Quote Originally Posted by Faenaris
Giving a tangible release date is paramount to disaster. Ask every mod team regarding a release date and they'll say "when it's done", even when the mod is released the very next day! A smart thing to do, for if you missed your date, you will have hordes of fans, screaming bloody murder "WHY????".
Ave Mr. Fen

Well spoken, looking back I was perhaps being a tad harsh with my wording, but my overall point was still there. It's probably just all those years of having to suffer through the subtle lies, blatant lies, half-truths, and "creative license" that the gaming industry as a whole have been throwing at me coming to the surface.

I do agree somewhat with what you've stated, and there's some that I do respectfully disagree on. In general, I do agree that when Company X states that they've got a deliverable that's coming on Date Y, and they miss that date for whatever reason, there's going to be some fairly serious backlash from the customer base, and for good reason. I know there've been several instances of this in terms of patches throughout my gaming years, I just can't recall any... Chalk it up to old age. In terms of a whole game release, I agree with you completely up to a point. The "when it's done" is a perfect mantra to stick to, up to a point where you're close enought to release that it's time to get geared up for it. Distributors need to be brought in line, advertising ramped up, helpdesk/support tested and verified, etc, so one will be prepared when it hits the shelves. Without going off on this tangent, suffice to say I think the industry in general is doing terrible job with this bit.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
*cough* S.T.A.L.K.E.R. *cough*


In terms of patching, I have a slightly different opinion. I still say that 1. maintaining close contact with the community to verify and collaborate on bug-finding and feature-requests is an absolutely must, and 2. as the patches near completion, THEN give us firm dates when to expect them. For the 2nd item, I do not believe this is too much to demand. I realize there are a number of different software dev methods for dealing with ongoing support and patching, but by and large everyone does have a final QA test cycle, in CA's case it appears to be 2 weeks. By the time this cycle is hit, it's pretty much a given that everything will be done at the end of this and verified. Devs don't (shouldn't, I should say) just slap together some code then commit it to the CVS and let the QA folks handle it, they should generally run some test cases to ensure they squished it properly. QA simply verifies this and ensure that nothing else broke, which the dev should have also taken into account.

Still awake? Anyway, take that all with a grain of salt, it's just my hard-headed opinions.

Quote Originally Posted by kraxter
Wold seem like it... If that the idea they are workign with now, I'm happy. Lots of small patches are by far to prefer, for me.
I wholeheartedly agree with this.