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ORIGINAL: khucke

During ground support air to air combat occured and then game stuck. Its vers 1.10. to reproduce the bug, fly Nat China fighter unit from 79, 142 to 81,140. We tried this twice with different combat results each time the game stuck.

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I'm sorry that WIF has disappointed some of you. Steve has worked his posterior off on WIF for many years now and it was not our intention to release it in a state that would disappoint anyone. However, it is a very complex board game that has been an extreme challenge to bring to the computer. In the area of general gameplay bugs, we're finding out more than we ever knew. We also had NetPlay test games that played through entire scenarios successfully.

We knew before release that there were some serious bugs in NetPlay - it was unfortunately a moving target where each build brought some new surprises and we expected it to be nailed down by release, but we were obviously wrong in our pre-release estimate of how many bugs there still were and how long it would take to fix them. I apologize for that and I take responsibility. We believed what we told you, but we underestimated the problem. NetPlay was a major priority for the last year and I personally did not realize there would be as many problems once it was available to the public as there have been. Some testers were more concerned than I was and in hindsight clearly we should have listened to them more, but there were also enough tests going well that we blinded ourselves a bit with optimism. The time after release has been unfortunately as eye opening for us regarding NetPlay as it has been for you. NetPlay continues to be our top priority, we recognize its importance and we're unhappy with the disappointment it has caused - we will get it working as soon as humanly possible.

The state of solitaire appeared very near to perfect before release. Once many more players started banging on it post-release, more bugs were discovered but it works well overall. We are working through the most serious bugs as a priority, along with NetPlay, especially focusing on those that affect all modes of play. However, I feel that in solitaire we're looking at an unsurprising level of bugs for a game this complex, even with all the pre-release testing. There are simply too many corner cases and option/play style combinations to make it possible to test everything with each release, but we'll continue to address issues with each update.

In any case, I apologize for my part that the game is not living up to your expectations. However, we did not try to push it out before it was ready. In hindsight, this is what we accomplished on the NetPlay side, and you have to be willing to accept some bugs in games of this complexity, but we only took the step of moving forward with the manuals and maps and starting to print once our best estimate from our discussions was that the game was in a good and ready state and would only improve by the time the printing and shipping of physical goods was completed. We were obviously wrong on NetPlay and we are working to fix that.

Steve continues to work on this as hard as anyone can and we are doing anything we can to support him. Fixing issues in a game of this complexity is not an easy task but Steve performs it with diligence and care. WIF could not be in better hands. We expect another update this coming week and at least one more zipped update posted directly by Steve over the holidays before Matrix returns to business on January 6th. We'll continue the best pace of updates that is healthy for Steve to do as we make progress on the reported issues.

Regards,

- Erik