Why are there four versions of 1.30 and seven versions of 1.31 in the beta list?

[grommile]

Dear Paradox,

Why on God's good green earth are there four versions of 1.30 (.3, .4, ".5 - Rolled Back", .6) and seven versions of 1.31 (.0, .1, .2, .3, .4, .5, .6) in the beta list?

Yours confusedly,
grommile

(Query inspired by someone in the PSA thread complaining about having version 1.15 yanked out from under their feet recently.)

 

[Republic of Mercury]

It's a marketing strategy; The illusion of choice.

 

[zorkman]

Dear Paradox,

Why on God's good green earth are there four versions of 1.30 (.3, .4, ".5 - Rolled Back", .6) and seven versions of 1.31 (.0, .1, .2, .3, .4, .5, .6) in the beta list?

Yours confusedly,
grommile

(Query inspired by someone in the PSA thread complaining about having version 1.15 yanked out from under their feet recently.)

Exactly, if you removed all the multiple versions of same patch like in the past nearly all the old versions would be available.

 

[Romanix90]

Because of Leviathan and 1.31 patch. It didn't work well so they released several additional patches (1.31.1,2,3 etc).

 

[grommile]

Because of Leviathan and 1.31 patch. It didn't work well so they released several additional patches (1.31.1,2,3 etc).

That doesn't justify keeping eleven patches for two versions.

 

[Romanix90]

That doesn't justify keeping eleven patches for two versions.

Would you prefer to play broken game, regardless of how many patches they've released, or to play the game with best possible state?

I don't realy care how much they've released patches as long as the game is in acceptable state.

 

[Word_Smith]

Exactly, if you removed all the multiple versions of same patch like in the past nearly all the old versions would be available.

For real.

 

[grotaclas]

I also think that most of them could be removed. Ideally the launcher should show a warning for users which uses these versions for at least a month before they are removed. And if it is possible, it would be good if the users would not be switched to the current version, but to a version which is compatible with their currently used version:

• 1.30.3 and 1.30.4 can be upgraded to 1.30.6 which should be fully compatible
• 1.30.5 is a little problematic, because it is achievement incompatible with all other versions, but hopefully every achievement run which was started on that version was finished by now and they can also upgrade to 1.30.6
• 1.31.0-1.31.4 are all compatible and could be upgraded to 1.31.4 (upgrading to a newer version, is a little problematic, because 1.31.5 added new monuments and they are broken if you load an older save which makes it impossible to acquire province modifiers which were replaced by these monuments(e.g. the missionary from Jerusalem))
• either 1.31.5 could be upgraded to 1.31.6 or 1.31.6 downgraded to 1.31.5, because 1.31.5 has one less bug and works with older versions of the microsoft c++ redistributables and is compatible with mods which change the main menu and have not been updated to include the epic button. 1.31.6 adds support for the epic store, but this is not really relevant, because epic doesn't have a way to access older versions

Edit: players who want an easy one-faith might want to keep 1.31.0, because it has a horde-religious policy which gives +100% missionary strength
Edit2: I just remembered that there was a crashing issue with mods in 1.30, but I don't remember the details. It might be that 1.30.6 crashes on some 1.30.4 mods.

 

[Jespoke]

They are being kept around to not break saves started on those versions. They are too recent to just claim nobody needs them, since some people play this game in 2 hour sessions once a week when they can get their multiplayer group together. As @grotaclas explains in detail, it takes some reasoning to decide which versions that can and can't be removed, which they just haven't decided to do yet.

 

[grommile]

Would you prefer to play broken game, regardless of how many patches they've released, or to play the game with best possible state?

I am completely in favour of them patching the game.

Keeping all seven patches of 1.31 available is... faintly ridiculous.