Reception & Thoughts | Patch 1.14.2 [Checksum fbf7]

Today marks the first dev diary since the release of Trial of Allegiance, so we’ll be looking back over how things went, and community reactions in a little more detail than usual. While I would have loved to have some data on player choices and interactions for today’s diary, our analytics engine is busy chugging away. So, we’ll have to hold off on that until the machine spirit has assessed the incoming preponderance of data.

The Elephant in the Room It would be hard to talk about Trial of Allegiance without first mentioning that we’re acutely aware of its critical reception from fans. I see no reason not to be transparent about this, and I’m going to use today as an opportunity to talk about what it means to us and how we analyze reactions, so let’s dive into some of the facts:

Everything’s on Fire! Well, actually no. Trial of Allegiance has thus far been one of our most stable releases in terms of bugs and player-encountered issues. This doesn’t mean there aren’t bugs: stuff always creeps through, but as you may have noticed by now, we’ve had an Open Beta running with a patch scheduled sometime today. The patch notes will be attached to the end of this document. Furthermore, we have another patch scheduled in next week to give us a chance to tackle more complex problems.

Due to the low incidence of bugs in the ToA content, we’re spending a bit more time on general improvements and things folks thought were lacking.

Developer’s Perspective: bugs are defects in the game - errors or unforeseen complexities that render part of the experience to not work as intended. We don’t usually consider design choices or outdated content as bugs unless they cause the first statement to apply, since that evaluation is often subjective.

Circles Within Circles Our steam review score has taken a fairly heavy beating on Trial of Allegiance. Reviews on DLCs are notoriously hard to draw accurate conclusions from, as very few people tend to leave reviews compared to the overall number of people who bought a DLC. Trial of Allegiance is particularly notable in that regard, as there are fewer reviews overall than we would normally expect. It’s absolutely possible to theorize behind why that is, but that’s all those are: theories.

That said, we read every review. Aaand it’s quite hard, tbh. Being a venerable ancient of the internet, I could wax lyrical on toxicity, vocabulary, and dissociation, but at the end of the day folks leave reviews for a reason. The language they use isn’t as important as the sentiment they’re trying to convey, even if they don’t always know the right way to do it.

What we try and do, therefore, is to try and don our armor of not-taking-things-too-personally, and group negative reviews by common themes or sentiments.

For Trial of Allegiance, we assessed clear ‘meta’ groupings in order of weight*:

- Unhappiness about recent regional currency price adjustments - Unhappiness about the price of the country pack > Compared to other HOI4 expansions > Other - Bought it but wanted something different > New mechanics, or > A european expansion - Unhappy with the quality of the release > In relation to specific issues; > In relation to mods > Unclear/Unintelligible > Unclear/Horrendously offensive

*This requires looking at global reviews, not english-language only: something we take quite seriously.

The exact weighting here changes a lot over time, but suffice it to say that the