As also said before, they did this with DBC 14 and it bit them in the ass severly -- so they are damned if they do and damned if they don't
I'm not sure letting people know what had been handled "bit them in the ass". The worst that happened was a bunch of "well, how long till it's actually released", "come on release it already" kind of posts, which are happening anyway and always will when things need fixed and is unrelated to the information shared. Those updates calmed large sections of people and brought understanding more than anything.
Personally I think the key issue with this is that the game has small number of bugs which can be "result changing". When you have a game, the result can at any moment randomly be taken out of your hands. Those are major issues. If you have one in your game, then that's altering the fundementals of gameplay into a roulette wheel. That's where people start to feel like information or progess updates has past the point of "it'd be nice to have" into an area where your playing audience should be informed.
I don't think anyone is asking for daily updates and weekly is maybe a little too close together, but since patch 3 it's been long enough with this degree of issues to not hear a thing.
Which brings me to the "we've had three patches, c'mon be grateful" guff we've had. Those patches didn't really bring anything to the table that shouldn't have been there out of the box. The game was crashing. Major features (logos for one) weren't working. It's not like they patched in fun gimmicky things and extras.
When it first came out there was a lot of "well return it then" retorts. Depending on the country you're in, consumer law doesn't let you return games due to perceived copying and piracy issues. That's the case we're I'm from. On top of that we do know Big Ant can and do make fantastic games, so selling it for a loss right before a patch dropped wouldn't be wise.
I think one of the things that was brought up was the manner in which Big Ant responds to criticism. The problem is that many gamers, simply put, are assholes. Rather than expressing negative feedback in a respectfull way, some choose to troll other threads. And when they do post in the right place, they come across as condescending. That's when we see the negative responses from Big Ant.
Well, I have been critical, but I have been respectful, as I do respect the developer and their aims. I'm not name-calling them or the product, so I'm guessing I'm not one of the many gamer assholes?
