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... :-)