Quote Originally Posted by MoonstalkerZ View Post
First, the community team's response of blaming user hardware may not be the opinion of the devs, or even of the individual community team members, but could be a result of orders from on high based on advice from lawyers. If SE delivered a non-functioning product, and the problem IS on their end, they could be liable for damages, depending on how the laws work in Japan. So though yes, the response sucks, we shouldn't be abusive to the community team - it's entirely possible they're just doing what the lawyers told them to, and being nasty isn't going to help them fix anything.
I was just thinking about this point today. I figure if this indeed does go on long enough, they could be facing something along the lines of a class action lawsuit. After all, they put out a benchmark to help players test for system readiness prior to purchasing the expansion, and many players no doubt ran the benchmark and later ordered the expansion and purchased game time confident they’d be able to enjoy the game with their current hardware (congestion aside). The fact that many are now discovering that their hardware is now unable to run the game as expected means that the benchmark was misleading. IMO, in this context, I feel a strategy of “blame the user’s hardware” will make matters worse, not better. If they refuse to properly fix this, they could be on the hook for paying out refunds on the expansion, playtime, and potentially any other purchases that depended on a working expansion (eg, you wouldn’t have bought a fantasia to try male Viera if you knew the game would be unplayable).

Could you imagine if something like Microsoft did this with Windows? Imagine releasing a tool to test for compatibility with the next version, claiming that it will work, allowing the customer to purchase the product, then making a late breaking change that they then refuse to fix later. Now imagine that the user has no way to know that it actually won’t work until they’ve already installed it and registered the license key. Going through the normal channels, that user is no longer eligible for a refund, but obviously they will want one if no fix is on the horizon. At this point the company essentially used a lie (working benchmark/compatibility tool) to get their mon y, and then ran. I’m fairly sure that in some form or fashion that move is illegal in most countries.

I feel like SE’s best bet would be to completely revert the sound driver to what it was in the benchmark even if that does mean breaking compatibility with that new plugin. That would at least make the game playable in the short term, and they can work on possibly bringing that back in later. Of course, if they’ve entered into some sort of contract with that company over this (I’d assume that SE gets a portion of the sales of that sound pack, otherwise, why would SE bother in the first place?), that could seriously complicate this mess.

I haven’t heard anyone mentioning anything positive about the sound plugin, so it makes me wonder if sales will be a flop for it.

Anyway, I’ll post a detailed bug report around Monday or so when I return home.