I think everyone who plays pc games should be a beta tester at some point in their lives. Then they would understand the relationship between devs and production companies such as Ubi. I was one for 3 years and can give you some real good reasons why the game is in the state it's in.
1)The devs were given a due date for finishing the code. And if they didn't finish by that time they would have taken a financial hit. (The company I tested for took a 250K$ hit for being a month late,which damn near whiped out any profit they would have made).
2)Just cause a product is beta tested doesn't mean the bugs will be fixed before the product goes gold. Again you have the time constraints with having to go gold by a certain date,and financial considerations. Dev companies aren't usually rich. To make a patch requires funds for paying the programmers and unless you are a company like Blizzard,that money has to came from the company that hired the dev comany. I'm surprised Ubi got two patches out as soon as they did all things considered. That shows me that both the Devs and beta testers know what they are doing,and that they have their own internal lists for things that need to be fixed.
3)I'm not sure about Ubi,but alot of these companies have to answer to stockholders which means THEY have to rush out products faster then they might like just to keep the stockholders off their backs.
Finally,the testing/patching process is a bit complicated. First you get a patch build with some fixes,test it,list which things are fixed and which isn't,then the devs put together their own prioritized list,easiest fixes first,hardcoded fixes at the bottom(From what a dev told me,the last thing they want to do is screw around in the hardcoded stuff. It's time consuming and any mistake could totally bork everything up to and including causing the OS itself to fail). Then you get the next patch build and go through the process again which is repeated till the testers and the devs are satisfied. After that it goes to the production company,in this case Ubi,whose Q/A testers spend a week or two testing the patch and they decide whether it gets released or whether they send it back to the Devs for more work.(Which is what happened with Sega and MTWII a while back. Their Q/A found a problem with the 1.2 patch and sent it back to Creative for more work).
Bottom line,it takes time and money to make a patch,and for a make or break patch like 1.3 would be, the more time we and Ubi give the Devs to make the patch, the better the patch will be. If,of course,Ubi authorizes a 1.3 patch. But I ain't going there.
|