I'll be plain with you, because I believe the situation calls for it, as there is a bad mood right now among forum members and even some moderators and members of the QA team concerning fixes for things that need fixing.
Everybody knows what I'm talking about. Those things used to be okay in the Bug Forum (say, 2 years ago). Now they're getting criticized, moved, and rebranded as 'feature suggestions' even when they are very clear design flaws or omissions or illogicalities in the scripting.
That's not the correct way to address them. Yes, the game is great, and I love it — just like everybody else, and I've got 2000 hours logged on Steam to prove it. But, inventing a new definition of 'bug' and 'WAD' and promoting the idea that requesting a fix for a flaw is a feature suggestion does not bear good witness to the game and solves nothing. The game is not being put on a criminal trial where the prosecution needs to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that something is broken or needs fixing. Deflecting every last shade of a suggestion that something 'needs fixing' (i.e. is bad) as opposed to 'could perhaps be made better' is not intellectually honest, is not productive, creates bad atmosphere and leaves a bad taste in my mouth whenever I go through the forums.
A moment ago, I pointed out that c_Istria and c_Aquileia for obvious reasons have no business being in de iure k_Bavaria as of 769 or 867 — or, thought is less obvious — even 1066. A moderator moved the thread out of the Bug Forum, over my objections, to be buried under a cushion of naval combat/enatic succession/Amazons DLC threads. I kept arguing. I heard that my thread was a suggestion on how to improve the historicity of the game. Following that same kind of logic we could call CTD reports 'suggestions on how to improve the stability of the game'?
Today, a member reported that between an underaged emperor and a human-controlled landed regent neither of them was allowed to end a pending war. Response from QA team? The dev team need to be persuaded(!) to do something about it. Well, if they have the time (yup). At least nobody posted in my own report thread about being unable to grant away excess counties when above the demesne limit (after winning a crusade during regency and receiving every single title in k_Jerusalem) and called it a mere suggestion to change a feature I disliked/disagreed with.
There are many such spots in the game, some of which are difficult to anticipate or notice until you end up in a specific situation (but once you are in that situation, they can in some cases even break your game). My problem is not with the fact that those flaws are in the game at all — although their sheer number and the way more and more of them are introduced in all the subsequent patches that come out without proper design/conceptual QA and pre-release testing is disconcerting — and not even the way in which nothing is done to fix those things over weeks, months, in some cases years, but with the way in which they are being rebranded as features, swept under the rug, even defended. Which — along with some people in PR/dev team's excitement over 'early access' comparisons (i.e. prolonged public beta, which CK2 was supposed to be at release) — is the true nail in the coffin, which has me seriously considering quitting the game now.
There needs to be a forum in which posters are free to report design and scripting flaws with dignity, and there needs to be some reassurance that those threads won't be left to suffocate under a cushion of 'hey, I came up with a nice idea' and 'now this is something that'd be cool to see in the game' threads.
When a report about a serious and obvious flaw that needs fixing is being rebranded as a 'feature request' and when the lack of direction, coordination and QA in post-release development of this game is being rebranded as something positive a.k.a. 'early access' (we didn't sign up for that in Feb 2012) — that's just too much to take.
Bottom line: There needs to be a forum where one can report a flaw, omission or some other problem without being expected to coat it in terms of a proposed improvement, and a place where you can report things that clearly don't make sense (e.g. Base Reluctance making regents veto almost every decision up to and including handing out above-limit titles, the realm be damned) without being expected to pretend that you're only voicing your own personal and subjective opinion. For the sake of both decency and common sense. Both of which are missing right now.
TL;DR: Please separate 'improvements' from 'fixes'. There needs to be a line drawn there.
Thank you.
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