Happy Wednesday! I’m Ryagi, Community Manager at Tinto. We’re back with yet another Tinto Talk, and this time we’re taking a moment to give a retrospective on the 1.3 Open Beta, which concluded with the launch of update 1.3 July 9th, last week. Somehow it feels like update 1.3 has been out for a month, but nope, I triple checked… It’s been less than a week at time of writing.
Overall we certainly consider 1.3 to be a success, and a large part of that success is contributed to the open beta period. That being said, we certainly hear that not everything pointed out was addressed successfully in time, which is why we have a new patch for 1.3 this week. So let’s take a brief moment to talk about that first!
Here are the changes related to trade:
Halved the base merchant maintenance cost to ease early-game trade profitability.
The base trade range is now wider and the merchant capacity penalty for trading beyond it is less steep; more neighboring markets now fall within free range, and stretching past it costs less extra capacity per unit of distance.
All countries now have a base 10% income from trades, regardless of the crown power.
Merchant maintenance efficiency in the trade panel now shows the actual maintenance cost reduction instead of the raw stacked bonus percentage.
And here are the changes to Mercenaries:
Mercenary pools now refill from local populations significantly more slowly; exhausted companies take much longer to replenish, making sustained mercenary use a harder resource commitment.
Recruiting a mercenary company from a region now properly draws down that region's pool of mercenaries available for hire.
These fixes seek to address some of the frustrations some players have had with both Mercs and Trade. We're very open to feedback on them so let us know what you think!
And lastly let’s not forget about Imperial Circle notification spam while playing as emperor. We have toned that down a bit in 1.3.11. The patch also comes with a few other minor crash and bug fixes of course. We’ll be sharing you the full patch notes when that goes live July 16th. ____________________________
When we launched 1.3.0 into open beta it wasn’t exactly the most stable, and players were quick to point out some issues with population counts, as well as diseases.. Thankfully fixes to both these major issues were issued in 1.3.2 and 1.3.4. When it comes to more general feedback we received throughout the beta period, one of our primary sources was our daily feedback threads on the Paradox Forums. But we also took feedback from our Discord & Steam beta feedback areas, and when they came about on other platforms such as Reddit. In total we received 1652 replies across 27 daily threads on the forums. Keep in mind that these are not unique replies, but rather total. Here is a visualization of the most active daily threads: Although we were not able to reply to all feedback, if you posted in one of them it was seen and logged and accounted for. We heard some people like the idea of shorter updates while in beta phase, something more akin to the frequency we used on release. The truth is this isn’t a very appealing strategy to us for a few fundamental reasons, and having a more structured weekly release cycle like we utilized in the beta period means less likelihood for things to slip through the cracks. So while we won’t be changing the update cycle anytime soon, we will be making some changes to the beta process for next time. Firstly, for 1.4’s open beta we’re going to cut down the daily threads and instead wrap use more topical megathreads that function in the same way, and same quantity, but are available from the start. We’re also going to be utilizing more forms similar to weekly forms we used on 1.3. This will help us achieve a few things:
It lets those who are willing to spend their time giving feedback do so in whatever order they want
It lets those who want to give specific feedback but not write an entire reply/post about it still do so easily through the forms
It’s simply easier/more reliable for us to collect feedback on a sustained month long basis
In terms of ensuring changes are more incremental during the beta, it’s being discussed internally as there are pros and cons to both theories of balancing. Though one thing we will aim to do in any case is give more of the reasoning behind some of the beta changes, so that they can be better tested. We’re also going to have a 1.4 beta specific known issues list. How extensive we can actually make this list, or if it turns out to be more of a surface level repository however, remains to be seen.
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Once more people have had a chance to play with 1.3, we’re also posting a brand new state of the game survey, we’ll be opening this up on Tuesday, July 21st and it will be open until the end of July. The timing of this is to help maximise accuracy with results. Our previous survey, 1.1, saw over 14k+ responses! Which is absolutely astounding and has given us feedback for the long term that will be even more interesting once compared to the upcoming 1.3 survey.
These results don't dictate our direction on their own, but they do serve as very useful pointers for long term plans. Especially when we have the opportunity to compare them to more up to date survey responses from 1.3 In August. We're sharing them now due to popular request, but also because it might give you more insight into our decision making process as we move closer to update 1.4, on that note...
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Next week, we have some updates to share with you regarding our vision for 1.4, and also further into the future. We want to give you this before we start showing off 1.4 content so that everyone can go into that preview after with the same context. We’ll be sharing this info on Wednesday July 22nd, after which we’ll have our first real 1.4 Tinto Talk July 29th (And yes that means back to more pretty pictures, and less raw yapping) That’s all for now though! Remember to keep an eye out for our survey as well as that news and we’ll see you then.