I honestly understand your frustration, USS_shipmaster. The casual gamer represents well in excess of 90 percent of sales for this game, and for the most part they will be blissfully unaware of most of the bugs within it. That's because a lot of them will set the 'Realism' somewhere between zero and 40 so that they can go to sea, find ships and sink them. To the casual gamer, at least a lot of them, Silent Hunter 4 is a 'shoot em up' for an older demographic.
I'll bet that if you could get hold of the server download figures for all the websites offering the SH4 patch downloads so far, you would be surprised at the small number of people (in relative terms) who have downloaded patches 1.1 and 1.2.
Most casual gamers for this game are in an older demographic, and they are not very aware of patches or mods for games, and they are also not confident in their ability to download them even if they are aware of them. Their assesment of the game will be based on the 'out of the box' version.
I have a neighbor who fits exactly that profile. He purchased the game for himself and his young son, and they both play and enjoy it unpatched. That's because his Realism setting started out as literally zero and has climed to about 27 I think.
I truly hope that the casual gamers are content with this game so that Ubisoft will continue the franchise. That doesn't mean I'm happy with the production schedule the Devs were given or the pitiful user manual issued with Silent Hunter 4.
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