Being a Senior QA Analyst/Engineer for 12 years has taught me a few things.
Number 1 - I would never want to release buggy software to the general public. This leads directly to...
Number 2 - The trend in today's world is to allow buggy software to be released to the general public, knowing that it is cheaper to fix a large percentage of bugs within the first few weeks of a release by having the end users provide feedback. Call of Duty is a 3 billion dollar franchise. Therefore, Activision/Treyarch have learned that releasing a game a year that will sell millions of copies, regardless of the opening release bugginess, will make them lots of money. Because they believe that their end user base will continue to buy it, they will continue to rely on the end users to do most of the work. Activision/Treyarch will tell you that they have committed months and months of development and QA time and effort into this Black Ops version...and they have. But they didn't do enough. Which brings me to ...
Number 3 - Know your users. The better you know your users, the better you can predict what they will do with your software, and thus, be able to provide the best quality user experience possible. I believe that Activision has made some serious transgressions when it comes to what it expects from its users. These people cannot be expected to put together detailed, precise bug reports, that are politely written on the Call of Duty Forums. Put yourself in the user's shoes. I just bought a $60 game, that has 6 earlier versions to its credit. By the 7th version, I am expecting perfection from the get-go. When I have trouble installing it, trouble getting it to run without re-booting my machine, and extremely slow performance with choppy framerate graphics which make the gameplay unbearable, then I should have the right to express my disdain for not having received fair value for my purchase and for the trouble I have to go through. I also have the right to get paid to do their job, if they want clear, concise, bug reports. But they do not offer that to their users. They expect that the user will do whatever it takes to make the product better, because all the user wants to do is play the game.
Activision: Do us all a favor, and spend the extra month or two it would take to make the game playable and enjoyable from the start, so we don't notice the bugs after only 10 minutes of installing it and/or playing it. Please use these guidelines for Call of Duty 8, and spend some of the millions in profits to make a better game at the time of release. And please don't disrespect the PC players in favor of your console users, even though most of your sales go to XBOX360 & PS3 users. We PC players are a proud people.
