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With the current setup of division of work, would it be better to have the community manager/ambassador located in Barcelona or Stockholm? Having 2 that don't know more than us seems to defeat the purpose of the function.
 
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At the moment, the community manager, who's here in Stockholm, and the community ambassador, who's located in the UK, are also having difficulty getting direct info from the team as they are hard at work on fixing things in Barcelona. If they're too busy working on the game to let you know directly, they're also too busy to update us thoroughly enough to give you that info ourselves. I know it feels a bit weird to think that we don't necessarily have that much more info than you at the moment, but that's kinda true ^^'
I know Tinto is a new-ish studio and things are still in flux, but a community manager that's not on-site is not very useful to either the developers or the community. I would hope that's not going to be standard practice going forward.
 
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With the current setup of division of work, would it be better to have the community manager/ambassador located in Barcelona or Stockholm? Having 2 that don't know more than us seems to defeat the purpose of the function.
That's something we've been discussing in the team for a while! And Tinto is actually the studio we've had in mind from the get-go to test having a community manager embedded on-site (aside from all the ones working close to PDS here in Stockholm of course). It hasn't happened yet because, well the pandemic. Not really relevant to hire or relocate someone to Barcelona when everyone is working from home anyway... But it's absolutely something we're investigating for next year potentially!
 
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With the current setup of division of work, would it be better to have the community manager/ambassador located in Barcelona or Stockholm? Having 2 that don't know more than us seems to defeat the purpose of the function.
Imagine you are at work, drinking coffee non-stop for the past 27 hours and having giant red eyes from staring at the screen, and a guy appears behind you every hour and taps you on the shoulder with "Hi Joe, so how is it going? Are were there yet?" :D

Now we know the real reason why they left Sweden!
 
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To answer globally on some of the points above:
  • I'm the Head of Comms, so most of the answers you'll get from me are communications/community-related, I can't and won't give you answers on the dev side of things (but I'll help the dev eventually provide them to you!). I can help you with what I'm in charge of, basically.
  • I know what matters first and foremost is for Paradox to fix and improve on the things you've escalated and have created frustration in the community. The main reason the actual devs have not been super active here themselves (and you're therefore stuck with me) is that they're actively working on the next hotfix. You'll eventually get news about that, and their plans, and everything, but the priorities for them have been "fix things > talk to the community", which even if it's a bit frustrating at times, is probably still the right set of priorites.
Edit: I remember now reading my message that "globally" doesn't mean the same thing in English as it does in French and I keep making that mistake, but I can't find a good alternative, so you'll have to suffer my Frenglish.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion but imo keeping the community in the loop should be one of the highest priorities for the devs (well maybe not all of them but just the team leads perhaps), after all people are a lot happier to wait for a fix if they know that a good one is coming, and what will be fixed (this also helps to abate future issues since it manages player expectations instead of a hotfix coming through and people being annoyed that x problem wasn't fixed). From our perspective we are not only incapable of playing the game now but we also don't know when we will be able to, which sucks.
 
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Imagine you are at work, drinking coffee non-stop for the past 27 hours and having giant red eyes from staring at the screen, and a guy appears behind you every hour and taps you on the shoulder with "Hi Joe, so how is it going? Are were there yet?" :D

Now we know the real reason why they left Sweden!
This is a more aggressively accurate description of a CM job than you can possibly imagine. The fear and discomfort you have when you go interrupting a dev that has been super hard at work on something to ask them for an update... It's real.
 
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This is a more aggressively accurate description of a CM job than you can possibly imagine. The fear and discomfort you have when you go interrupting a dev that has been super hard at work on something to ask them for an update... It's real.
Give the CM a cupcake/luxury coffee budget. You'll see they will come crawling.:cool:
 
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I couldn't care less for this hollow PR apology, you've done this too many times now. We want to know WHY you released this sorry excuse for a dlc, WHY you thought this would be okay and WHY the person responsible for this still has a job. What's going on with PDX? Is upper management really filled with such incompetent people? Worrying.
 
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This is a more aggressively accurate description of a CM job than you can possibly imagine. The fear and discomfort you have when you go interrupting a dev that has been super hard at work on something to ask them for an update... It's real.
Yeah it's a rather common trope
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Also, for those of you who hadn't noticed yet, echoing to the 'actions not words', another hotfix has been released for EU4 Leviathan just now.
 
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Also, for those of you who hadn't noticed yet, echoing to the 'actions not words', another hotfix has been released for EU4 Leviathan just now.
Happy to see this. I'm hoping we'll soon get some proper clarification about what happened with Leviathan and what will change to stop it happening again, now that the most urgent hotfix is out. Edit: although unfortunately it looks like there are still plenty of serious bugs with the new patch.

I remember now reading my message that "globally" doesn't mean the same thing in English as it does in French and I keep making that mistake, but I can't find a good alternative, so you'll have to suffer my Frenglish.
I understood you fine, but I think "broadly" or "generally" could be what you're looking for :)
 
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Also, for those of you who hadn't noticed yet, echoing to the 'actions not words', another hotfix has been released for EU4 Leviathan just now.
Very happy that fixes are coming out, but I will say that one of the primary "actions" here isn't getting the fixes out, it's about Leviathan releasing in this state in the first place. I think that this thread in particular, which got active again after the latest update (before it was locked), kind of exemplifies why people are upset:


A lot of people are now starting to worry that this is a persistent pattern of releasing an unfinished, buggy mess, ruining savegames, charging for that privilege, and then promising that it won't happen again. I realize that these things can sometimes be a fact of life for software development, but this is TWICE in the span of 3-4 months for the same game that this has happened. And even back then, we were told:

"Before we return to the Nakama update, we intend more extensive testing to better identify any additional problems, and will explore the feasibility of a public beta. We apologize for ruining the Europa Universalis IV experience that so many of you have been having."

So I guess my point here is not just that it's a bad expansion/patch. It's the fact the we kind of feel lied to since PDX promised that things would change and be better next time, then it seems absolutely nothing was done to follow through with it, and now the end result is even worse than before. And I suppose that's why folks aren't as happy with the post-release fixes as they maybe could be, because we were told very shortly ago that this wouldn't happen again. It just feels like no lessons are being learned and no visible actions are being taken too fix them.
 
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@konbendith Thanks for your explanation in depth. The idea of embedded community managers sounds quite exciting tbh. A midpoint between the marketing enthusiastic buzzword expert and the person who wants to talk to the compiler rather than to people.

If devs aren't paid to go on the forum, is a figure like Snow Crystal basically doing it all in his free time? One way to create dev presence would be to pay the most socially sparkly team member to mess about on the forums for an hour or two a week, dropping an insightful comment or two from the dev perspective while staying clear of the toxic threads.

And some of the threads that turn toxic could perhaps be addressed in some manner, without requiring anyone to actively wade through and engage in it (which I would not ask anyone to volunteer for). The thing is, I have personally never understood why secrecy exists around bug fixes. Fixes are not company secrets or spoilers of future content. Leaving a simple "we're aware of it" or "we hope to fix that by 1.x.y" post might go a long way to cooling down a hundred people shouting who all have as the goal to try to make Paradox aware of their pain.
 
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Hey everyone, just giving you the heads up that I'm turning off work things for the day (and I'm a big believer in the value of my free time, so don't expect too much of me outside of work hours). I've kept an eye on this thread super actively today, it's unlikely I'll be able to dedicate as much time to it for the rest of the week because you know, I'm in charge of a 20+ people department which, among other things is in charge of shipping a certain event happening later this month, including the announcement of a new game that I'm sure you're all excited about (I actually only gotten quite a bit of time today because most of my crew was in rehearsals :p).

So still expect me around here, an answering the questions I can answer, but probably not as fast and often as I did today!
 
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among other things is in charge of shipping a certain event happening later this month, including the announcement of a new game that I'm sure you're all excited about (I actually only gotten quite a bit of time today because most of my crew was in rehearsals :p).
Sewing victorian-era costumes for the event, no doubt!
 
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Shifting the light of blame from the company back to the customers. Wow. You release an unfinished expansion, that we have to pay for, and wilfully release a patch that breaks the game...barely fixing in it in bugfixing patches...and WE are the ones in the wrong?

The swiftness of this move is SO Machiavellian. Love it. When did Nestle buy out PDX?
 
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It's a little abnormal to ban reviews until launch.
I actually i've seem several streamers indicate embargosdisallowing them from doing a review of the game before launch, even while being able to stream it.
 
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I don't believe we've ever silenced, banned, or stopped working with someone because they were critical of us.
Either you're not aware of what happened with Arumba, you're blatantly lying, or more went on behind the scenes that for whatever reasons you're not sharing. The perception as it stands from a long time loyal player that started with Hearts of Iron in 2002 is that you do not listen to players anymore. I will not say my full thoughts of the treatment of players like me on the forums publicly. But the public perception of the company is one of toxic company culture that cares more for churning out releases then actually fixing problems. HOI4 has had a glaring flaw of unlimited aircraft since launch that has ruined the game for me from launch, and has yet been fixed and barely even acknowledged. The simple fact here is a corporate/company culture that no longer values player input.

Edit: I left the forums a year ago precisely because of this attitude towards players.
 
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