Has anything really changed from CA?

[al Roumi]

Support is way better now though . :) That more than anything has made me happy. Though I can actually get the thing running and not WCTDing all the time.

True, but results and changes are slow in coming. The appeal of daily updates on what is being worked on wears out when you are still facing tedious bugs. I'm sorry to repeat this but the game was not anywhere near ready for release and it's insulting really.

I was an avid Mount and Blade fan and I enjoyed the anticipation of new updates that slowly moved the game forward, developing gameplay and addressing (and creating) bugs. When it was finally released, I would have said it wasn't all the way there yet either, but damn was it more "complete" and finished than ETW 1.0.

The point being that in M&B I was fine about being a paying beta tester. When I've been a beta tester for other games, I've enjoyed being involved in the dev process too. However, the fact that we are effectivley free and un-acknowledged testers for ETW is galling. More so for having paid about £35 for the sodding special forces edition. Steam is all well and good but IMO it does NOT give a game designer license to sell you something 3/4 completed and finish the development of the game once it's on your machine.

God knows what happened at CA, or Sega Europe, but frankly it looks like they had a novice team with half the head-count they anticipated. As GFX said, they 1, haven't learnt from previous games and 2, have produced something slap-dash, which for some frustratingly unknown reason, I STILL PLAY and care enough to rant about it...