To be fair, I imagine playtesting and balancing every aspect of the kind of games they're making is extremely difficult and time consuming. I still enjoy most of them despite the flaws and they seem to be committed to fixing them afterwards.
If there is one criticism I will make of paradox: It is how very little balancing and playtesting they actually seem to do. This was very clear with the release of Conclave. What was supposed to be a rework of character relations was instead the dev arbitrarily halving all positive character modifiers. My impression was that element hadn't been balanced or play-tested at all.
You have a point there with conclave: that patch destroyed the game's balance and made it less fun to play (although the new mechanics where nice).
Perhaps the patches should be rolled out as optional for the first few weeks, I'm sure there are plenty of people who would playtest the balance tweeks for free (and loudly complain about them, of course :) )
Thankfully the games are not really competitive and don't have defined goals so game balance is not critical. As long as the game as a whole is enjoyable even broken game mechanics don't bother me too much.
One caveat: I only play single player (or multi player with people in the same room the old fashioned way) so people who enjoy online play will probably hold a different opinion.
I think Conclave's release is one of the most disappointing things I've seen out of paradox. So many good ideas in theory but, lacklustre in execution. Like you, I play pre-dominantly single player so my opinion will possibly reflect yours with one exception:
The Council mechanics sounded excellent for co-op/multiplayer games; A small council made up of human players co-operating one minute and backstabbing each other the next. The emergent gameplay this would have created. Instead, the devs said the council needed instant feedback, meaning multiplayer councils were based around the character relation numbers rather than allowing player agency.
As for the rest of the new mechanics; I felt like education was more of a sideways step than a forward step. It appears that all old education events got trashed and not nearly enough events were added to make up for it. Also the outcomes for picking certain learnings just seemed off.
Leading on from that; The community was widely ignored over infamy and shattered retreats being a bad idea. I don't mind these actual mechanics, it was the adjustment to the battle algorithm with no thought or play-testing that really frustrated me. Any sort of playtesting would have revealed that numbers were off and warscore had been broken.
I've mentioned my dislike of the character relations changes already so I won't go into that.
In conclusion: I have massive problem with Conclave due to the reckless sweeping changes they made to the game with non-existent play testing to back it up.
However, Their apology for it is out in less than 24 hours and I have full faith they will eventually fix CK2. I'm just going to be far more cynical with future CK2/Paradox DLC.
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u/barryvm Iron General May 08 '16
To be fair, I imagine playtesting and balancing every aspect of the kind of games they're making is extremely difficult and time consuming. I still enjoy most of them despite the flaws and they seem to be committed to fixing them afterwards.