You have a point. However, taken to its logical conclusion, this and other vociferousness has the opposite effect.
To some extent, controversy can be good. It increses awareness, it increases attention to the product. As long as it doesn't get out of hand, companies often like to have this. I'm not saying they purposefully do negative things, I'm saying that when it happens it's not necessarily negative for the strength and growth of the game community and sales.
What happens, though, is that active company presence costs time and money. They have to carefully consider what they say and how. Think about how much internal discussion and attention a simple press release takes. Now, multiply that by X times for something such as a public forum. This can spiral out of control and take a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money in terms of overhead costs.
So, what happened here is that people have inferred something from a statement Alexman made. At worst, Alexman was imprecise, in which case Firaxis is guilty of not spending enough internal time and attention on review of the exact wording that Alexman was to use. That's at worst.
Ultimately, by jumping all over Firaxis for this, it ensures that in the future they will spend a large amount of time and attention for any future posts. This in turn will limit the number of posts, if not eliminate them altogether. So if that's what we want, we should keep complaining.
My point is that we have to assume part of the blame. We inferred things. As I said, at worst, Alexman had imprecise wording. We took it from there.
Wodan
Wow! That's some of the most tortured "reasoning" I've seen from any of the Firaxis apologists.
Your argument, taken to its logical conclusion, is that we should all be quiet so as not to bother Firaxis. They already can't be bothered hosting their own forum. Now you're saying we should keep quiet so as not to bother them further.
Let's look at the original statement:
We are done with the patch, but unfortunately we will not be able to release it this week as we had hoped. Believe me, I know how hard it is to wait, so here is the list of changes in the meantime.
First and foremost, Firaxis started this little hubbub by starting this thread. No poster here deserves
any "part of the blame." We are all customers of Firaxis. Without us, they have no business.
If they don't want to spend the resources to deal with customer support and service, they've got no right to be in business. They already save resources by not hosting their own forum. How indulgent are paying customers expected to be?
No one is "inferring" anything. Look at what he said: "We are done with the patch, but unfortunately we will not be able to release it this week as we had hoped." He didn't said we're "close" to being done. He said it's "Done." He didn't say that, despite it's being done, you'll have to wait X period of time. He said they had hoped to release it
last week. Any expectations created were the result of that one sentence. If something is "done" and they hoped to release it
last week, there is a clear implication that it will be released very shortly. Any inference taken from that implication is entirely justified.
At the risk of repeating myself, I'll say again what I said earlier. This self-congratulatory shell game -- "We have it, but you can't and, by the way, tell us if it's worth the wait when you can quantify neither the worth nor the wait" -- is a model for how things should not be done.
These last two patches have been handled ineptly, in one way or the other. This is business, not a frat house meeting and Firaxis' handling of these last two patches are been distinctly poor business. There are things which can and things which cannot be avoided. A number of bugs in any computer software cannot be avoided. But the poor handling of these patches by Firaxis could have and should have been avoided. It's simply poor business and no amount of apologies and rationales for Firaxis' behavior can change that.
When something is poorly handled, it's right to hold accountable those responsible. The more we engage in "La Di Da" apologizing, the worse the situation is likely to become.