I've been reading the dev diaries for the Europa Universalis IV Cossacks expansion and it's just amazing how many "paid features" are there just to fix broken systems or improve bland ones.
Additions to the Espionage tree to make it worth taking? You gotta pay. A balance fix behind a paywall. Nice.
Less opaque and schizophrenic alliance system? You gotta pay.
Make AI-started wars actually worth joining for once? Pay up, or else get constantly embroiled in useless wars just to keep your alliances.
Make protectorates not entirely useless? Pay us to fix this feature you previously paid for us to implement.
You get the idea. Meanwhile you read through the "free features" and…well, let's just say they are less than impressive. They are adding a feature where the loser of a war in an MP game, if stripped from some core territory, can be blocked from fucking up their country through butthurt (truce breaking, manual loans, releasing vassals, etc). That's incredible. Another allows you to see which trade goods you can get in a colonial province and their chances of spawning. Wow. That should have been in the game in v1.0.
Paradox' DLC policy is getting worse every time they release one. The "free features" used to be alright, but now it's mostly dumb little shit and very slight, mostly QoL changes. To get actual fixes for broken or completely uninteresting systems, you have to pay, and it's very likely the expansion is going to break the game in one way or another, making it nearly unplayable for months until a patch is finally released.
I remember that one time where they wanted to make automatic Papal Influence spending a paid feature. If you didn't pay, you got to keep clicking that fucking button every time you had 5 points or so. There was so much butthurt in the forums (rare for Paradrones) that they changed it to be free, thankfully, but that they even thought about making it paid is fucking stupid. It only got worse from there it seems.
I know they can be pirated but it's the principle more than anything else that disgusts me. Paradox fucked up with their DLC policy. One day they will fuck up to such an extent that even piracy isn't going to help.
It's too bad, I was excited for Stellaris, but with how much they are exploiting EUIV (and CKII to some extent), I only fear the worst. It looks like it'll be casualized too, which will make it even worse than semi-mainstream EUIV and CKII. Fuck Johan and fuck his retarded DLC policy. I'm just going to play Distant Worlds and hope they make a second one.
Also general EUIV thread I guess.