Request for patch info!

[Bamspeedy]

At the heart of all this is the issue of motivation.

That I heavily disagree with. 'Motivation' is not always the reason things go wrong. Obviously, there is something wrong (because of the bugs), but it doesn't necessarily mean that it was motivation. People who fail at the olympics, didn't always do so because of lack of motivation, or simply because the other guy had more motivation. There could be numerous other factors.

Did these bugs happen because their 'process' is set up wrong? Did one person screw up, or not follow procedures correctly? Only Firaxis/Breakaway/Atari knows that answer.

Believe me, they WERE motivated to release a bug-free game (but that would be very unrealistic if you want to count very minor graphical bugs). A totally bug-free game would be impossible. There have been millions of people playing Civ3 for 2 years and there is still bugs being found. The game would NEVER be released.

suppose that Zelda Wind Waker had serious bugs at release time? It had to work, so its creators made it so.

Are you talking about the game for Nintendo Game Cube? They don't even have to do any testing/programming to make sure the game is compatible on different platforms/hardware/sound cards/video cards/multiplayer, etc. There are now 1000's of possibilities of all those different combinations that computer games have to be able to play on. A video game only has 1 system it has to work on, where a computer game has to work on thousands of different computer systems. So what is the price of that game compared to C3C? I don't think too many people would buy C3C for $50 (even if those bugs didn't exist).

Not necessarily investment.

The programmers going to work for free?

 

[chameleon]

I would like to commend Firaxis et al for their support to the CIV community. I too work in the IT industry and know that "bug-free" is impossible with todays environments (if it ever was). It is the level of bugs, and how well the supplier responds/fixes them which sorts out the professionals from the cowboys. These guys are definitely professionals and get a big thumbs up from me. Thank you.