Old Celt,

I was wondering what awful thing you said in the .com post that got you chastised and your entire post edited out.

I don't know where the post is, but apparently the SEGA rep said that patching RTW is CA's decision. The problem for CA must be whether or not to take the time out of the schedule to do another patch. CA has always followed a strategy of one major patch per release, and they try to catch all the major bugs in that one patch. However, RTW was released with a huge number of problems, and that overwhelmed the v1.2 patch effort so that some things were not caught such as the loadgame/siege problem which I suspect is just the tip of an iceberg of a problem with savegames.

CA is well aware of the loadgame/siege problem, but I've seen them follow a policy of no comment on outstanding bugs for four years. CA uses the core customer base to help identify bugs, but they don't answer to that base or even have a dialog with it. This is why you are allowed to report a bug at .com, but not allowed to ask if it will be fixed. If CA admits it's not going to be fixed or it has to wait for the add-on to be addressed, that's bad for marketing. Practically all the responses to criticism I see made by CA are damage control to minimize any negative impact on sales.

I can tell you that the Total War customer base that has been around here for four years is decimated. Good graphics has replaced good gameplay as the main selling point which makes gameplay less important in the scheme of things. All the people who I regularly played Total War with online for years have left for other games.