C&C3 Patch Status

APOC's Patch State of the Union Address ... on the C&C3 Support Forums (thanks Ant and C&C DEN) has an update from the Command & Conquer 3 community manager on patch plans for Command & Conquer 3 and its expansion, stepping into a hornet's nest of opinions about balance between casual and hardcore players. He apologizes for communications lapses on the topic and for how Kane's Wrath shipped with bugs already fixed in Tiberium Wars. Here's a chunk:
Right now, we are getting the wheels spinning on a patch for Kane's Wrath, and the primary focus is on fixing these desyncs and some of the critical exploitative bugs causing imbalances. With regards to my comments about "70% of players caring more about single player and skirmish" and that we generally focus our efforts on patching multiplayer...I certainly did not mean to infer we don't care about SP or the AI. Yes, both have their faults and we absolutely do care and if there is something critical or emergency like that we deem is of that level, we'll look in to fixing it. Right now, the above issues noted take precedence, and please do note that these changes will also impact SP and our AI as they are currently tied together. So you may find some of your grievances fixed when that happens.

As for Tiberium Wars, I would like to apologize about my blog posting a while back where I mentioned proposed balance changes for 1.10. Unfortunately, finishing Kane's Wrath became the priority and getting the immediete critical fixes for Kane's Wrath is the 1st priority before we look back to Tiberium Wars. We are absolutely not done patching Tiberium Wars and never wanted to infer anything of the sort. We don't have a legion of people who can patch either game at will, but we are doing our best with our current resources and projects at hand. We are working to build solutions for the near future that will allow us to have greater resources to patch and so forth., But with Tiberium Wars having been patched 9 times and Kane's Wrath not receiving 1 yet, the priority has to be obvious.

That said, TW is not the forgotten child or the melted vanilla ice cream. We've come a long way in improving our support for our games and we're not about to try and take steps back, that would certainly be borderline crazy.

So what's this all mean...

It means, we're on the case and we'll try and get this to you as quickly as possible. We cannot hotfix the current KW issues, they are larger than that unfortunately. I am fighting for you guys daily I want you to know. Please do not take any of my previous comments about SP or AI as anything with little care, and please understand we're absolutely dedicated to supporting our titles and will try and quell these issues in our best means possible.
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7.
 
Re: It's pretty and fun.
Apr 21, 2008, 14:48
Bob
7.
Re: It's pretty and fun. Apr 21, 2008, 14:48
Apr 21, 2008, 14:48
Bob
 
RE: Overon

All I can say is no kidding. After reading the forum thread, it looks like that community hasn't been through a C&C release before? They seem to be so naive? Or am I too cynical?

How many years has APOC been the only guy in the C&C support forums? To me, it looks like the same old thing, EA ships a game that needs patches ASAP, APOC appears every once in a while to say how rough he has it with the coding/qa teams, the coding team is moved on to other projects, the QA team is overworked/inadequate, nothing gets fixed, etc.

The sad thing is the community turnover is so high that when APOC appears and tells the sob story about how hard it is to work with the coding/qa teams, some people buy it and think there's progress being made, but don't realize it's just part of the same script that's been rolled out a few times now.

That isn't too say there are patches being released. but after being through a few of these launches with them (as a customer), it isn't hard to see what's up. There's a definite limit to the amount of time/effort EA'll put into a title and after that point, there's little the community can say/do to force EA to issue patches. Sure, there will be a few patches released, but inevitably those will have balance/bug issues, which require the release of further patches, which probably won't get released.

Alas, those poor dedicated souls in the C&C:TFD forum with their petition for TFD v1.03... :-)

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  Re: It's pretty and fun.
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