Re: Had enough of El Reg's moneygrabbing bull****, I QUIT!
I have, many a time, announced that I wouldn't touch a game again (either in an existing thread or elsewhere) and then, shockingly, never touched that game again. Worms Reloaded comes to mind - no matter what machine I tried, I couldn't get multiplayer to work at all, because they used a multiplayer system that - by their own admission - only two Steam games used: Theirs, and another which had lots of reported multiplayer problems.
They had no intention of fixing it, and never did, and to this day I still haven't loaded it back up except when they claim to have "fixed" it and then I just prove to myself that, actually, it's still exactly the same. I haven't loaded it in over a year now, I don't think, and gave up looking for updates. And that also stops me from buying any of their other games too.
If I've paid for a product, and I have problems, I will post my problems on your forums (don't expect me to sort things out entirely in private - there's a reason that I publicise the problems even for my favourite products - to get them acknowledged, fixed, and show people the difference between a company that cares and one that doesn't). That's what forums are there for.
I will post them in the most relevant area possible and contain them in my own thread unless another is very similar and I can "piggyback" on their comments. I title them with a relevant header and search before I post. That let's people know the various problems and come straight to a relevant post when *they* do the same. I've had posts that were literally titled with the error message that only I and a group of others were getting and until I made the post, all the previous entries were just "It doesn't work", "I get an error", etc. with no details and no follow-up (or follow-up on the 32nd page which is *USELESS* for other people trying to find help).
And when I announce that I am quitting a game (Age of Booty - Gamespy never worked properly. Worms Reloaded - funny UDP multiplayer mode on Steam never worked properly - both probably because I have a software firewall and a hardware one, but that's no excuse when thousands of other games work online just fine. The new X-COM demo - I got into an infinite loop in the menu and could not get out of the game without a full process kill, nobody was interested so I didn't buy it. I could go on.), I quit it. Whereas when I announce that I have a problem and someone aids me in diagnosing it (Zombie Driver - I found a crash-bug related to having a joystick device installed that wasn't really a joystick device, but a keyboard-based emulation of one), I'm happy to post the solution and go on my merry way and sign the praises of the developers.
That's how this works. Put out junk, and expect your complaints department to get overwhelmed. And in the online world, the complaints department is a publicly visible forum where everyone has their own grievance.