And it's impossible for them to retroactively lower the severity of an infraction.
Wait but... how is that public knowledge?
I'm not sure it's "public knowledge" but I've seen screenshots of the conversations with a Paradox forums moderator where he explained it.
Overall it matches Paradox's own design philosophy: a bunch of ad hoc crap with no regularity of policy or professionalism.
uh
That's not my experience, though I *assume* it's true of their initial releases.
You sound like you have an axe to grind...
Well, (1) if you talk to people who worked at Paradox internally for a few years, and you look at the typical problems Paradox has on release of a new product, you figure out pretty quickly that they don't really do code-base management very well. Their own CEO calls it "nonconforming game development." Patches make changes that aren't in any documentation, anywhere; those same changes are reverted without warning or explanation; and then the developers themselves don't even know how parts of the game work. I've even seen situations where developer A didn't realize developer B changed something and said he would check with head developer C on whether the change was supposed to be in the game. And we're not even talking about the bugs that creep into the games for inexplicable reasons (like Japan being randomly broken for a few patches in EU4).
(2) I suppose I do, to the extent that I think it's great that Paradox is seeing more success these days, but there are also some fundamental problems with how their design process work. If you've ever watched their developer multiplayer games in EU4, you can almost always guess what changes will be coming in the next patch. Oh, Groogy has a fucking temper tantrum and spams chat because he thinks the other player should accept a peace deal faster? We get the new Unconditional Surrender button. Oh, a player in India wins the multiplayer game? Better nerf the non-European countries some more.
And I'm not even talking about their games themselves, really. This is all 100% about how they function as a company. It's the "making it up as we go along" school of game design. Sure, they make up some good shit, mostly. But their process is loosey-goosey and it shows in the games.