Some of the reasons for why the official UT forums are run like they are: http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showpost.php?p=2113475&postcount=49.
Fundamentally, people who non-stop bitch about the UI, the player counts, the "consolification", etc are doing it for their own benefit. 99.99% of the "I'm sad" or "How can we save UT" threads are retreads of opinions now almost 6 months old and are already well understood by the UT team.
Jeff--it might be possible to quell some of those repetitive complaints by publicly answering fans' primary concerns. I rarely visit your forums anymore since I'm no longer paying too much attention to UT3 (got hooked on Sins of a Solar Empire, but that won't last forever), so please forgive me if I missed some of the dialog, but I think that what UT fans would like to know is:
If there's going to be another UT for the PC, will the user interface and everything else that surrounds the game play be as good as what we had in UT99 and UT 2004 and thus came to expect we would have for UT3? You say that people's complaints about the UI and the consolification are well understood by the UT team, but what we don't know is, how will they use that knowledge in the future?
I think that many UT fans are concerned that you guys no longer care about PC gaming and they'd like to know what your intentions are for the next UT. I think fans would also appreciate having some additional context about why UT3 for the PC ended up being the way it is.
Did the designers sincerely believe that they were making a good user interface and that it was smooth and fast? Do they only care about designing for consoles now since, supposedly, that's where the money is (which would make some sense)? Were they under tremendous time pressure and perhaps even legal threats from Midway to get a salable product out the door before Christmas or else, in which case, like someone who does an all-nighter on a term paper, they didn't feel good about the final product but had to grudgingly put it out there? (If you can't talk about that for contractual and confidentiality reasons you could say that you "just can't talk about it, sorry" and folks could fill in the blanks from there.)
For the record, I don't think that Epic's designers are idiots who don't know how to make a fast, smooth user interface or server browser, etc., and also who don't know the difference between a beta and a finished product. My theory is that Midway leaned on (or maybe put a gun up to the head of) Epic to get the game out before Christmas and that you guys had to triage and bust ass to get a product out the door, porting the console version of the game to the PC.
Am I right?
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