@Darkangle2000now wrote:
@Me_mumblecakeYou seem to find it normal everything releases unfinished nowadays?
All you sum up could have been done beforehand. It was a choice not to.
How do you know that it was a conscious "choice" not to. As someone who actually earns their bread and butter with software development I can tell you that it is a lot harder to test against all corner cases than you think. How do you know what the root cause of e.g. the ranking problems is. Is it an inherent problem in the code that is always visible, is it only showing itself when the servers are under a certain load, does it have to do with your latency, possibly your PC slowing down at a specific point due to background processes? How do you know what was a conscious decision and what was not? With almost all problems that pop up it is either something that seemed so obscure to the developers that they simply didn't think about it or it simply worked on their clean test machines which will have an excellent connection to the servers. With regard to pushing out a quick-fix ... that's not so easy. There is a lot of red tape. A patch will need a software development plan which will need drafting, reviewing and signing off, requirements need to be collected, reviewed and signed off, a test plan needs to be created, reviewed and signed off (a lot of that can be mostly copy-pasted but it still takes a lot of work). Only when all of this is done is the developer actually allowed to touch the code. Not adhering to the strict development process which will be in place will result in unmaintainable code so this is avoided at all cost (there are very rare exceptions where the paper work is done afterwards because a bug that disruptive has snuck in that the company simply can't afford to walk the process). Depending on the size of the team and the scale of the change it can take the better part of a week before any code can even get touched.
Another very important point is that while a product is in development it doesn't generate revenue so a small team like Motive will always be against the clock not to run out of money. Now they won't cut corners that would knowingly lead to severe issues (though they are human and can simply underestimate the impact of a known issue) but the chance of those is always there. Properly following the process above will have already minimised the risk here but it is certainly not zero. The problem is not that games companies have "chosen" to deliver unfinished games. The problem is that games have become bigger and bigger over the last 20 years but the money constraints have stayed the same ... no money until release. Striving for perfection is the enemy of progress. It takes 20% of time to get 80% of the job done and 80% of time to get the last 20% of polishing done. The project managers have to walk a fine line on how far to take the polishing. Also, 20 years ago a released game could almost not get changed. Broadband was less than 1Mb/sec so patches wouldn't get widely adopted. With a pure online game like squadrons it is much easier to add some polish after release.
Personally I think that you simply lack the experience and understanding of software development to accuse the developers of malicious conduct. You want to see malicious conduct? Have a look at how Blizzard messed up the remaster of WarCraft 3. They were telling lies and were even removing features which are to this day still advertised on their website.
