Closed beta is an excellent idea. The moderators could easily nominate a selection of the relatively impartial (or at least truthful) forumites. Get them to sign an NDA if necessary (most wouldn't even read it in my experience) and pass betas through the testers before RC stage.

The devs clearly don't have time to test thoroughly so why not? It would certainly save on the more embarrassing errors like planes that don't start...

It's lip service, nothing more. If this patch is crap I'm just going back to 1946. I've already parked one foot into HSFX.

Of course they won't do it. This is apparently the last patch so no point even discussing it for CoD. And I doubt they will do it for the sequel due to a mixture of pride and confidence about their progress. Hope I'm wrong, though.

If I go to a car dealer and ask for a test drive, I expect them to at least give me the keys so I can get the car moving.

You can't seriously suggest that not being able to start something as major as the Hurricane is due to this patch being a RC. Rubbish - it's nothing more than sloppiness with a dash of nochalance thrown in for good measure.

For sure there are some positive aspects of this latest patch, but the issues that have been missed (or rather, reintroduced) are just, well ....

http://www.tacteam.org/epoch/rsz_1double-facepalm1.jpg

No, this is not the patch but it's the a proof that we should better forget about IL2 Cliffs of Dover and everything that may follow. If this is basal for the sequel I won't install it even if I would get it for free. I already went back to IL2 1946 with HSFX a long time ago and relish an awesome working & looking WWII flight sim.

@Luthier, take a break and do the same to see how easy life could be. Return back to the roots of this great product and refine it without ruffle or excitement.

You're not dealing with a car, you're dealing with a software-product. The differences are as legion as that analogy of yours is severely overused and if you cannot see that, there's damn little I can do to convince you.

It's a bug, and you WILL find that in an Release-candidate. The Hurri No-start bug would, at least to me, be grounds to pull the patch for a rework before releasing another RC. Then again, that's how I work and think, although others might think otherwise.

Too hideous to release this as a final patch? Agree completely.

Actually, I'm reasonably optimistic about the sequel. Whatever you say about the professionalism of the dev team you have to acknowledge that CoD was born under very trying circumstances.

Hopefully the next release will be more controlled.

Fellas am I missing something here?RC released has bugs, bugs get reported and they are worked on and fixed before the final Steam release..

I don't see what people are hyping on about? If they checked the patch for every bug known and listed then what would the point of a RC be? It would be official rules right?

Granted if you fly the hurri your be a bit pissed but its a bug, this isn't the final released patch...

Do some of you actually think they do this on purpose? Release and re release bugs into the game to pi#s everyone off..?

first of all, re-introducing bugs you've already solved in previous versions shows very, very bad code knowledge, programming or versioning control. most probably all of them.

secondly, they does not look like they weren't testing anything, they were simply not tested anything. they've just thrown them together the last version they had on their subversion, and that was it.

as a third point, don't you imagine CoD is a different branch in the code than BoM. Considering they will work together, it is the same base code, which means what we see right now in CoD is exactly the state in which BoM is too. Which is nothing short of disastrous. Their "pace" of fixing things, more than one year and a half after release is almost zero. For God's sake, other companies are making a whole new product, from the scratch, within this period of time. they were not able to just fix some simple things.

I can not see how this might work for BoM, no matter how hard, or from which angle I'm trying to look at it.

At this point, a realistic expectation would be to expect them fixing anything they can at this crawling rate (with many previously working things getting broken) until they'll have to close the business for good, most probably at the time the BoM sale results will come in. And the optimistic one would be to have them release the code, so that we can work on it by ourselves.

As MJ said, this is it!

Jamz, everyone expects bugs in a Release Candidate -- no question. But HUGE, GLARING, ones? We rightly figure that this Release Candidate means the devs are getting towards the end here, and they need all of us to find the type of bugs that are subtle and easily missed. After all, this is it. No more added features or improvements to CoD until maybe "the sequel" --- a long time away (we're still waiting on the June announcement for THAT).

Instead of a near-finished product that needs some tweaking and some bugs to hunt down, we get a sloppy patch with aircraft that won't even start (:confused:), and others that can barely get halfway to their service ceiling before they start shaking and spluttering. Other longtime missing/broken features such as AI and Comms haven't even been addressed. Even the long-awaited readme hadn't even been edited to remove previous beta items -- such as the nerfing of the Spitfire 2a and Hurricane Rotol. Sure, NBD except it points to astonishingly sloppy and careless work by a dedicated, hardworking development crew. Was there no leadership at all for someone to say, "OK, look guys, before we release this let's just fire up a few PC's and run a few quick missions -- let's focus on some of the known problem areas". To be sure, some "oopsies" would've been spotted right away, tweaked or fixed, and then at least that would permit the rest of us to work on spotting the less obvious bugs.

At the very least, Ilya could have taken 10 minutes to proof his readme file, delete the old stuff (which gave more than a few of us a bit of concern), and deliver a more polished, professional summary of the hard work done on beta 1.09.

If the glaring bugs had occurred at the last moment, then a quick mention in the readme would at least acknowledge these are known items to be squashed. We have no assurances these obvious bugs will be fixed, based on established track record. It's a darn shame, as some aspects of this beta 1.09 show real promise, but get obscured by the overall sloppiness exhibited.

Hopefully, Ilya will make good on his intentions to answer some of our questions and render all of our concerns and exasperation moot.