Hogan

#9... much agreed. I am no longer with EA, but that doesn't take away my pride for the work that I did. I agree that there are certain corporate elements within EA that I do not agree with, but the only way that we, as consumers of video games, can do anything useful is to not support poor game quality. At the same time, I was often frustrated when issues reported would get over-looked, but I came to understand that there are important reasons why. In the end, I do wish EA, with it's vast talent of developers, would truly spend the proper amount of time to fully-test a game. Maybe games are becoming too complex though. Maybe it's because a good majority of gamers do not think about these things. It'd be cool to find out.

I agree with #5. I tested for EA for 10 months on 4 different projects... we were all very passionate about the bugs we had found, and believe me, we find 99% of them. Like #4 said, it's the dev's and the QA managers who decide what bugs ultimately gets fixed. #1, you have no place to blame the testers. They do 1/2 the work on games, and often get the least credit for it. Unless you've been a tester at EA, how can you know of the work process that testers go through? It's painfully frustrating when it is decided that a bug is a shippable one, but there is so much that goes into it than just saying, "We won't fix it." EA has shareholders that it answers to ultimately, and those shareholders demand a certain pace to the games that are produced by EA. Marketing sets deadlines for release dates, and people work their asses off to meet those deadlines. I'm talking 16, 20 hours work days. Have you ever worked that much in a day? Do you know what it's like to poor over millions of lines of code to find one slow memory leak? It takes thousands of hours. And if you mess up a fix, you create more bugs. Anyway, you should know that the people at EA are super passionate about gaming... and honestly, I'm sick of how much everyone gripes about it. If you hate their games so much, don't buy them! If you think you can make a better game, then do it! Just know that testers work their asseses off and love the games they work on. It's unfair to blame them when it's a much more complex process to find all bugs and fix them than just having a good QA department. Until you understand that, you'll never know the game making process.