Mike C:
Just a little perspective for you:
Doom is widely regarded as the game which was the breakthrough game for network play (certainly there were networked games before doom, but doom was the first big one). However, in its 1.0 and 1.1 releases, the LAN code was very broken and basically ran roughshod over your network. It wasn't until 1.2 (ie, the SECOND path) that it was in a reasonable state.
Simiarly, quake is widely regarded as the game that did the same thing for internet gaming. But when quake was first released, internet play was terribly laggy, especially for modem users (which was nearly everyone at the time, this is 1996 we're talking about). It wasn't until a completely spereate program was developed (quakeworld), and many, many releases that it got to the state that it really was a good playing experience.
You mention starcraft as a game that was released without major issues. Well, blizzard released several patches for starcraft, which addressed issues such as:
- A map cheat hack
- Multiple bugs that allowed you to unfairly gain resources
- Major balance issues, especially of the zerg air units (I count over 60 balance issues addressed in the 1.04 patch!)
amoungst other things. You may say these aren't as severe as the air superiority bug, but for a game that many people bought primarily to play multiplayer, bugs that allow cheating, or large gameplay imbalances are pretty serious issues.
But people tend to forget about these things, because in the grand scheme of things, a month or two at the start of a game's life waiting on patches isn't long given a good game has a lifespan of years. Heck, quakeworld was still being patched after quake 2 came out ...
So, in short, if you had the expectation of everything working flawlessly out of the box, it's not the game that was broken, it's your expectations. If you follow the gaming industry as closely as you say you do, then you should realise even the classics (I mean, many people, myself included, will tell you doom is the greatest game of all time ...) have problems for those who pick them up as new releases.
I want everything to work perfectly too. But I think it's only reasonable to wait for a few patches and give the developers a chance to fix any outstanding issues before complaining about how terrible they are.