Seriously disappointed with recent Paradox trend

[SKOTy]

I love you Paradox (just look at my games under my badge), but sometimes there's enough.

I've spend thousands of hours playing PDX games and I've been enjoying them a lot but recently I am observing a decline in quality of patches and DLCs provided and I seriously considering stopping buying DLC from now on.

I play mostly EU4, Stellaris, Vicky 2 (which is dead from development point of view) and HoI franchise so I'll be talking about them.

Let's talk about EU4 first, apart from bloated number of DLCs (I get this, as everyone needs to eat and have some place to sleep) and some DLC which were released just for purposes of releasing something (Mare Nostrum - I think community agrees that it's just DLC made for purpose of releasing something).
The quality of recent patch 1.20 and accompanying DLC went dramatically down. I've found many obvious bugs which even a person not working as QA would find in one of the main features of accompanying DLC (3 reported by myself as others were already reported). Simple playtest and observation would be enough, there were really no complicated steps to reproduce these bugs.

HoI4 - bought field marshal edition but I do not feel I've received something worth $70 (yes I am still promised 2 DLC but if you look at Together for Victory size I fill like I was scammed). I still much rather play HoI3 due to its depth although HoI4 brought amazing innovations (production lines) it still lacks the strategic depth.

And now Stellaris patch 1.6 - I was looking forward to play on Tuesday with new patch and finishing some achievements - but guess what they didn't pop (did the mistake of not checking forums before actually starting playing) and as a bonus the galaxy just went full pacifist. Never go full pacifist as it breaks the fun.
There are at least two issues with Stellaris that are severity one, which in any other company would mean people working overtime to fix this - now we haven't even received an ETA for hotfix. Not to speaking about that both of these issues would be discovered by a regular playtest.
Patch was meant to please community on Stellaris one year anniversary, should I be worried about upcoming HoI4 anniversary?


Here's the thing Paradox, we are your CUSTOMERS and we determine your success. A bit of more focus on actually polishing your products instead of meeting goals on releasing unfinished and buggy patches/DLCs would help. Also add a bit more communication towards us, customers.

I am working in software S&P 500 company and if we would be doing the things you're doing recently, trust me, we would no longer be a S&P 500 company.

Just two things that we're doing differently and could be done better by you Paradox.

- communication with customer - I've filed multiple bug reports but in many of these I am missing any form of communication - do you acknowledge the bug report? will it be fixed? when? (that's clearly missing SLA between us). Simple "Thank you for bug report, it is tracked for release with 1.x patch" would be enough.
Another thing, no communication about desperately needed hotfix for Stellaris 1.6, just that it will be ASAP (ASAP today? ASAP next week? not to mention that this is the exact reason for working overtime (maybe it's just a deformation from working for such large company))
I think lack of some customer level agreement is seriously hurting us, customers.

- general quality of products - by number of totally obvious, 100% reproducible and sometimes gamebreaking bugs it seems that Paradox has hardly any QE - in our company we have 1 QE for every one developer and things like, internal beta (tested by our customer support), public beta, bug re-verification, general sanity testing are part of the release which prevents situations like this with patch 1.6.
I really, really don't want to sound like teaching you what your QA should be doing but to me it seems like your QA is spending more time hunting some corner case issues and exploitable things instead of focusing on general stability of the product.



The pool of goodwill you've accumulated has been depleted and I doubt you'll see any more money coming from me unless this trend stops and it will take some time for you to regain my trust. I won't even buy a Vicky 3 which is the thing I am thrilled about for past 5 years.
Looking at your annual report you had the best year so far, so one disappointed customer might not concern you, but I am sure I am not the only one.

 

[XYN]

I love you Paradox (just look at my games under my badge), but sometimes there's enough.

I've spend thousands of hours playing PDX games and I've been enjoying them a lot but recently I am observing a decline in quality of patches and DLCs provided and I seriously considering stopping buying DLC from now on.

I play mostly EU4, Stellaris, Vicky 2 (which is dead from development point of view) and HoI franchise so I'll be talking about them.

Let's talk about EU4 first, apart from bloated number of DLCs (I get this, as everyone needs to eat and have some place to sleep) and some DLC which were released just for purposes of releasing something (Mare Nostrum - I think community agrees that it's just DLC made for purpose of releasing something).
The quality of recent patch 1.20 and accompanying DLC went dramatically down. I've found many obvious bugs which even a person not working as QA would find in one of the main features of accompanying DLC (3 reported by myself as others were already reported). Simple playtest and observation would be enough, there were really no complicated steps to reproduce these bugs.

HoI4 - bought field marshal edition but I do not feel I've received something worth $70 (yes I am still promised 2 DLC but if you look at Together for Victory size I fill like I was scammed). I still much rather play HoI3 due to its depth although HoI4 brought amazing innovations (production lines) it still lacks the strategic depth.

And now Stellaris patch 1.6 - I was looking forward to play on Tuesday with new patch and finishing some achievements - but guess what they didn't pop (did the mistake of not checking forums before actually starting playing) and as a bonus the galaxy just went full pacifist. Never go full pacifist as it breaks the fun.
There are at least two issues with Stellaris that are severity one, which in any other company would mean people working overtime to fix this - now we haven't even received an ETA for hotfix. Not to speaking about that both of these issues would be discovered by a regular playtest.
Patch was meant to please community on Stellaris one year anniversary, should I be worried about upcoming HoI4 anniversary?


Here's the thing Paradox, we are your CUSTOMERS and we determine your success. A bit of more focus on actually polishing your products instead of meeting goals on releasing unfinished and buggy patches/DLCs would help. Also add a bit more communication towards us, customers.

I am working in software S&P 500 company and if we would be doing the things you're doing recently, trust me, we would no longer be a S&P 500 company.

Just two things that we're doing differently and could be done better by you Paradox.

- communication with customer - I've filed multiple bug reports but in many of these I am missing any form of communication - do you acknowledge the bug report? will it be fixed? when? (that's clearly missing SLA between us). Simple "Thank you for bug report, it is tracked for release with 1.x patch" would be enough.
Another thing, no communication about desperately needed hotfix for Stellaris 1.6, just that it will be ASAP (ASAP today? ASAP next week? not to mention that this is the exact reason for working overtime (maybe it's just a deformation from working for such large company))
I think lack of some customer level agreement is seriously hurting us, customers.

- general quality of products - by number of totally obvious, 100% reproducible and sometimes gamebreaking bugs it seems that Paradox has hardly any QE - in our company we have 1 QE for every one developer and things like, internal beta (tested by our customer support), public beta, bug re-verification, general sanity testing are part of the release which prevents situations like this with patch 1.6.
I really, really don't want to sound like teaching you what your QA should be doing but to me it seems like your QA is spending more time hunting some corner case issues and exploitable things instead of focusing on general stability of the product.



The pool of goodwill you've accumulated has been depleted and I doubt you'll see any more money coming from me unless this trend stops and it will take some time for you to regain my trust. I won't even buy a Vicky 3 which is the thing I am thrilled about for past 5 years.
Looking at your annual report you had the best year so far, so one disappointed customer might not concern you, but I am sure I am not the only one.

I agree with the hotfixes part. While it's nice that PDX fixes things eventually, playing anything close to the release day is almost guaranteed to be a frustrating experience.

Also overtime is not a big company deformation - I work as a software developer too, and with small/medium companies, we always did it when needed. On some projects even could be called in the middle of the night if it's something really critical.

Now I don't say that it is what everyone should do, but it would be nice if they at least planned for their days off, to avoid situations like "we released it right before holidays, see ya in 2 weeks while this major bug is there".

Bugs are normal and expected in any product, but treating the customer base like beta testers in these situations is not good.

The old software engineering wisdom "don't release on Fridays" is nice to stick to. If there are problems you either ruin your holiday or give some pain in the ass to your customers.

 

[neusaap]

I think to be fair these are growing pains that result of the rapid growth the company has experienced lately. Either they will adapt or they keep pumping out garbage which is something they will see in the sales at some (and then they will probably adapt at that point).

If you look at the frankly laughable state CK2's M&M dlc was released, that's not something the customer base will indefinetely accept (though I'm sad to have to note that there somehow appears to be a hardcore fanbase that would buy expansions even if the content is confined to things already produced by the modding community - not the best given for quality in the capitalist system).

I also have the idea one of the main reasons of those problems is that they're undermanned, I'm under the impression that most overhaul teams are significantly larger than the official dev team...

 

[Seven Sulivin]

Remember when Paradox broke multi player oon Mac in EU4? They had to release a hot fix ASAP. Sometimes Paradox will slip.

 

[Tomas Nau]

there's people who don't wait until there's several dlcs/patches to get the games?

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

We still need a Vicky 3

 

[steven77]

Yeah this DLC policy is getting ridiculous, I feel like some of the things that they added in DLC should have been included in the base game (CK2 is a good example of this.)

 

[delra]

Yeah this DLC policy is getting ridiculous, I feel like some of the things that they added in DLC should have been included in the base game (CK2 is a good example of this.)

If they give their work away for free, how do they buy food for their kids?

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

If they give their work away for free, how do they buy food for their kids?

He did not say give it all for free. Some things do seem like they should be integrated into the game itself as it changes too much. For example EU4: Mandate of Heaven
As for DLC that are fair for DLC, look at Purple Phoenix(EU4) and Sunset Invasion(CK2)
He is not saying to give everything away for free, just to reevaluate what does into dlc and what into the actual game

 

[--Yigito123--]

He did not say give it all for free. Some things do seem like they should be integrated into the game itself as it changes too much. For example EU4: Mandate of Heaven
As for DLC that are fair for DLC, look at Purple Phoenix(EU4) and Sunset Invasion(CK2)
He is not saying to give everything away for free, just to reevaluate what does into dlc and what into the actual game

...And then have people complain that the DLC has too few features and isn't worth it.

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

...And then have people complain that the DLC has too few features and isn't worth it.

If you want Aztecs invading Europe or a more impactful Byzantium gameplay, buy the DLC. If you don't like Byzantium, then don't. Simple as that

 

[--Yigito123--]

If you want Aztecs invading Europe or a more impactful Byzantium gameplay, buy the DLC. If you don't like Byzantium, then don't. Simple as that

Again, people will complain that Paradox is wasting their time churning out ahistorical/pointless garbage and not working on meaningful DLC's .And good luck getting people to acknowledge that Paradox is adding what used to be DLC content into the free patch, because they will never acknowledge that and claim it would've been in the free patch in the past too.

Cue "Paradox is stealing our money", "I'm seriously disappointed with recent Paradox DLC" and so on. Don't forget that those DLC's you're talking about were neither well received nor were best sellers.

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

Again, people will complain that Paradox is wasting their time churning out ahistorical/pointless garbage and not working on meaningful DLC's .And good luck getting people to acknowledge that Paradox is adding what used to be DLC content into the free patch, because they will never acknowledge that and claim it would've been in the free patch in the past too.

Cue "Paradox is stealing our money", "I'm seriously disappointed with recent Paradox DLC" and so on. Don't forget that those DLC's you're talking about were neither well received nor were best sellers.

Except this stuff is purely optional and most likely won't damage gameplay? No one is complaining about Purple Phoenix and Sunset Invasion being DLC. I am talking about the more impactful stuff, like how you can't properly play a good amount nations in CK2 without buying certain DLC

 

[CiderMuffin]

So on the EU4 one it's less "releasing a dlc for the sake of dlc" it's more "a lot of people didn't like the features of some of them which were probably experimental mechanics"

On the Stellaris one, bugs happen. It's a game development fact, no game is bug free. They're not going to leave the bug in and there is even a beta patch you can play with.

 

[Zardnaar]

I gave noticed this trend as well. We have 30 and 40 player EUIV and theres a bit of bitching.

 

[lolada]

Nobody's perfect but that post is way too harsh. For example bug reports - you can easily see that devs respond to bug posts, not for every one of them ofcourse. You can see in this forum that they often redirect players to post a savegame file in bug forums.

If you have followed the game and forums more closely you could also see that quite a few game features included in expansion were user suggested.

You can also see advertisements that they hire new QA members. DDRJake was hired as QA for example.. You could see that they explained this issue after releasing expansions that number of hours played by players is huuge and the logic behind finding bugs after expansion releases.

You could see that hotfix comes very quickly after major releases. They even open beta access if you really want the patch early. Considering complexity of the game and sheer number of expansions and extra content number of bugs is minimal. Hardcore players find some obscure bugs and exploits that happens, but normal players won't even ever notice any bugs.

Then they often give 75% discounts on lots of game content. You always get some content for free etc etc thats just from top of my head.

I don't know.. i still haven't found a game company that communicates better with customers and produces more good content.

 

[Ananix]

Prices were recently doubled(really, doubled) for maybe just turkey, I dont know, but with the current price, I am done buying DLCs. Not worth the money anymore.

This whole problem is just encouraging piracy. And I am starting to feel stupid for actually buying DLCs.

 

[BeyondExpectation]

I love you Paradox (just look at my games under my badge), but sometimes there's enough.
I still much rather play HoI3 due to its depth although HoI4 brought amazing innovations (production lines) it still lacks the strategic depth.

What makes you say HoI3 is deeper than HoI4?

 

[MikeFranks]

It is also my feeling, this is why I stopped to buy PDX games now. I am also waiting for sales for interesting DLCs of EUIV.

I understand the important value of DLCs for the compagny but come on, it is beginning to look like "train simulator" and its millions DLCs.

So now, as I said, I still playing their games but I don't plan at all to buy one of their récent games. I want complete games, not overpriced and with INTERESTING DLCs.
Please stop to do as CO with cities skylines which vomits on the players with useless DLCs. Mods are giving funnier times, for free ...

 

[b_raven]

I think PDS just got decadent trait.