Yeah there was a bit of a stink among players of Victoria 3 because they found out that socialist organisation of society led to unequivocally the best and most efficient distribution of resources and led to less workers dying or being miserable, from memory
All the socialist styles beat the capitalist and feudal styles hands down, and syndicalism combined the anarchist relative indifference to the stability stat (an annoyance most governments had to deal with, the tendency of the proles to revolt) with the productive power of state oriented socialist systems (because worker syndicates, uh, are made of workers?).
There was a legitimate critique that emerged though: the transitions of government style were much too easy to implement top down with a button click. That hit the nail on the head for why the simulation was going way off from reality. In reality, nobody at the top was giving up their power that way, and so movements towards these kinds of revolution were literally battled and crushed over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Arguably trying to build a communist or syndicalist nation should require the kind of battle for the revolution and risk of betraying the cause in the course of arming to defend it (or of being crushed by overwhelming force) that real revolutionaries went through.
In short, the police were invented to nerf syndicalism, and weren't represented in the simulation.
I got really excited when I saw that proactive governance generated "radicals" and "supporters," that this was implemented via "interest groups" (like industrialists, trade unionists, petite bourgois) who would approve or disapprove of various policies and could become radicalised, and that in the event of civil war you got to pick which side to play as, with starting manpower and territory determined by interest group support. "Finally!" I thought, "finally, becoming socialist won't be a choice between 'intentionally piss off the proles while disbanding my entire army' vs 'implausible marxism-leninism-incrementalism'. Finally I'll have a real fight on my hands, one I'll have to win!"
Then the game came out and, like, yeah, that CAN happen if you go out of your way to force it to happen, but really marxism-leninism-incrementalism is actually a billion times easier than trying to trigger revolution OR counter-revolution, and frankly much easier than it ever was in Victoria 2.
That all said, a tonne of gamers complained about the wrong things. Socialism is OP because it's easy to achieve and gets little to no pushback, but a lot of people on like the steam forums were complaining that it was too efficient and resulted in a drastically higher standard of living than capitalism.
