[bf1942] EA has to be the worst run company in software... IMHO

[ScratchMonkey]

--On Saturday, October 08, 2005 11:01 AM -0400 Jon Wolberg 
<jon at defenderhosting.com> wrote:

> BF1942 was totally bug ridden in 1.00.  Hell they had a patch out on
> release day!  It gradually got better up to the 1.61 stage which took
> over a year. While it would have been nice to have the quality of 1.61 at
> release BF1942 was still a ground breaking game in terms of online play
> and is still one of my favorites, regardless of the messups.  Bear in
> mind people that BF2 was released on JUNE 23RD!  It has only been 3.5
> months since it came out and we've already seen THREE patches.  I'd say
> they are trying very hard to get it right.

Compare to Vivendi. The Tribes fan base was severely disappointed by 
Tribes:Vengeance, and no patch was ever issued.

It's common to release a patch now close to a game's release date (or any 
piece of commercial boxed software) because the product is "locked" long 
before release and development and bug-fixing continues during that period. 
It's typically about one patch cycle's worth of time prior to release that 
the product is locked for manufacturing.

The 2nd BF2 patch doesn't really count, since it was a patch to a patch, to 
fix a show-stopper bug in 1.01. They didn't even roll the number within the 
binary.

There may have been dozens of internal builds for each official patch. 
Sadly, EA doesn't trust the server admin community to test those builds as 
Epic does with UT2004, so every patch comes out with lots of issues that 
are a complete surprise to the community.