The devs say they will not be focusing on making multiple start dates any more

[Snow Crystal]

How can we (The community) help? The last dev diary produced a number of suggestions for map and de-jure changes (Including my own very reasonable suggestions for Bulgaria). Part of these suggestions come from a place of understanding that the current CK2 team can't be expected to be experts on the entire medieval world, and leverage the community's knowledge and passion for history. Research is well and good, but it can only happen if there's an impetus to do the research in the first place. Not to mention that the map is rather large now, and dev hours are finite

I guess the question I'm asking is, when the community makes suggestions for this kind of thing, how much would be helpful to include? Just an outline of the suggestion and reasons for its inclusion, like in the post I linked? Would it help to have suggestions for baronies, ruler history, and CoA included? How can we make your jobs easier, so we can all improve this game we enjoy so much?

It is still sort of limited, as we would have to go through everything and actually verify that it is reasonable to add it to the game. So even though you say .. Bring links and information, we would still have to go through all of it, and then implement it. Even though a forumite would take the extra extra step, it would still take some time for us to actually go through all of it.

But if you want to make a good suggestion for a map change (for example), I would recommend doing it like this:

• A short summary of what you think should be added, why, and how it fits into the game.
• Link to a lot of maps to verify what you have said
• Links to historical characters that would fit in, or straight up a document showing us a timeline of the characters and links to them
• A document where you have set up what changes you would make. In other words, what changes to current content, what new content, which baronies go into the new content, alternate cultural names for the place, which new duchies you make, which provinces go into them, renamed provinces etc etc.
• Coat of Arms for every new province, every new Duchy and every new Kingdom

The more of these things you can add in (though I suggest as links rather than a huge forum post, for brevity's sake), the easier it would be to implement an idea.

And I would suggest trying to discuss your idea peacefully with those who disagree with you, because .. Let us be honest here. Like I mentioned earlier, CK2 has a timespan of 700 years, and there is a bunch of changes back and forth that could be made, and people will disagree what is the right answer. If you end up making childish fights with other forumites, it just ends up sullying the whole post, at least in my eyes.

 

[elvain]

How can we (The community) help? The last dev diary produced a number of suggestions for map and de-jure changes (Including my own very reasonable suggestions for Bulgaria). Part of these suggestions come from a place of understanding that the current CK2 team can't be expected to be experts on the entire medieval world, and leverage the community's knowledge and passion for history. Research is well and good, but it can only happen if there's an impetus to do the research in the first place. Not to mention that the map is rather large now, and dev hours are finite

I guess the question I'm asking is, when the community makes suggestions for this kind of thing, how much would be helpful to include? Just an outline of the suggestion and reasons for its inclusion, like in the post I linked? Would it help to have suggestions for baronies, ruler history, and CoA included? How can we make your jobs easier, so we can all improve this game we enjoy so much?

can't speak from a dev perspective of course, but maybe I could help with perspective and experience of long-term (though currently vacant) modder who has dealt with many such suggestions and who himself made quite many of them too, few of them successfull.

1) the most imprtant and basic thing is the manner how that suggestion is put. Any kind of demandive behaviour disqualifies the suggestion in the first place. NOBODY of us wants to deal with anybody who doesn't bother to treat you with respect as a human being. The suggestion can have perfectly made province borders have them already on game files, have perfectly made all other game files (province history etc), all rulers, all this with elaborated (yet brief) explanation why it should be done this way, if it is demandive and - what's even worse - if some nationalism or chauvinism can be sensed from that post, it disqualifies itself as bothersome and unreliable - in many cases both.

2) Keep in mind that in the end the responsible person will be the one who implemented the changes into the game and therefore if he/she has doubts about your reliability as a good source, he/she won't use your suggestions... or only as marginal source. Especially if some sort of national sentiment can be felt from it (I'm saying that knowing the fact that many injustices are made because history of some nations is being ignored or marginalized, though, being louder and accusing anybody from being anti-[fill your nation of interest] never makes it any better). But most importantly, I want to say that the responsible person needs to be able to check what you are sugesting and there's 99% probability he will want to make the changes by himself, because it is his responsibility. So offering several suggestions and discussing which one you consider better under these or those condition always helps, because it helps the responsible person to be the one to take the decission best fitting to his (game's) needs.
Support your suggestions with (reliable! and verifiable!) sources if possible, because the final responsible person will most probably want to check and potentialy adjust something by himself.

3) if you can provide full and sourced list of rulers for the province (holding) it can always help, but make sure it fullfills the above mentioned conditions.

4) Try to be as brief as possible. Reading sources is always found better than reading something from some guy from the internet (I always fail at this point )

5) keep in mind that even if all the conditions were met, there still may not be a person to look at it, read through it and do the changes. Sometimes / often / mostly / always the team is quite busy with things which have higher priority. Even if they would often want to check it, they can't or don't have time. Note that while you think they can just take it and port it into the game, it may well take them few hours to orientate themselves in the issue, read through, and then put it inside.

EDIT: Okay, ninja'd by @Snow Crystal for being redundantly long

 

[Parafoudre]

If not enough people play the "in-between" dates (although 10-15% is a lot higher than I expected...)

10-15% don't play the first three dates, but they don't necessarily play the in-between ones.

 

[Parafoudre]

How did you learn about the dates thing without already having a Paradox account then?

You should take into consideration the fact that his main account, could be unusable.

 

[Snow Crystal]

EDIT: Okay, ninja'd by @Snow Crystal for being redundantly long

HAH! Get rekt Elvain

But seriously speaking, Elvain is right.

 

[rinehime]

10-15% don't play the first three dates, but they don't necessarily play the in-between ones.

Good point.

How did you learn about the dates thing without already having a Paradox account then?

You do know you don't need an account to browse the forums, right? Just the subforums like bugs/suggestions/modding/etc. Now you're the one that's trolling.

 

[Masternachos]

IF CK3 decides to go with set bookmarks only, it could be a good idea to poll the forums, etc. to see what could potentially be the most anticipated start dates. ie, List a bunch of start dates you're thinking of (along with explanations of what said start date IS), have people vote for X of them, go off that. It could save time and effort while also giving players a real sense of involvement (I think there's another word better describing what I'm thinking of, but...).

 

[Parafoudre]

IF CK3 decides to go with set bookmarks only, it could be a good idea to poll the forums, etc. to see what could potentially be the most anticipated start dates. ie, List a bunch of start dates you're thinking of (along with explanations of what said start date IS), have people vote for X of them, go off that. It could save time and effort while also giving players a real sense of involvement (I think there's another word better describing what I'm thinking of, but...).

If statistics show one thing about this game, it's that the desires of the actual player base are greatly different from the desires of the forum users.

 

[TyroniusRex]

If statistics show one thing about this game, it's that the desires of the actual player base are greatly different from the desires of the forum users.

Yeah i do often consider that anyone in the forums is likely more of a die hard fan which essentially makes us a demographically lopsided vocal minority, which is only so useful for the devs to 'keep their finger on the pulse' of the community

 

[elvain]

IF CK3 decides to go with set bookmarks only, it could be a good idea to poll the forums, etc. to see what could potentially be the most anticipated start dates. ie, List a bunch of start dates you're thinking of (along with explanations of what said start date IS), have people vote for X of them, go off that. It could save time and effort while also giving players a real sense of involvement (I think there's another word better describing what I'm thinking of, but...).

I think that if they will decide to go for CK3 they should first make the game concept based on what they want and can do and that will give them a notion about the time period. If they ask the forum, it will most probably answer: give us the longest timespan you can = the earliest start dates as possible.

I can see very big difference in current CK2: if you check the game's graphics and everything (events, etc.) it all fits to the High medeval and early Late medieval era (11th-14th century), while most people chose to play as early start date as possible, which means 769 (the biggest mistake and nonsense for a game like CK2) and 867. I frankly don't like this discrepancy. The game really shouldn't go beyong 850... or IMHO not even beyond 950.

The times before 900 were very different era than what we imagine as Middle ages with all those knights, castles, stone churches, independent cities etc. None of that existed before 900 A.D. and most of it not even before 1050 and pushing game 300 years before that is nonsense. And IMHO the community should not be asked about it, because everyone would ask for the earliest date possible just to be able as long as possible.
But that distorts the image of that period. Times of the 7th - 10th century, or the migration era in general should geit its own game. The warfare, institutions, social and political processes, the graphics of that era were all very different from both how we imagine Medieval times and how CrusaderKings describe them.

If the community should be given the privilege to vote about start dates, it should vote among start dates offered by the devs between 900-1450 +/- 50 years maybe

 

[Metanetwork]

I just want to know who does all the research for all the historical characters. Dynastic crests, title histories, character attributes, skills, even their general appearance in some cases. Here's what I think happened: (and for assumption purposes, well call the person responsible for all this 'Jeff')

Paradox: "Hey, Jeff. Thanks for putting so much incredible detail into the game. Every DAY from 1066, 'til the end of game, you accounted for every. single. person. -And you did great. Fantastic job. But now were' going to release a new DLC, focus on the Charlemagne era, and the Carolingian Empire. It'll start in 769. So... you know what that means. Time for you to fill the gaps! Every single day, from 769 to 1066... get to it, son. If you could go ahead and just take care that... it'd be grreeaat."

Jeff: "Oh GOD, no. I can't. I nearly lost my mind last time. I can do TWO start dates... but that's it. No MORE!!"

While some cadet children are missing here and there, most of the titles have a full history going from 769 to the end date.

 

[classicist]

Welp, I suppose there's nothing else to be done except to start a new game in the unbookmarked in-between-dates, and to keep at it ferociously.

 

[Masternachos]

If statistics show one thing about this game, it's that the desires of the actual player base are greatly different from the desires of the forum users.

Ah. Right.

 

[Masternachos]

I think that if they will decide to go for CK3 they should first make the game concept based on what they want and can do and that will give them a notion about the time period. If they ask the forum, it will most probably answer: give us the longest timespan you can = the earliest start dates as possible.
...

If the community should be given the privilege to vote about start dates, it should vote among start dates offered by the devs between 900-1450 +/- 50 years maybe

Yeah, I meant basically Paradox would decide on what THE start date is going to be (as well as THE end date), and then pitch some specific bookmarks, based on events or maybe characters they'd be interested in working on AFTER that date. And people could only vote for a certain number of them so no one can essentially answer "All of the above".

 

[Ruwaard]

Currently the bookmarks are sorted in 5 periods, from Charlemagne to the Late Middle Ages. IMHO each present period should perhaps still get at least one bookmark.
One of the IMHO drawbacks of only bookmarked start date is, that the best bookmark for certain periods often tend to differ from region to region.
For instance it never was a bookmark, but I always liked the potential of the 1273 start date, with the struggle between Rudolf of Habsburg and Ottokar II in the HRE. Now another part of the map might be better off with a slightly different start date.

 

[nwil10]

@Snow Crystal

Could you link us to some of tge indormation you guys used to make the decisions of who owned "it", when, etc. I would love to read through it.

 

[LizardCommander]

Speaking as as guy who had to manually edit 1355 province history files (and not the hundreds of ducal, King tier and Empire tier titles too) I can say that what PDX needs is a custom utility that spits out title histories on demand. I made a simple one for my mod, they need something a bit more complex to fill in entire histories.

I hope that Paradox has a basic code-writing macro that simply spits out simple syntax based on clicks, would make programming a lot easier with one for anything that isn't requiring entirely new lines to write.

I would then use a program that runs lines against one another to see if there are conflicts and the relationships between the lines (which overrides which, which is not 'running' as is (and therefore error in the code), or if there are conflicts like 'will not run b/c line x prevents line y from running'), perhaps not the simplest thing to design, nor the quickest, and new programming would require more inputs for both of these, but would still save a lot of time in the future and for bugfixing.

For user input would be 'intended values' and then it would perform a simple search to determine whether or not these exist in their proper state within the section being reviewed, so something as simple as a wrong number of spelling error don't cause bugs to appear.