Of course we do. That's why (sob story) it hurts so much when people who have no idea what we go through to produce a game that's pretty much a work of genius declare that we're mental incompetents, paperboys, monkey typists, and so forth. Developers are human too. Boo hoo, etc. It annoys anyone who can't do everything to their heart's content, if they can't also be realistic about things and say, "We've done something that no-one else has done, and we did it as best we could under the circumstances." There are things in Rome which no other game does. Bugs are fixable, but lack of genius isn't. You can't patch a game to make it a work of genius. Rome is, basically, a work of genius. That's why it's winning all these rapturous reviews - not because we've supplied concubines to the review editors or donated $1,000,000 to GameStar or whatever, but because those people, who've seen a lot of games, really rate Total War in general and this in particular.

That dichotomy - of feeling that they've done a good job under difficult circumstances, but also feeling sympathy with anyone who finds a bug in a game - is almost certainly why a lot of CA's programmers don't stop by these boards. It can be almost physically painful to read complete strangers insulting us individually or collectively because they happen to have found a bug (or a feature they don't like, or a historical inaccuracy, or whatever). Anyone whose advice is "get a tougher skin" should try investing two years of their life in a creative endeavour and then ask fifty complete strangers to tell them it's shit...