This isn't anything new, they've been doing this for a few years. They cite "toxicity" for any serious fan backlash against shitty gameplay decisions they've made. Stellaris had some nice incidents with this where their devs whined about how no one liked their updates. CK2 would have too, but the worst bullshit Paradox forced in there (the India DLC which literally broke the game since they seemingly never bothered to test it) was a bit before the days you could use buzzwords like "toxicity" and silence vast swathes of people. I know Hearts of Iron 4 had some nice drama too, it looked like shit on release, especially compared to the glorious WWII autism simulator that was HOI3 with all expansions. And don't forget the drama with East vs West (they've memoryholed the thing and it's forbidden to bring it up) and that one EU3 spinoff game (based on a popular mod) they had which likewise was memoryholed. The latter was especially funny considering the lead developer of it was an utter joke himself (he was some Portuguese guy who even after the game was canned made posts insisting it was still happening).
I would just like to take this opportunity to mention that the Portuguese modder ended up sperging so much that his parents had him involuntarily committed to an asylum and we haven't heard much from him since.
During the height of the drama, he even dared to claim that Paradox gave him ownership of the Clausewitz game engine.
As far as I know, this was just a case of the game not living up to Paradox's standards (Okay, that might generate a lol from you guys, but this was during a period when they were trying to shake the buggy reputation and CK2 was released around that time with very few major bugs), followed by them missing key development milestones and after the nightmare of letting a previous modder develop a game (Magna Mundi, the Portuguese modder's game mentioned above) they weren't having any of it.
I have heard rumors of some political sperging, but looking at it now I can't see any sources for it. I also see topics about it on Paradox's forum so it hasn't been memoryholed, nor is it forbidden to bring up.
To be fair, when one of your more popular games, and definitely one that's been an ongoing DLC cashcow for you continues to have the same bugs, DLC after DLC, with the community asking you to create some easier and/or/more intuitive means of addressing the mechanic in question, you probably deserve a reputation as "producing buggy games".
Case in point - since 2.2 Le Guin, which is when they changed how workers were assigned as the planetary/colony level, they changed the system a fair amount. I don't really recall exactly how the older system worked, as I might have played about 20 hours, then left the game alone for 6-8 months, and then 2.2 dropped (which also made previous saves unplayable without going through a process to make them compatible with 2.2), but I do know that I still have problems getting populations to stick to jobs. You pretty much have to manually dial down the priority of jobs until it matches the available population in the "social strata" (rulers, specialists, menials, or similar), and you have to do it every time you get any population growth, add a building, or add a district to a planet or megastructure.
God-fucking-forbid that you have multiple species, because with the various traits that could be at play, the system is almost guaranteed to decide that you should have the species specially adapted for mining working on producing for your societal traditions research, the species specially designed to be autistic super-researchers farming, your domestic-specialist robots mining, and no way to correct any of that, either by encoded weights in the programming, or via some kind of micromanagement system.
Image relevant, since they just dropped a new DLC on June 4th, and you STILL can't adequately micromanage your populations on a planet-by-planet basis, in a game built around micromanagement.
I'm starting to wonder if Paradox took a look at how the various clowns associated with ARK: Evolved (and the rest of the games from that group) have managed to capture a crowd of sperging exceptionals that keep throwing money at them for DLC after DLC, without ever getting major bugs and enormous playability issuse (like the memory leaks in ARK, for example) fixed. Those forums are probably even more exceptional than the Paradox ones, because if you were to start a thread about "I like these cool new dinos you added, but the game is only playable for short periods on my machine, because of the memory issues; I wish you'd fixed those instead of adding more content?", you'd have a pile of assholes reeeing about "They're the devs! They know what they're doing!" and "Those dinos fuck you up instantly because muh realism!", because exceptionals gonna exceptional, I guess.
This isn't anything new, just Johan/Paradox continuing wokeness while making the games progressively shittier and shittier, expect Paradox stock to plummet the next few years while more garbage like Imperator is released, I doubt Stockholders are happy about alienating fans with shitty political gesturing and draconian forums. Expect criticism of Imperator to get memory holed and silenced to protect Johan's precious fee fees.
First time I ever heard that "kebab" was considered racist and not just a joking term for Turks/Muslims (you know, like most other food related terms for ethnicities) was when Paradox Forum mods started threatening people who used it with suspensions and bans. And then a bit after EU4 came out they posted a sticky which warned about the consequences of using the term "kebab", thus putting it on the same level as the stickies in the Hearts of Iron forums which warn about discussing the Holocaust in your threads.
Why do I get the feeling the only interaction Paradox/Johan has had with Muslims is Johan bumping into one while on the way to buy his soy latte and speedwalking away while muttering "s-s-sorry" as the Kebab shouts Arabic obscenities? Literally every Muslim/Turk I've ever interacted with on the internet was either indifferent or thought it was funny.
I'm starting to wonder if Paradox took a look at how the various clowns associated with ARK: Evolved (and the rest of the games from that group) have managed to capture a crowd of sperging exceptionals that keep throwing money at them for DLC after DLC, without ever getting major bugs and enormous playability issuse (like the memory leaks in ARK, for example) fixed. Those forums are probably even more exceptional than the Paradox ones, because if you were to start a thread about "I like these cool new dinos you added, but the game is only playable for short periods on my machine, because of the memory issues; I wish you'd fixed those instead of adding more content?", you'd have a pile of assholes reeeing about "They're the devs! They know what they're doing!" and "Those dinos fuck you up instantly because muh realism!", because exceptionals gonna exceptional, I guess.
I think that's more of an example of Survivorship Bias since anyone who criticizes would get b& and removed, or wouldn't dare to post at fear of upsetting the soy overlord.
This isn't anything new, they've been doing this for a few years. They cite "toxicity" for any serious fan backlash against shitty gameplay decisions they've made. Stellaris had some nice incidents with this where their devs whined about how no one liked their updates. CK2 would have too, but the worst bullshit Paradox forced in there (the India DLC which literally broke the game since they seemingly never bothered to test it) was a bit before the days you could use buzzwords like "toxicity" and silence vast swathes of people. I know Hearts of Iron 4 had some nice drama too, it looked like shit on release, especially compared to the glorious WWII autism simulator that was HOI3 with all expansions. And don't forget the drama with East vs West (they've memoryholed the thing and it's forbidden to bring it up) and that one EU3 spinoff game (based on a popular mod) they had which likewise was memoryholed. The latter was especially funny considering the lead developer of it was an utter joke himself (he was some Portuguese guy who even after the game was canned made posts insisting it was still happening).
It's really funny how mod teams like Meiou and Taxes are able to make a game with 100 times more realism and depth for free without any access to the source code and having to work around Paradox's Spaghetti code while the actual Paradox team is so fucking incompetent they keep game breaking bugs for literally years. And then they whine about the meanie bo-beanies who criticize their precious game that they can't even patch. Fucking Bethesda is more competent and user friendly.
They banned the use of the word Kebab when referring to Turks and banned all mods that let you commit genocides... despite the Cherokee's trail of tears being in the vanilla game.
They banned the Putin Mod for Darkest Hour because it criticized Soros and let you play as ISIS and banned any mod that has holocaust flavor events (regardless of the context).
Pony mods are pinned threads all over the forum and most of the mods that people use are banned on their forum.
How is this not Holocaust denial? They are literally ignoring it ever happened and banning anyone who mentions it, we should let the nice people at Kotaku or some other rag know about this. Live by the soy, die by the soy.
How long before someone from Paradox gets exposed as a Sexual Predator you guys think?
I would just like to take this opportunity to mention that the Portuguese modder ended up sperging so much that his parents had him involuntarily committed to an asylum and we haven't heard much from him since.
During the height of the drama, he even dared to claim that Paradox gave him ownership of the Clausewitz game engine
He also claimed he was suing Paradox, Frederik Wester, and Johan Andersson personally over it. Maybe it's for his own good he's been committed.
As far as I know, this was just a case of the game not living up to Paradox's standards (Okay, that might generate a lol from you guys, but this was during a period when they were trying to shake the buggy reputation and CK2 was released around that time with very few major bugs), followed by them missing key development milestones and after the nightmare of letting a previous modder develop a game (Magna Mundi, the Portuguese modder's game mentioned above) they weren't having any of it.
There was some good drama with the EvW team, some of whom were pretty professional about it and then others like the "Project Kennedy" guy who apparently was behind some stupid shit. But it's been a while.
I have heard rumors of some political sperging, but looking at it now I can't see any sources for it. I also see topics about it on Paradox's forum so it hasn't been memoryholed, nor is it forbidden to bring up.
Might be now, but I remember they didn't like people discussing the game for the few months after the release, and not just based on the leaked pre-release version. Last time I checked you also needed an account to view the (now locked) EvW forum but it's been a while.
This isn't anything new, just Johan/Paradox continuing wokeness while making the games progressively shittier and shittier, expect Paradox stock to plummet the next few years while more garbage like Imperator is released, I doubt Stockholders are happy about alienating fans with shitty political gesturing and draconian forums. Expect criticism of Imperator to get memory holed and silenced to protect Johan's precious fee fees.
What was the deal with Imperator? It looked fun and looked like a nice update to the old ass EU Rome. Was it your typical Paradox game on release and riddled with bugs, half-baked features, and thus will only be playable with mods or in a year or two minimum after they put out 50-60 bucks worth of DLC?
Funny how only CK2 seemed to make something new while actually being playable on release. EU4 too but it just felt like an EU3 mod with CK2 graphics.
It's really funny how mod teams like Meiou and Taxes are able to make a game with 100 times more realism and depth for free without any access to the source code and having to work around Paradox's Spaghetti code while the actual Paradox team is so fucking incompetent they keep game breaking bugs for literally years. And then they whine about the meanie bo-beanies who criticize their precious game that they can't even patch. Fucking Bethesda is more competent and user friendly.
I haven't played an unmodded Paradox game in so many years. M&T is indeed a god-tier mod. It's probably why I don't play Paradox games much anymore. Too much frustration when they'd release a patch fixing some annoying bug but it would take the mod time to update to it, and then I'd be annoyed because I'd have to restart my game.
What was the deal with Imperator? It looked fun and looked like a nice update to the old ass EU Rome. Was it your typical Paradox game on release and riddled with bugs, half-baked features, and thus will only be playable with mods or in a year or two minimum after they put out 50-60 bucks worth of DLC?
Imperator feels...wrong in every sense of the way. It's very clunky, got bugs, and it has even more of a "Mana" focus than other recent Johann titles, many of which have very narrow usage (Religious Power); so much so that PDX is now saying their long-term goal is redesigning the game to remove "Mana." When something like that happens shortly after release, you know they done fucked up, even moreso than the typical Paradox day-one release bullshit. It took them over a year before they released they designed themselves into a corner with Stellaris and started redoing shit, while Imperator had them admit it in a month.
I hope they fix it because it does have promise. Just right now it's feeling very cheap.
Paradox Interactive are worthless. They banned me just for calling their Imperator naval system lazy for having only one ship type. Guess what's coming in a future patch? Multiple ship types.
They have a hair-trigger temper and will ban anybody, and they pimp out some of the most (in terms of actual time spent coding) exploitative DLC I have ever seen, compared to a fanbase that creates entirely new games just out of mods.
I hate them and I genuinely want them to go out of business, even if they don't ever get a new competitor to keep making grand strategy games.
Paradox Interactive are worthless. They banned me just for calling their Imperator naval system lazy for having only one ship type. Guess what's coming in a future patch? Multiple ship types.
They have a hair-trigger temper and will ban anybody, and they pimp out some of the most (in terms of actual time spent coding) exploitative DLC I have ever seen, compared to a fanbase that creates entirely new games just out of mods.
I hate them and I genuinely want them to go out of business, even if they don't ever get a new competitor to keep making grand strategy games.
It's unlikely they'll go out of business unless they get a competitor: grand strategy games are whale magnets.
Personally, I like Stellaris, but then again, I play it with like a dozen mods, so...
When I first this thread, my first thought that Johann was in a rage ever since the community emphatically voted against "monarch mana." Would not be surprised if all this was a cover for that wretched mechanic.
One thing I always wondered about the Paradox Forums is which users were genuinely just fanboys of the games and which users were paid shills (likely Paradox employees on sockpuppet accounts) doing damage control.
It's unlikely they'll go out of business unless they get a competitor: grand strategy games are whale magnets.
Personally, I like Stellaris, but then again, I play it with like a dozen mods, so...
When I first this thread, my first thought that Johann was in a rage ever since the community emphatically voted against "monarch mana." Would not be surprised if all this was a cover for that wretched mechanic.
What are you referring to by "emphatically voted against?" other than the fact the mechanics were criticized a lot (and some of the devs hated it). I've been out of the loop for about a year on Paradox Forum drama.
What are you referring to by "emphatically voted against?" other than the fact the mechanics were criticized a lot (and some of the devs hated it). I've been out of the loop for about a year on Paradox Forum drama.
Johann started a thread on Imperator's release (it was a flop apparently) about monarch mana and how it affected gameplay etc with a linked twitter poll, mana being Johanns baby. Alas, the players voted against it and Johann promised to remove it in Imperator and reconsider its place in their other games (how they are planning to truncate a big feature on a dead new release is anyones guess.) Anyway he is a massive prick on the forums so its only a matter of time until he has a temper tantrum.
The best paradox game without mods is Crusader Kings II, which Johann was not a part of incidentally. I'm not big into their forum drama llama either it was just mentioned in the other thread.
The paradox fanbase is fucking bat shit nuts. Like I get why the forum is shit tbh. You will never see more autistic arguments in your life arguing about a no name peasant from middle Timbuktu in the 6th century AD, who's grand contribution to history was fuck all. Then getting righteously indignant about it. Also the LARPers of all sorts, tankies, an coms, monarchists, strasserists, Iron Guard, NazMao, etc. Super niche ideologies that maybe 3 people know arguing in earnest that unit X is OP/UP because the group they don't like is making it so.
The paradox fanbase is fucking bat shit nuts. Like I get why the forum is shit tbh. You will never see more autistic arguments in your life arguing about a no name peasant from middle Timbuktu in the 6th century AD, who's grand contribution to history was fuck all.
Typical furry shit. If they actually cared they'd just mod in one themselves (there's a Zap Brannigan advisor voice mod, for example), but obviously it has to be in the actual game so they can gloat on twitter about forcing themselves on other people.
Paradox Interactive has had toxic forums since I been on there since 2005; the best example I can think of is their history and non-English forums, you will see a full-on display of a bunch of historical nonsense bickering over who has the biggest e-penis.
Why? Well, they do make games for your average autistic sperg who like to map paint, I am sure you saw their newest cesspit of a game called, 'Imperator Rome' that came out in April this year. They are just lazy hacks that did a one-to-one port of Europa Universalis: Rome with a refined map and terrible user-interface with fewer features than their previous title in the series. Imperator Rome is just a game sold as a beta that does not even have basic features as moving your capital until whenever they update the game or sell it as DLC. If I am not mistaken, there are only four songs in the base game of Imperator Rome, and you need to spend another $6 to get the remainder of the music.
Tbf, the material that the community produces is more superior that the actual alternatives from the game. Also, Darkest Hour is better than HoI4. Fight me
Tbf, the material that the community produces is more superior than the actual alternatives from the game. Also, Darkest Hour is better than HoI4. Fight me
The sad thing is Paradox would not be anything without the modding community that supports their games. The BlackIce mod for Hearts of Iron III is the only real reason you would even play that game, the same can be said for Kesierreich or the Cold War mod for Hearts of Iron IV.
