoint you, but that's ok you should stay civil and moderate
you know for sure that something very wrong is happening. A "ardent follower" population should believe intrinsically that the game/company is awesome and that complainers just don't understand it. In that regards, the reactions to the first batch of criticism against the supply system were much more "natural" (no it works as designed, you just don't understand it... etc).

If a company manages to screw up to the point that its most "ardent followers" acknowledge the fact that it fails to release products of reasonable quality, and needs close to a whole year of fixing so that their game actually functions, that really is sad.

No, that's not nerd rage. Seems to me only to be a somewhat rude and uncivil post:

THE FACT IS HEARTS OF IRON 3 IS CRAP.

It amazes me that anyone here defends paradox at all, but maybe the minority folks defending paradox are paid by paradox or maybe their just blind dumb asses?

Some of you just dont get it do you?

Do you really think that just because paradox gives themselves a presence here for player feedback it means a working game is their priority? ofc not!

I can of course only use my own experience with PI and trust that they WILL fix the problems with HOI3.

The only thing he (and the many other much worse posters) is accomplishing posting this is that people like King and Johan might actually stop reading these forums instead of reading and posting on them on Christmas Eve on his vacation like King did.

My point is this: Very often it is not what you say that is the problem, but how you say it. If you want people to take you seriously you have to provide information in a way that will make them take you seriously - otherwise they most likely will just ignore you and the information you want them to have.

There is NEVER anything wrong with staying civil

 

[Thain_Took]

...Most people are better off waiting 1.5 years to get the gold or complete edition of a Paradox product which will WAD and save them lots of $ as compared to buying the initial release and then the subsequent expansion packs...

I came to this same conclusion years ago. I'm no longer willing to waste my money, more importantly my time, on unfinished products.

However, Paradox never really seems to finish some games. EU3 "Complete" apparently wasn't, as there is yet another expansion pack you can buy. Even EU2 recently came out with an expansion pack/redo. But maybe that's better than just abandoning a game, as seems the case with Crusader Kings.

 

[VetMax]

I came to this same conclusion years ago. I'm no longer willing to waste my money, more importantly my time, on unfinished products.

However, Paradox never really seems to finish some games. EU3 "Complete" apparently wasn't, as there is yet another expansion pack you can buy. Even EU2 recently came out with an expansion pack/redo. But maybe that's better than just abandoning a game, as seems the case with Crusader Kings.

That's for sure. The spice must flow!

 

[Porkman]

They're in the game making business and getting treated like garbage by the customer is just part of the job, in fact it's part of every service/product oriented job... your customers may actually think all your hard work adds up to suckage. It is what it is. They need thicker skin if they can't handle their community of gamers taking their game to task.

You sound you like you worked in a service industry job and took the wrong lessons away. Just because a certain level of jackassery is inevitable doesn't absolve the individual jackasses of responsibility. Paying someone for a product doesn't give you the right to treat them without basic human decency. I can't think of a part of the EULA that read, "if the game does not work as expected or advertised, the end user can make personal and profane attacks upon the developers and fans." :rofl:

 

[Hagar]

There is NEVER anything wrong with staying civil

Like the French say: C’est le ton qui fait la musique. Or in English: You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Being civil will ensure you'll have a far greater chance of getting your message across.

As to HoI3 quality standards: well there's always the trade-off between the commercial aspects versus quality. If gaming companies would release a game only once the game is completely bug-free then they're very likely not to release it ever, simply because they'd gone belly-up in the process. You should see the amount of bugs we manage to include in our final products, and that's despite taking QA very seriously indeed. Like many others in this thread I'm confident Paradox will address most of them in due time. That's good enough for me. Some other companies do not, that's for sure...

 

[Veldmaarschalk]

Actually Johan has made a statement along those lines a while back... Delving it up again might prove to be a heck of a challenge, but believe me he did. Obviously that does not apply to the Beta test group as a whole - certainly not to those that stayed on. IIRC 25% of the 100 Betas actually contributed in a positive way.

Here is one such posts

It wasn't a 3rd.

We had basically 15-20 betas out of 200 that were active. And another 20-25 that posted once or twice..

The active betas was insanely good, but to find all problems you need a really big good group of people.

The ironical part was that several of the inactive betas were people we HAD taken in cause they had complained alot on the forum on previous games claiming "the betas sucked, I can do a better job"..