ORIGINAL: jzardos
Once again, it pains me that the testers did not catch (think they did?) and fix this before the release.
I think you have a wrong view of what beta testing is.
What it is not : "Here is the game. You have 3 months to test everyting. Then we make every correction and we sell the game."
It's an evolutive process. New version is up. Devs says they have changed this and this. They ask the testers to see if changes works as intented. Tests shows changes needs further tweaking. Then with every change, you can have an unexpected change in another area, because everything is interdependant, and this game runs some very complex mechanisms. Testers can't re-test everything every time a change is made. Maybe something that worked very well at an earlier stage was broken later in the development, and no tester saw it because it worked before and they were focused on something else. Maybe something was spotted, but the devs had no time to tweak it before release. You can't always retest and retweak everything, or else you never sell your game and you're out of business.
The day when the game is out, many many more players begin to "test" every aspect of the game with a fresh view. And so new areas that need tweaking emerge. That's inevitable. But frankly, I have seen countless games in the past that were much much worse on release that this one. And I mean, worse like "really unplayable before 3 or 4 patches and unbalanced before 2 or 3 expansions".
This one is stable at release and certainly playable. The fact that we have deep discussion about pilots training means that lot of more important mechanisms are already pretty solid. That's a very good sign for the future of the game.
