Isn't it weird how the people with thousands of posts and every Paradox game under the sun on their accounts are coming out of the woodwork to make excuses.
Let me cast Vicious Mockery as a Reaction here:
Isn't it weird how the people with a hundred and some posts (or less! Imagine that!) are coming out of the woodwork to ask generic questions, which everyone who spends ~5 seconds thinking about can already give an answer too?
No, not really, because OP (hopefully!) didn't actually want to have a legitimate question answered, but merely wanted to complain about the same thing we've been going up and down most of the forum's first page for about 12 days (eh, maybe it's 11, don't think people got too much into the lategame performance issues on release day, given it was evening).
Isn't it weird how the people with thousands of posts and every Paradox game under the sun on their accounts are coming out of the woodwork to make excuses. It doesn't matter if the bugs are in the process of being fixed, and it doesn't matter if we call those bugs performance issues or not. What matters is this is a wide spread problem that should have been impossible to miss, yet somehow it made it to launch and now almost two weeks later we can't play the game we paid for. The little details of how we describe the bug don't really matter when this should never have been sold to us in the first place. I mean saying "they're fixing it" is like asking me to praise the guy who slashed my tires because he's now back with a puncture repair kit and a guilty look on his face.
Round 2!
Isn't it weird how the people with a hundred and some posts (or less! Imagine that!) are coming out of the woodwork to start asking how such an obvious and glaring issue could ever have been missed and how Paradox should have never sold/released anything but perfectly bugfree (or, if the person asking is somewhat reasonable; 'free of critical issues') updates and usually imply that Paradox is a big scheme of scams and whatever-else they can come up with?
Again no, because obviously the people not following PDX developement practices too closely are not too aware that this is a regular thing that basically happens every other release in most of their running game franchises (just go and post a "Hey, can anyone label me updates that were shipped with really critical bugs or broken features" in any of the game's subforums. You will get responses. Some of them even truthful and/or reasonable).
It's called Agile Developement. You release iterations in the shortest possible intervals, to get the maximum amount of feedback in the shortest possible timeframe. You do not spend overly excessive amounts of resources on doing everything pixel perfect and releasing it in a single big go, but instead settle for producing gradual upgrades to an existing product, not all of which might provide the same value or are of the same quality. And before you claim otherwise,
it works. Agile Developement, Scrum and the various offsprings of that are the next step in software developement. I could quote studies here, but screw that because noone would read them anyways, if you have enough brain to understand the matter, you shouldn't have trouble Googling that.
And it's working. And people are supporting it. Because otherwise we wouldn't be here talking about a game that wouldn't exist, created by a guy who has just a couple days ago announced he's moving to work on yet another project that is being funded by the successes we have just hypothetically refused to accept.
The one core gripe that I have with this, however, is that Paradox is not providing THIS VERY POST'S POINT as a public explanation.
The release is not meant to be bug free (I mean, in an Utopia, it would be, but it will never be), because it's too inefficient for the developement cycle. Instead you get an unstable release, alongside being freely able to play the previous 'stable' version via Steam branching. You can buy the DLC and play what is effectively an Open Beta, or you can not buy the DLC and play the Open Beta, or buy the DLC and not play the Open Beta, or not buy the DLC and not play the Open Beta. The options are all there. But because PDX doesn't explicitely list them to people, all they see is "I bought and it has bugs, why no fix?". (And before someone makes the false advertising argument: No software advertisement ever claims it's free of bugs and no legislature anywhere enforces quality standards on software, except in relation to protecting sensitive data. And if you start trying to compare software developement with something like food quality controls/standards, I'll hack your brain with a banana, because that statement is approximately the same level logic.)
PS: And now I've gone and ranted an essay again. Excuse me whilst I grab some food, get a good drink and play some Stellaris. I need fun now, and repeating myself takes the fun even out of otherwise enjoyable arguments.
