The importance of playtesting/beta testing

Well, the game changers could at least report the bugs that they are encountering to Answer HQ or select "me too"... They are clearly seeing these bugs in their videos but I have never seen them posting on Answer HQ.

Not sure if Origin even supports letting players at beta games. I only ever launch it for a small handful of games.

There are certainly a goodly number of developers on Steam who will let players play beta versions of patches, expansions etc. I realise this can still be construed as getting players to do a company's testing for free, but there is something to be said for high number of testers that beta programmes like these can attract in finding problems. They could even release patches/DLC for beta testing where mods are blocked so there is no contamination of test results.

Even running a beta programme for the last patch for only a couple of days would have caught the bugs that required a hasty hot fix and probably a lot of others as well.

I have been away for the game awhile so I wasn't around with the creation of the Gamechanger thing. I tried to find out what that was all about and it all seemed a bit confusing as to what it was for that I am now ignoring it.

I agree. The Game Changers exist to market the products they’re sent early - it’s the responsibility of paid EA employees to make sure the game functions. EA can call these people “Game Changers” all they want, but it’s basically the same as makeup companies having a PR list of influencers. I don’t even think it’s the GC’s responsibility to post to Answers HQ - everything I’ve seen about that suggests that EA is farming out the running of that to unpaid volunteers, who also shouldn’t be responsible for managing big reports for a mega corporation’s product.