Aloysius:I'll go ahead and respond to this.
There isn't much we can do about boosting. Playing legitimate matchmade games is playing legitimate matchmade games. We can't take a microscope to all 30,000+ games played every day. I don't delete 99% of the posts about boosters, I delete the 1% where they devolve into profanity and flaming and are against the code of conduct.
OK. But there were plenty of situations where iEchoic or others would provide several games of evidence. it really wouldn't have been hard to check those out and make a decision based on the evidence you were provided with.
Aloysius:Title Updates on consoles are a very complicated thing, a lot more goes in to it than "someone on the forum named "Xx_WeedPot420Goku_xX thinks Grunts need a buff, let's get a patch out today!" There are business decisions well above my head that go in to it, but I report all of the glitches you guys report, we test them out and put them in our bug database. The people who make balance decisions have ideas of what they're going to do and when the decisions are made and finalized for a patch I can announce it, but not before. Saying "Oh we're thinking about maybe patching" and then not patching would be a really bad idea. You guys would go nuts. I announce things as soon as I can legitimately say what is going to be in the patch, and when it's going to come out. We have to work with Xbox Live on timing of actual patch rollout, and sometimes they don't give us a lot of lead time. We're working on that, but there's not a lot we can do.
Glitches are looked at, every one that is reported on the forums is investigated. It's just we're not going to redo the entire pathing/combat/build system because the Arbiter gets stuck once every 500 games while raging over mountains. We know about that glitch, trust us.
Fine, so it takes a while to develop and release a patch, but there are a lot more glitches than an Arbiter getting stuck (not to mention that he glitches fairly often), and they were talked about, but never fixed. If the pathfinding is bunk, then it should be fixed whether it's on your developer's Christmas wishlist or not.
Aloysius:I disagree with your assessment that I haven't supported the Community one bit. I've given out hundreds of DLC Codes for Flaming Warthogs, Honor Guard Wraiths and both DLC. I've started up the Dev Blogs and the Skirmish Map pages so the community could better see what went into making Halo Wars. Everyone wanted to know more about why we didn't have a free build system, so I got the Lead Designer to write a Dev Blog on why. We had a play with Devs night that went over pretty well. I answer as many questions as I can for the Fan Fic writers over in the Halo-Verse.
A lot of us (myself included) who complain about lack of support are talking more about the actual game and not so much about the forums (but that's already been talked about a little above). And while I like how you've tightend up on the rules now, there was a while where bans were seemingly randomly given out. Mostly to critics of your decisions, and not so much to people who actually deserved them (IMO). One "Play With the Devs" night doesn't do much as support for the console...
Aloysius:Unit Stats are coming out this late because the designers didn't want people to theorycraft early on after release. Also they are significantly more complicated than I originally imagined, and took me quite a bit of time and effort to get them to where they are now.
In all of this, don't forget that the company that made the game, Ensemble Studios, was told it was closing 6 months before the release of the game. This had an impact on everything, including post-ship support.
OK. So that is fair then, not your fault, but it sounds like ES got lazy, which may also be fair considering they were about to close. But really, they should have kept enough staff to make a high polish game, and not the rushed version that we got. It is a very good game, no denying it that. But it is still very buggy, and the pathfinding....speaks for itself.
Aloysius:Obviously you're unhappy, you talk about it in every recent post. I know the UAE doesn't have support for Xbox Live and that is negatively impacting your experience, but Halo Wars and Robot Entertainment can't do anything about it.
So yes, I understand your frustration, but you are way off base with your second to last paragraph.
I'll let FJ respond to that one.
Aloysius:edit: I know I"m going to get a bunch of questions on this so I'll clarify. The decision to make and announce patches is way above my head. There are business decisions, and PR decisions for not announcing stuff until we're 100% sure of what's going in to the patch and when it is coming out. The people who make those decisions and the people who announce it (me) have been doing this kind of thing for a very long time, and we learned our lesson long ago not to announce things until we're 100% sure. The feedback that occurs if we announce things that don't come about, or miss a date is much, much worse than the feedback for staying quiet until we're ready.
Most of us know it's not your decision to make new patches, but it's our only way of communicating with Robot...or at least the easiest way of communicating with Robot. I know I take a lot of my frustration out on you, and I shouldn't, but you're the only person associated with Robot that I'm not too lazy too gripe to.
Thanks for the lengthy post though, it did help clarify some stuff for myself as well as others.
COMMON SENSE:
So rare it's a go'da
mn super power
Oooh, my Common Sense is tingling
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You got me good, munn.