Puer, the following argument is flawed and I'll explain why.
Dont ship the product unless it works! I dont half expect that my new tv may or may not work when i bring it home and say to myself..."oh those poor hardworking technicians, gee whiz, they have it rough, hope they dont get mad if I call and complain". "I will just put the tv in the corner and hope it works". Do you bring a new appliance anD accept it does not work. Damn no..you bring it back and expect a refund or exchange.
When you buy a TV you are buying a piece of hardware that meets certain guidelines. The key here being HARDWARE, and as such every TV you buy is very similar. Not so with a piece of SOFTWARE. It is largely custom made by hand character by character and it it expected to work with an almost infinite number of hardware combinations. Your expectations are practically impossible. As such companies pick the most popular standards out there and work towards those.
Also, you state it doesn't work. Well as you've seen numerous times already that just isn't so. I'm sure you were exagerating, but still the program appears to be working in the vast majority of systems which means it's not as horrible as you are trying to make it out to be.
My point is you simply cannot compare a program with a home appliance, their basic functions are at opposite ends of the spectrum. While I agree the programs should be more robust it's just not going to happen. First we demand things be done in a hurry, yet when they are done we complain that it's not done properly and they should've taken more time. Well guess what, they put it out to make us happy in the first place. So unless we feel like funding them for an extra 3-6 months of testing programs will continue to be buggy and require patches. They don't make money by keeping things off the shelf, and until then we'll just have to wait for those patches that inevitably come.
Companies tend not to pay much attention to message boards, they may have someone who keeps an eye on them some but more often than not that's the extent. Perhaps they don't like getting flamed by anonymous people, and besides they have emails and mailing addresses for a reason.
I wish you good luck with your return campaign and if it works all the better, I would absolutely love to see something like that get real results. I for one don't have the game, I refuse to pay $70 for any game no matter how good, and I don't think I ever have (well maybe once, but I doubt it was even that much).
