I do appreciate Shaka of Carthage giving us a heads up that the peace conference is still on the to-do list. Assurances are important. It lets us know, that maybe the developers want to fix it, but cannot find the time to do it. I suspect that is not the fault of the team itself, as it is most likely required to prove its worth to the company, by creating money producing content within short windows of time. From the outside looking in, it seems the team is given just enough resources to produce this cash flow, leaving large fixes that are hard to charge money for undone.
If this situation exists then making the large complicated improvements would require the company spending more money on the team, while theoretically, making no extra money in the end. The other option is for the team, for a period of time, to produce less money, while maintaining current costs, while they make these type improvements. Either one is a tough sell to executives who are probably under pressure to do the exact opposite, that being, increase the money made per dollar spent.
Since these forums are one of the only means I know of to communicate what players find valuable in the game, it is here that some of the communication will happen. Making that tough sell to the executives for the resources to provide what is being asked for, may (or may not) be advanced with voices here.
But here's the confusing thing. Based on this logic, why fix bugs at all?
Every modern game developer releases updates to their game in downloaded patches. We live in the amazing time of "living games." Many of these patches are for balance purpose, and some of them are significant, and surely take time and effort away another task that would make them money. So why fix anything if there is no money in it?
What about customer respect and satisfaction? I could argue there is value in that, although it can't be as easily measured as profits from a new DLC, developer reputation is a factor for future purchases. Now, maybe not so much for paradox players ...we suffer the dev's neglect and complain and yet we still hand over our cash for the next little drop of content...
In the stock market, a company will pay a dividend to stock holders. What the hell, right? Why would a company pay YOU? I see game maintenance and improvement as the same thing. A company should thank their customers by fixing a broken product, as a way to show we are important to them.
If a car company's car keeps exploding, shouldn't they do something about that? Well, there's no money to be made there, so who cares, let's keep making new cars? Wouldn't it make more sense to fix that exploding car that people have been complaining about for 4 years?
I brought up some examples that you could argue don't relate to devs and videos games, you may be right, but in my personal opinion the logic of it is the same.
Does paradox really like having a reputation that they only care about money and peddling DLC? I don't think so.
In fact, paradox actually did earn my respect when they listened to my thread on heavy French tanks and put them in the game. I probably would have moved on from HOI4 by now, but paradox has actually proven in the past that they will do things like this to improve the game. But yes, that was just simply unlocking tech, and i know a peace deal rework is an entirely different story.
But i have to say the dev post, i disagree. There are so many little things that could be done right now to improve the peace deal system, and we want them right now rather than waiting another 2 or 3 years for a complete overhaul. For example, how long would it take and how much money would it cost to add a multi player peace deal turn timer so AFKrs don't ruin a session for 20+ players? Would it really be so hard to prevent ping-pong passing, when all they need to do is make sure turns go straight down before going back up so everyone can use their warscore before they're completely screwed out of any gains?
There are little things we need desperately and there is no sense in waiting to do everything all at once. I have to strongly disagree. We need it worked on now.
