"ummm, Ea is a publisher, not a developer, they don't make patches."
This is much like saying that the Sears toy department is a seperate entity from the Sears corporation. If the Sears toy department does something unfortunate in any way... say, something illegal, for the sake of an example... the Sears toy department does not get charged: Sears does. Likewise, Maxis is a division of EA... a part of EA. The two are no more seperable than a toy department to a department store and the store itself. If Maxis were a seperate and distinct corporation, then you would have a point; but as it is a division of EA, and all employees are thereby employed by EA, then to say that EA is not a developer is incorrect. In the case of The Sims, they simply use the Maxis banner. It is a brand, not a company.
"Maxis, the developer has had a fine history making relatively bug free products, and making patches that address the issues that do crop up."
Tell that to the owners of Sims Unleashed, with its mass of bugs that were not only well documented, but even admited to by the developers. Bugs that were only partially patched, while others could not be corrected. Likewise for Sims Superstar, with glaring flaws that were so deeply rooted into the game, that the only practical option available was to put any necessary fixes into the NEXT expansion pack: Makin' Magic.
Likewise for owners of the original expansion packs: Livin' Large and House Party, where installation was a shot in the dark for many, as registry files would often be installed before much of the rest of the package, resulting in a message indicating that the expansion pack was already installed before almost all of the contents were installed. The solution to this was either manually uninstalling everything and reinstalling, or manually deleting files from the registry and reinstalling. The Sims Eraser was introduced to combat this... after the release of Hot Date, and over a full year after the problem first surfaced.
"I know it's cool to get on some band wagon..."
...because a joke about the business practices of one company is far greater an example of band wagon jumping than fanboyism for a developer.
"but thinking can be cool too..ya know?"
And on this, I agree fully.
This comment was edited on Nov 1, 18:52.