Technical Support

Ok, so another little rant-post on tech support.  Not the standard 1-800 number kind, but I'm talking about the kind of support developers probably should lend to consumers after they made a game and said game has gone to market.  Over the past month or so I've hit a few things:
1) a wage of nostalgia for certain games
2) regret I had not played other games
3) game spending sprees on steam and other sites
 
Which has all led me down some interesting paths.  Some have been positive, such as when I purchased Deus Ex (already talked about) and spend like 4 hours modding the engine to look not so old- that was fun and I am enjoying the results.  Now while doing this, all the work has been 100% community based- which makes sense.  This game is old.  Then I've also purchased Duke 3d off of apogee's website.  Interestingly, what they were selling was as close to the orig duke 3d as you could get.  So it didn't run by itself.  Further interesting to me is that Good Old Games sells the same thing already set up to run on modern windows machines.  In any case, setting up the eduke thing wasn't all that hard, but needless to say I was a little miffed that I could simply have bought the same thing from good old games that I got from apogee and it would have worked.  
 
Now, things get more interesting.  I had some credit from amazon and was a little bit remorse over how I've never played bioshock.  So I bought it (price was right).  Anyways- the game didn't even remotely work out of the box.  It took me a while to identifty the issue- made worse by this game not being all that old but still not being supported.  (I can't really blame irrational/2k that much, because I think this game is probably on the edge of the statute of limitations for when developers need to support their software still).  But it was rather frustrating to me that the 'google first' fixes were all to disable a major component of the game (sound) and were not to fix the problem (bioshock sound engine would not load on my computer).  Anyways- I identified a few issues: the usb sound thing I was using was crap- so I got rid of it and uninstalled the software.  Turns out that fixed problems I was having with source engine games (framerate slowdown) so yay!  But still the game would not load.  Finally I worked out that the mere presence of a sound render program on my computer (blue ripple for Dirt3) was breaking bioshock.  Uninstalling that software works like a charm.
 
Of course, dirt3 doesn't work if you leave it uninstalled (at least for me because I have it set to 'hardware' sound).  So I keep an installer handy.  And this leads me to my tipping point.  See, I had owned dirt2 for the xbox 360, and it was awesome.  Really good. I had also heard that the dx11 items made the PC version look just that much better.  So when dirt3 came out a couple months ago- I bought it for the PC.  And all was good.  It ran great and looked awesome.  Then over time, the game would periodically lock up on a loading screen (entering or exiting the main menu system to/from a race).  And I read something that the blue ripple sound I was using wasn't up to date- so I made it up to date.  I've played dirt3 a little less frequently than I had initially, but really have dug the multiplayer (esp hardcore mode), so I pick it up every once in a while just for that.  Of course it would lock up like every 3 races.  So I did some digging around online and got the impression that codemasters was 'ignoring' the issue, but if you force the game to run in dx9 (still looks good- though some problems, more on that in a bit) it wouldn't lock up.  Totally true- runs fine.  Of course, all of the 'track' textures now have a dopper effect because some of the dx11 render stuff doesn't hide it and that looks bad, but other than that the game is alright.  Still this upsets me, I have a gtx570 with the new i7 sandybridge dude, plus 8g of ram.  So there's no reason I shouldn't be able to play this game maxed out.  So this morning i decided to do some light reading over on the codemaster forums.  And found (much to my surprise) that a community manager had created a sticky post for helping work through the issue.  Here's the central problem they were having 'fixing' the issue:
None of their PC nor any of Nvidia's PC's could reproduce the issue.  So they were having people upload dump reports and stuff- that's actually cool.  So I read through all 20+ pages of the thread and here's what I've gleaned: ever since Codemasters has started using dx11 features, their games have had 'lock-up' issues that they have not 'addressed.'  By addressed I mean that I don't think they've acknowledged an issue, except now for Dirt3.  The other thing I noticed- and this is something i think of specifically in relation to the way this website handles tech problems:  of those 20 pages of replies, there are about 6 actual posts from codemasters.  The thread covers about 20 days or so- so that surprises me.  I mean over here when a site goes down, Dave or someone is all over it on twitter and such giving status updates.  People move, people act and end-users are notified.  So I guess that's just all I had to say.
 
I'm shocked that a company which makes a mass-market product and a company which establishes an internet presence for interacting with it's clients can't be bothered to do just that.  I'm further shocked that codemasters people posting are 'community managers' which leads me to believe their duty is to be that communication vehicle.  I don't know, I could be totally wrong in how workflows are allocated for community managers- but in my line of work, if there's something that needs focused on, we tell someone to basically drop what their doing and focus on that.  Why wouldn't they just assign a community manager to that thread (since they deemed it important enough to engage this massive crash dump reporting operation- cool QA move btw), to give regular updates or such?  I don't develop software or come from that world, so maybe I just don't understand how this all works.
 
Ironically I haven't played the game in a while.  Non-ironically each time I think I want to go play it, it pisses me off I can't run the game in dx11 and I go play something else.