Kanes Rache 1.1 lässt weiter auf sich warten

Hey everyone,

I would like to first mention that my previous post this week about our patch was misunderstood about releasing tomorrow. I was purely trying to inject some lite humor and sarcasm and unfortunately this turned in to an inaccurate message. For this, I apologize.

We had an emergency setback yesterday with the KW Patch which was caught by our ECG team. They are the final approval gate, in Europem and they found a bug which was claimed fixed, but broke in the latest build, and thus not fixed. While the bug itself is minor, it's not something we can publish the patch with. So we had to create another build of the patch, QA it, and resubmit to our ECG & CQC team last night. Any time you resubmit, a full sweeping test must take place which take's a minimum of 2 days, and it's unfortunate the 4th of July falls tomorrow as a USA holiday. Thus, we will have to wait until next week to release the Kane's Wrath patch, and begin Ladder Season 2.

We fully understand the anger and frustration, but to those who can understand, we are committed to releasing a quality patch. The last thing we want to do is put a broken patch out there which we then need to emergency patch, and you are even angrier. This is why we have multiple approval processes which involves 3 different teams doing the same testing, looking for issues. If we had released the patch today, you would have received a patch with a nasty bug in it that would have required us to emergency patch. That would be a terrible scenario.

In lieu of this situation, our EALA General Manager (and former C&C and BFME Executive Producer) Mike Verdu, has taken some time to write a very personal message to you, the fans. We are dedicated to our community and to the future of the C&C franchise, and it is rare to find an industry leader who is more forthcoming and honest in such a situation than our EALA GM, Mike Verdu.

Please take a moment to read his following message/blog and I hope you can look forward to next week. We are going to plan some big celebrations around this patch next week, not limited to just the Ladder Season - APOC


"A WORD FROM EALA GENERAL MANAGER MIKE VERDU"

We are finally on the cusp of releasing a long overdue patch for the PC version of Kane's Wrath, the expansion pack for C&C3. This patch addresses desync and balance issues that should have been fixed months ago, and I apologize again to our customers for the long delay. The wait for the Kane's Wrath patch has been a low point in our product support for the last few years, and I take full responsibility.

As General Manager of the studio that makes Command & Conquer games (as well as the Battle for Middle series), I care a great deal about our product quality and support.

I am very proud of our games and the teams that made them. From C&C Generals to the two Battle for Middle-earth games to C&C3, I feel like we have brought great RTS experiences to millions of people who have spent tens of millions of hours playing the games and having fun. That's what I live for. it's why I'm in this business. I can't think of a better reward than to know that we have built games that people are spending time with and enjoying. I know that some in our community may dislike certain products or aspects or features of the games overall - and I'm humble enough to realize that we can always improve and do better - but in my heart I believe that we've made some good games that have delivered value to our customers.

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.

Our support woes are not the fault of the line developers who work here. We have some of the most talented people in the world on our RTS teams here at EA Los Angeles. The basic issue is the tension between developing new products and supporting our older products. Creating a patch requires hundreds - and in some cases thousands - of man-hours invested by an interdisciplinary team. as well as close coordination with our quality assurance department and other parts of our company. Our teams and leaders have the best of intentions and desperately want to continue supporting our games. but we find ourselves constantly trading off between new development and support. It's very hard to juggle this work and there are often dependencies and complexities involved that wind up hurting both the new project and the patch efforts. Our issues with support are not a matter of being greedy; believe it or not we have actually spent seven figure sums supporting each of our products for the last few years (if you added up the effort invested and money spent on patches and support for Generals, the BFME games, C&C3, and their expansion packs, we could have built an entire new product). It actually boils down to a matter of logistics and management.

We've been wrestling with the logistics of support for a long time and we need a new approach. After all, some of our competitors have been providing a high level of post-launch support for years, so we know it can be done. and done well.

I'm happy to announce that we have established a live team for our RTS products. Its mission is simple: To protect and serve Command & Conquer - the C&C community, the individual C&C games, and the C&C universe. The live team is starting small, but over a period of many months it will be staffed with a number of developers who will be dedicated to support. Over the next year, more and more support activities will be carried out by the live team instead of by the teams that actually build the games. Red Alert 3 will start out supported by its development team and will transition to live team support a few months after release. The live team's laser-sharp focus on support eliminates the inherent conflict between new development and patching/maintaining our legacy products.

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. In fact, it will take considerable time to get this effort spun up and working well. But over a period of months and years, I believe the benefits of this new approach will be evident. My hope is that the community will be able to look back on this period and say, "this was the low point - and then things started getting better".

-Mike Verdu
EALA General Manager