Just taking a look at the credits, it's obvious that there was a LOT of testing going on for this game. Medieval 2 being what it is, I'm sure test cases take a long time to go through and the sheer number of circumstances would require a lot of testers and a lot of time. And just noticing a bug during production does not magically fix it.

You also have to understand that QA, development, production, and publishing are all different departments. The decision to fix a certain bug at all does not generally rest with QA, it's done by Dev and Production, which in turn are usually pressed by publishing. I can easily imagine a bug in the M2 database that says "Units with two-handed axes don't attack cavalry," but it was something that just couldn't be fixed in time.

Yeah, it's a whole messy web of things that determine what bugs are in a game at release. And don't kid yourself about games being released without bugs at all: there are ALWAYS bugs. But blaming the testers for that just isn't cool. It's like being that guy who yells and screams at the cashier for why store prices are so high.

Please don't be that guy.



P.S. No, I don't work for CA or Sega, but I do work as a tester. It just gets tiring reading official forums on games I have worked on that blame QA out of ignorance for bugs in games.