Good day all. Over the weekend, the team and indeed, the entire company was away conquering Malta. Great times were had and I'm sure there will be many pictures and tales of the occasion making the rounds but now Tuesday is upon us and I want to talk about feedback on our updates.While we have our in-house QA team and a closed group of Betas who provide valuable feedback, sometimes we want to get a wider playerbase to try out our game builds by way of an Open Beta. A prime reason for this is to try out a large core change to the game where we want to get a lot of feedback from the community. In this case, we wanted to get feedback on a new area-based fort system.For reference, we are fairly happy with how the 1.18 fort system works. It blocks movement, forces some sieges without requiring carpet sieging and, especially with the terrain bonuses, adds a good amount of strategic mid-long term planning for your nation. However there were some undeniable issues with the system in lack of clarity and overlapping Zones of Control. We wanted to try a new system out and hear what you had to thinkIt didn't take long for the feedback to mount up. The new system was unclear, forts blocked nothing on their own, small and mid sized nations struggled to offer much movement blocking, Military access rules became messy. The following week we decided as a team to revert to the 1.18 fort system.Of course, there were some who liked and even loved the beta version's area-based fort system, and reverting was a disappointment to them. You're never going to make everyone happy, no matter what you change but I would like to thank everyone who played and continues to play with the 1.19 beta, as your contributions help make it a better update.Of course, forts were not the only things on the cards for 1.19. There were plenty of changes to the Scandinavian experience, map changes and such which were well received. Nothing warmed my cockles quite like seeing screenshots on various platforms of beautiful resurgent Golden Hordes though!Soon™ 1.19 will be out of beta and released for all to play, with additional fixes for bugs found during the beta period. This is another great part of the Open Beta process. Your bug reports have been appreciated, as well as the crash reports that get sent in, leading to dozens of additional bugfixes for 1.19, including the particularly nasty subject integration bug.Since we've shown off most of 1.19 and we've been talking about forts anyway, how about seeing the Paradox Fort in Malta, complete with Garrison:Inside which the army draws up plans to occupy the rest of the islandSee you again next week where we will talk about how we see EU4 moving forward and our goals for what we want to do with the game.If that's simply too long for you, be sure to tune in for the EU4 Developer Multiplayer, where the world shall be lit in flames at 1500 CET www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive