Quote Originally Posted by Asai Nagamasa View Post
The communtiy provides input and the developer can selectively choose to either use it or ignore it. The community is absolutely not to blame for how the TW series has turned out. That fault lies squarely with the developer.
Indeed, CA and or Mr Simpson look frankly naive expecting the community of consumers to accept responsability for CA's misfortunes.

My charitable guess is that Mr Simpson is a good programmer who unfortunately has a fairly flimsy grasp of the market economy or expectations of it that are inconsistent with reality.

So it’s a choice - fix stuff, or talk about fixing stuff. Seems like a no-brainer, but things have changed. I can now add more quality to the games by talking to the community than I can by fixing issues.
What so "things didn't used to be like this" when:
1. there wasn't such an easy way for the community of our consumers to react to us directly and
2. when CA produced more complete/stable/enjoyable products -without shameless marketing gimmicks to squeeze more payback out of initial sales (Special forces edition)

What I find particularily galling is what I interpret as CA's perception that we as their consumers should appreciate their efforts -whatever they end up being and never mind what we expect them to be as a result of their marketing.

I can see why they might think that simply producing code which allows a consumer to play a game with a resulting "experience" should engender a mininum of respect and thanks -we wouldn't have anything to complain about if they hadn't programmed the game. Nonetheless, the short sightedness and lack of customer empathy of this point of view is astonishing.

If anything, ETW is a cautionary tale for CA, Sega and any developer who pushes their marketing beyond what their production team can actually provide.

ETW really has suffered from poor management and decisions which overall have made the publisher and developer look mendacious and more interested in exploiting new DLC features for financial reward than consumer enjoyment.