C&C Labs News Wire

— Thursday, July 3, 2008 —

The bad news is that Kane's Wrath patch 1.01 - originally slated for release today - has been pushed back until next week. Presumably, this is because a bug was found in the patch that EA decided to fix - so in a way, this is actually good news. Despite the vehement and completely justified anger on the official forums.

The other good news - if your definition of good includes promises for the future, which it may not - is that EALA General Manager Mike Verdu has announced that EA is creating a "live" team for supporting their released RTS titles:

I am not as proud of our record in supporting our games after launch. In fact, I'm downright unhappy with that aspect of our business. There have been some bright spots: For example, our community manager's passionate advocacy on behalf of our customers, the huge patch 1.05 for Battle for Middle-earth II that was a labor of love between our team and the community, and our fast response to some initial problems on C&C3. But overall, the level of support has been lacking. We tend to put out a limited number of patches for our products and in many cases those patches take longer than they should to finish, test, and release. It’s been a chronic issue for more than four years, and we need to fix it. (emphasis added)

It's good to see someone at EA admitting that they suck at supporting games.  And it's good to see that they are, in theory, taking substantial steps to get better.

However, this isn't the first time Verdu has apologized for EA's poor performance and promised to do better in the future (to dig up an old favorite - see the Generals Ladder Kit, for starters). So, forgive me if I remain a skeptic. Indeed, I think Verdu's comments support my skepticism:

I am not going to say that this initiative is going to instantly solve all of our support issues – and I don't think we have the credibility with our customers to make that claim anyway.

 

Last edited by Mike on Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 7:38:16 PM.

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