I think those're mostly fair criticisms of the game as it stood when it was released. I'm kind of curious how Paradox is forcing you to bend over for them, though, heh. Anyways, it seems like they've been patching a lot of stuff into it, and working as they go to address some/most of what you've mentioned. Patching happens, though I suppose the scope of what they address does change from game to game and dev to dev.

Also, while the programmers in the studio were working on patching up the game and improving it, what do you think that the artists the studio employs are going to do? Just sit around and do nothing? Of course not. Art probably/generally takes less time to do than coding, so naturally the fluffy DLCs are going to come out first.

I've also not seen the price of a game go up after its release, only ever down. Or stays where it is. So I'm not sure why you think that the price of the game is going to go up by 400% within the next year.

I guess one last thing would be the idea of early access. I think you could make a pretty convincing argument that they should've done so, but the flip side of that is... these days, what's the /definition/ of early access, even? Is an MMO at launch actually just 'early access' since it's going to have more mechanics, content, patches added to it? Is a game like Starcraft 2 when it was first launched (Wings of Liberty) just "Early access" because they had two other expansions laid out for it, and WoL wasn't representative of its end state? The latest expansion came out awhile ago, Legacy of the Void. It was considered released as 'done', and yet they're still applying huge patches and radically altering some units of the game, since clearly the multiplayer patching process wasn't going to be 'done' at release.

I think if the game is playable, stable, and in a reasonable state of completion, you can consider it 'released'. That's up to the devs, even if they plan on patching the crap out of it and continuing to support it with patches, DLCs, expansions and the like.

You have some fair points and you know I was exaggerating a bit and was a bit on fire there, the reason being that I see good games by indie developers that get over critized while with paradox it's just "ahh well it's shit now just wait a year and buy all the mandatory extras and your good". It reminds me exactly of the CoD type of game where everyone will just give their money to paradox either way and be ok with a subpar product just because their the big kid on the block thus bending over for them.

I know that it was the art people that made that dlc who couldn't do anything else anyway but I was speaking on the price of the dlc (which is literally just some fluffy pictures)