You know it took me a while to actually figure out what the problem was here regarding the customer support rendered by CA, now that I have however, I would like to make a few comments if I may.

First of all, as far as I know Activision holds all the purse strings. They control all the money. I.E. no money, no patch. All the knowledge and reporting of bugs in the world will be for naught if there is no money or time to build a patch. If I'm wrong about this, let me know, but I've always been of the mind that the publisher holds all the strings when it comes to financing.

Secondly, I can understand the comments CA has made, whether or not I agree with them. In this kind of game opinion will vary from person to person, and it's really hard to tell whos point of view is accurate. I can no more say that CA is a bad company and wants to screw me over, than I can say that the community of players is 100% correct and deserves restitution, to be honest I don't know what is driving all this angst.

Thirdly, we, as consumers are directly responsible for this situation, not CA or Activision. Let me elaborate: Games are released with bugs because people will still buy them. CA could have released RTW as an unplayable pile of garbage and thousands and thousands of people would still have bought it on the day of release. In my own experience I couldn't get any enjoyment out of RTW until the 1.2 patch, when I finally got back into the game. Of course, my 49.95 had already been spent, and obviously I contribute to the problem. The fact is, game publishers want to release fast and when the profits will be highest and since for every person who complains about the issues there are thousands who don't care, the strategy works. The only way to stop this cycle is to refuse to buy games on release. To hit the publisher in the pocket book and refuse to pay for substandard product. Unfortunately I don't see that happening, ever. The games will be released in as "raw" a state as the consumer will be willing to accept. And, much of the time, we don't know if the game will be unplayable or perfect when the release date comes. This is all ecconomics and marketering, and our only recourse is to not play the game (pardon the pun).

Finally, I still enjoy RTW. In my case it's probably because I'm not that great a player on the campaign map and I still find some challenge in the game on hard difficulty (well not on the battle map, but anyway). I've always felt the design of RTW was overly complex in many places and if anything I think that's the games biggest weakness. Squallor being one of the most prominent examples of what I might consider a flawed attempt at designing difficulty into the game. We have to be careful, in that it is quite possible to mistake bad design for a bug, and vice versa. Anyway I just wanted to give my two cents, it's best not to be losing our minds over this sort of thing.