Time to take a (permanent?) break because…

[Desatanica]

I have a lot of admiration for the many modders in the paradox community, and was one myself before joining PDS. This said, do not equate modding with working on an active codebase and engine, as well as the script associated with it. Modders have the luxury of potentially infinite time, entirely flexible quality targets, no need for translations, multi-platform support, no business targets, etc.

Changing one word that alters the meaning of a sentence in the base game could quite literally involve dozens of people, and hundreds of man hours after you rebuild for all platforms, undergo certification, and get things retranslated and verified. For script changes, there's more significant QA involved.

I agree that modders can use the canvas and paints that we provide to build incredible things - but the maintenance of those tools is an invisible cost to them.

You are mostly right, however generally speaking you are not. If you take this thread for example, every single suggested change would involve readjusting a .txt OOB and some country history for naval ships, obviously anyone would be able to implement this without mentioned obstacles. Likewise i just looked at every single change in the 1.11.4 Beta and over 75% of the changes are not code related, and simple adjustments of values such as how much a modifier gives, ai weight for focuses, adding missing portraits/order of things ect, things anyone is able to change, and quickly as someone whos knowledgeable.

In my opinion it would be clearly advantageous to allow people in the community to upload suggested changes to github or whatever other platform, at which point as game director you could go over the changes and QA among other things and consider adding it(or even just part of it) into the game without spending the man hours doing it, or finding out how to even do it.

Let me ask you this, how many dozens of threads of suggested changes, even simple and straightforward ones like this, have you thought "hmm this is a pretty good idea, but i cant be bothered incorporating it, as it would require too much work and moving people on it" Whereas if it was already finished infront of your face, and only a matter of you looking over it and giving it a green light, would actually be in the game? My guess is over 50%, which would be a very large amount of content and improvements, and appease tons of people who have been complaining about the same simple fixes for months/years.

 

[Miganto]

You are mostly right, however generally speaking you are not. If you take this thread for example, every single suggested change would involve readjusting a .txt OOB and some country history for naval ships, obviously anyone would be able to implement this without mentioned obstacles. Likewise i just looked at every single change in the 1.11.4 Beta and over 75% of the changes are not code related, and simple adjustments of values such as how much a modifier gives, ai weight for focuses, adding missing portraits/order of things ect, things anyone is able to change, and quickly as someone whos knowledgeable.

In my opinion it would be clearly advantageous to allow people in the community to upload suggested changes to github or whatever other platform, at which point as game director you could go over the changes and QA among other things and consider adding it into the game without spending the man hours doing it, or finding out how to even do it.

Let me ask you this, how many dozens of threads of suggested changes, even simple and straightforward ones like this, have you thought "hmm this is a pretty good idea, but i cant be bothered incorporating it, as it would require too much work and moving people on it" Whereas if it was already finished infront of your face, and only a matter of you looking over it and giving it a green light, would actually be in the game? My guess is over 50%, which would be a very large amount of content and improvements, and appease tons of people who have been complaining about the same simple fixes for months/years.

What about the people that don't want the changes? What about the changes that people want more than these changes? What about the then thousands of changes made by people that make mistakes or make unwanted changes, these all need to be reviewed. Something like github works when you are working in a small ish team, not when you have 70,000+ people (that was the peak load on steam alone, there are easily more than that) being able to make and making changes, the administration of that would require hiring enough people that DLC would need to double/triple/whatever in price to cover it.

Then comes the prioritisation of changes you want/like, not even considering the complaints coming about by changes not being made / not wanted / rejected, akin to this thread. What if the majority of people wanted to do the exact opposite of what this OP wanted, imagine the thread then when they get a 'denied' rubber stamp on their changes... i'm sure that would go down well.

There are so many people playing this game that almost every change requested by the community isn't going to have the majority backing it because others will want to change it 2% less, or add this extra flavour text, or they don't like the country as much, etc etc. You can't have a community run change system because the game would constantly be bouncing back and forth between ideas based on who is voting at the time.

 

[Crispin]

Forgive my ignorance if it's not feasible at all, but on the workshop for Total war Warhammer II you have a mod called Community Bug fix(over 70k subs). Which has been a god send between patches of said game, while also fixes bugs that never gets attention from Creative Assembly.

Why do you think something like that has not happened for hoi4 ? Is it because there are so many competing overhauls that fixes them themselves that coming together just won't work?

Warhammer II doesn't have that many overhauls, more small mods that add this and that so that could a reason for it being easier to come "together" so to speak. Also slightly bigger crowd.

 

[Corpse Fool]

I'll admit that I've acted out of line a couple of times on these forums, and had the mods put me in time out. Some of those times I'll admit that I deserved it, a smaller part of the time I am still indignant about.

Between the mod actions I've seen, having repeatedly been told by devs that devs don't want to engage with the forums because of debate culture and such, not having questions answered, and seeing what sorts of changes are actually made in comparison to things that are being discussed... I've taken rather large steps back (heh) in terms of my activity on all forums related to this game. I'm actually waiting for the post-patch turbulence to settle down and seeing where everything sits before making my own decision about whether to continue on with caring about this game, or cutting my losses.

 

[Arheo]

You are mostly right, however generally speaking you are not. If you take this thread for example, every single suggested change would involve readjusting a .txt OOB and some country history for naval ships, obviously anyone would be able to implement this without mentioned obstacles. Likewise i just looked at every single change in the 1.11.4 Beta and over 75% of the changes are not code related, and simple adjustments of values such as how much a modifier gives, ai weight for focuses, adding missing portraits/order of things ect, things anyone is able to change, and quickly as someone whos knowledgeable.

In my opinion it would be clearly advantageous to allow people in the community to upload suggested changes to github or whatever other platform, at which point as game director you could go over the changes and QA among other things and consider adding it(or even just part of it) into the game without spending the man hours doing it, or finding out how to even do it.

Let me ask you this, how many dozens of threads of suggested changes, even simple and straightforward ones like this, have you thought "hmm this is a pretty good idea, but i cant be bothered incorporating it, as it would require too much work and moving people on it" Whereas if it was already finished infront of your face, and only a matter of you looking over it and giving it a green light, would actually be in the game? My guess is over 50%, which would be a very large amount of content and improvements, and appease tons of people who have been complaining about the same simple fixes for months/years.

I respect your conviction for this idea, but we won't ever be going this route - while it sounds nice on paper, it would be a disaster in practice.

 

[Indyclone77]

You are mostly right, however generally speaking you are not. If you take this thread for example, every single suggested change would involve readjusting a .txt OOB and some country history for naval ships, obviously anyone would be able to implement this without mentioned obstacles. Likewise i just looked at every single change in the 1.11.4 Beta and over 75% of the changes are not code related, and simple adjustments of values such as how much a modifier gives, ai weight for focuses, adding missing portraits/order of things ect, things anyone is able to change, and quickly as someone whos knowledgeable.

In my opinion it would be clearly advantageous to allow people in the community to upload suggested changes to github or whatever other platform, at which point as game director you could go over the changes and QA among other things and consider adding it(or even just part of it) into the game without spending the man hours doing it, or finding out how to even do it.

Let me ask you this, how many dozens of threads of suggested changes, even simple and straightforward ones like this, have you thought "hmm this is a pretty good idea, but i cant be bothered incorporating it, as it would require too much work and moving people on it" Whereas if it was already finished infront of your face, and only a matter of you looking over it and giving it a green light, would actually be in the game? My guess is over 50%, which would be a very large amount of content and improvements, and appease tons of people who have been complaining about the same simple fixes for months/years.

It's quite impressive to have the Game Director explain to you why this approach doesn't work and then double down on it straight away.

Even "simple" history and OOB changes need to be verified via QA and a GitHub system would then double there workload of verifying all these new merge requests while also fulfilling all there other duties.

As Arheo says the realities of what goes into a game and the entire backstage machinery can be completely ignored by modders (I should know from all the modding I've done) which cannot be handwaved in a professional production and if we're would lead to a rapidly degenerative state of production where community scripting would still be ignored as it would clash with what could already be in development that the community is not aware of and so on.

 

[Kosaki MacTavish]

Even "simple" history and OOB changes need to be verified via QA and a GitHub system would then double there workload of verifying all these new merge requests while also fulfilling all there other duties.

"the realities of what goes into a game and the entire backstage machinery"

"it would clash with what could already be in development that the community is not aware of and so on"

Even a small railway, character, and autonomy status change (i.e. my recent mod)?

Darn, bureaucracy sucks, i know it.

But still, love ya devs.

 

[Desatanica]

I respect your conviction for this idea, but we won't ever be going this route - while it sounds nice on paper, it would be a disaster in practice.

You assume it would be, which is how how things that could happen, never happen. If you allowed such a option to be available to people like OP who clearly could have done everything himself, nothing is actually forced into the game, and you will still have complete control over updates. It's simply a tool to speed up improvements and additions of the game, with the work already done infront of you as developer, so in almost any situation this would be clearly advantageous. But i digress, it's 5 years into development at this point, and it's about time for me to throw in the towel for any hopes like this, and to be honest the game in general. I wouldn't even be writing any of this if the game was more open sourced and had the modding support myself and hundreds of other modders have always wanted/expected, because we could just change what we want.

 

[SquireBev]

You are mostly right, however generally speaking you are not. If you take this thread for example, every single suggested change would involve readjusting a .txt OOB and some country history for naval ships, obviously anyone would be able to implement this without mentioned obstacles. Likewise i just looked at every single change in the 1.11.4 Beta and over 75% of the changes are not code related, and simple adjustments of values such as how much a modifier gives, ai weight for focuses, adding missing portraits/order of things ect, things anyone is able to change, and quickly as someone whos knowledgeable.

In my opinion it would be clearly advantageous to allow people in the community to upload suggested changes to github or whatever other platform, at which point as game director you could go over the changes and QA among other things and consider adding it(or even just part of it) into the game without spending the man hours doing it, or finding out how to even do it.

Let me ask you this, how many dozens of threads of suggested changes, even simple and straightforward ones like this, have you thought "hmm this is a pretty good idea, but i cant be bothered incorporating it, as it would require too much work and moving people on it" Whereas if it was already finished infront of your face, and only a matter of you looking over it and giving it a green light, would actually be in the game? My guess is over 50%, which would be a very large amount of content and improvements, and appease tons of people who have been complaining about the same simple fixes for months/years.

How long before every ship in the game is renamed Boaty McBoatface because "the community" thought it was funny?

 

[Desatanica]

How long before every ship in the game is renamed Boaty McBoatface because "the community" thought it was funny?

Are you trolling, or serious?

 

[Kosaki MacTavish]

How long before every ship in the game is renamed Boaty McBoatface because "the community" thought it was funny?

You know that this is on the other end of the spectrum of things we're actually talking about? I mean, all i want from the vanilla game is rather historical, such as:

1. Reworking Formation of Arabia decision(s) since the concept of Arabia that is closest to 1930s is comprised of the entire Arabian Peninsula except of British colonies with possible expansion to Iraq. That's from McMahon-Husein Correspondence in 1916, less than 20 years before the game's starting date.
2. Reroute the Trans-Java Railway to follow the more important Northern Coastal Route instead of the lesser-capacity Southern Route.
3. Making British Malaya and Dutch East Indies under Unaligned Colonial Government to make it more like British Raj. Democratic puppet is more akin for the Dominion status after all.

 

[SquireBev]

Are you trolling, or serious?

My point is that opening anything up to community contribution is sure to attract unwanted changes due to people trolling/memeing, and it'd be an absolute nightmare to moderate.

 

[Desatanica]

It's quite impressive to have the Game Director explain to you why this approach doesn't work and then double down on it straight away.

Well yes, I'm objectively correct.

Even "simple" history and OOB changes need to be verified via QA and a GitHub system would then double there workload of verifying all these new merge requests while also fulfilling all there other duties.

Yes, the simple history and OOB changes that are already thoroughly researched by OP with links to research and articles related to them. Which could easily be done by people uploading similar changes of other things, or god forbid half a day of the QA looking into it to double confirm it.

As Arheo says the realities of what goes into a game and the entire backstage machinery can be completely ignored by modders (I should know from all the modding I've done) which cannot be handwaved in a professional production and if we're would lead to a rapidly degenerative state of production where community scripting would still be ignored as it would clash with what could already be in development that the community is not aware of and so on.

These changes mentioned by OP could have been theoretically finished and uploaded to github 3 years ago, and still be compatible today to be implemented in the next patch. I want you to realize what i just said.

 

[awmobile367]

My point is that opening anything up to community contribution is sure to attract unwanted changes due to people trolling/memeing, and it'd be an absolute nightmare to moderate.

I understand you were attempting to be funny with your statement but when I read it I did not see "your point" in what I read merely a snide commentary that didn't fit at all with the meat and potatoes of the discussion.

 

[qer]

Honestly I think the one good idea to come from this thread beyond the entitlement of some people is to have something similar to the custodian team of Stellaris for some backwards compatibility improvements. For example improving the Naval tech process to be less bloated or incorporating armored cars to the tank designer.

 

[Arheo]

Well yes, I'm objectively correct.

And with that stunner of a comment, I'll be locking this thread. We've exceeded the limits of what can be considered constructive here.