It's perfectly fair to be upset at Firaxis/2K, to not like the design decisions, or to not like the game. Nobody is saying that everybody must like the game - there was certainly backlash when civ5 came out as a more "dumbed-down" version, and then the flaws that were BE (when most of us would have been ecstatic if they literally just remade Alpha Centauri but brought in some new features to it), I'm not going to get upset at anyone who is turned off, or who doesn't enjoy every version.
The complaints come when people try to project onto things they can't know, as in, knowing the state of development. Everyone agrees that the game is not 100% perfect, but it's simply the reality of modern systems that stuff is too complex to make perfect. And because it's so simply to patch, yeah, it means developers/studios get "lazy" and can certainly live with more bugs. When your old NES games came out, it was virtually impossible to apply a fix to them, so you gotta be damn sure that everything works. When civ can basically have one guy push a button and suddenly everyone gets a new version of the game, it's a lot easier to live with missing UI panels and broken features. But on just knowing the state of the initial release, and even knowing the bugs that exist, it's impossible for anyone who doesn't work in their office to know the exact state that the code/development team behind the game is in.
And this pseudo-beta model sucks - if not for the simple fact that when I play a game, I have to think, "hmm, should I play as XXX now, or do I think that I need to wait for the next patch to see if they get rebalanced to something I will like better." And in that respect, yeah, we're basically all beta testers for now. And really, if anyone is not comfortable with that, then definitely do not buy a game on day 1 of release - wait until after it's gotten a patch or two. It is really annoying - I mean, I definitely don't want to go out to watch Doctor Strange this weekend only for them to re-cut it and release it again in a few weeks. And ideally we should demand more of the gaming industry overall. But it also means we have to wait a much longer time for each version, and overall, I think it's better to get the early version, live through the bugs and issues for 6 months, and then after that point you can feel reasonably safe that the version is complete. If you don't want to live through this, then go ahead, wait to play/buy until the first few patches are out. Heck, you're even more likely to be able to grab it on a Steam sale in the meantime.
The complaints come when people try to project onto things they can't know, as in, knowing the state of development. Everyone agrees that the game is not 100% perfect, but it's simply the reality of modern systems that stuff is too complex to make perfect. And because it's so simply to patch, yeah, it means developers/studios get "lazy" and can certainly live with more bugs. When your old NES games came out, it was virtually impossible to apply a fix to them, so you gotta be damn sure that everything works. When civ can basically have one guy push a button and suddenly everyone gets a new version of the game, it's a lot easier to live with missing UI panels and broken features. But on just knowing the state of the initial release, and even knowing the bugs that exist, it's impossible for anyone who doesn't work in their office to know the exact state that the code/development team behind the game is in.
And this pseudo-beta model sucks - if not for the simple fact that when I play a game, I have to think, "hmm, should I play as XXX now, or do I think that I need to wait for the next patch to see if they get rebalanced to something I will like better." And in that respect, yeah, we're basically all beta testers for now. And really, if anyone is not comfortable with that, then definitely do not buy a game on day 1 of release - wait until after it's gotten a patch or two. It is really annoying - I mean, I definitely don't want to go out to watch Doctor Strange this weekend only for them to re-cut it and release it again in a few weeks. And ideally we should demand more of the gaming industry overall. But it also means we have to wait a much longer time for each version, and overall, I think it's better to get the early version, live through the bugs and issues for 6 months, and then after that point you can feel reasonably safe that the version is complete. If you don't want to live through this, then go ahead, wait to play/buy until the first few patches are out. Heck, you're even more likely to be able to grab it on a Steam sale in the meantime.