I also think that everyone with even a bit of common sense can read through the mindless insults and discern if a complaint is valid or not. "OMFGG FUCKIN DEVS FUK U I NEED RANDOM DUNGEONS && BETTER SUPPORT!!! FUKK!!" is just as much as a valid complaint as "I would like random dungeon support". Unpolite? Yes, sure. Innappropiate too. But also logically sound and valid, so let's not be intentionally obtuse.
It might be just as valid , but in my experience if I deal with one of my customers who acts like your first example I refund their monies and tell them (politely) to fuck off. Shouting and wailing and whining about things tends to get you ignored in the real world. By the same token you don't have to be as polite as your example b.
DB devs "say" (they don't, but that's how it is) that we must rely on the community, and yet they do nothing to maintain a community of good developers.
They obviously don't do it through developing. Features that would be INCREDIBLY USEFUL to newbies AND all users, and also INCREDIBLY EASY to code, such as a graphical interface for selecting DB launch commands (bnet account, password, no-flash) etc. are not there. Instead, you have to rely on modifying the properties of a shortcut and typing a lot of stuff, and make sure it's formatted correctly. Many people either don't know how to do it, or find it very annoying and at the very least, confusing. And so they have to rely on the community to make good launchers and reloggers to avoid doing all that. And so, there's 10-page threads taking space on the main forum debating which is the best relogger, which WE'RE supposed to go through to figure out what's best for us, or keep using shitty shortcuts even if you're multiboxing. ALL OF THAT could've been avoided by adding stuff that can LITERALLY be coded and tested in 10 minutes, 15 minutes TOPS.
They've definitely dropped the ball with things like this. I think the company has got too big and should either work on fewer projects, or hire some more staff. The buddyteam make Honorbuddy. That's their main product and what they spend most of the time on. Over time they've added Buddywing and Demonbuddy and are presumably going to make a bot for GW2, all at the same time that a MAJOR patch comes out for WoW that breaks almost all of the old code for that, so now their devs have to rewrite most of Honorbuddy as well.
Businesses tend to put most of their time and effort in areas that give them the best return. For the buddy bots that means that Honorbuddy gets the most time and money thrown at it, at the expense of other bots who won't get much time unless they are badly broken. So we're not likely to get major updates to Demonbuddy for a couple of weeks further at least. If they hired a DB spokesperson whos job it was to moderate the DB forum and communicate things from the dev team to the users, and to write up guides and How Tos and the like it'd sort a lot of the above out.
Apparently all of this is, plus all the things I said in my other pust, is just asking too much for my money, and I should be forever thankful every time DB is updated (every 3-4 weeks, most of which are just bugfixes, 1 week if the bug is crippling). Well, uh, no.
No, DB has issues that need sorting out. I think that in a month or so a lot of them will be sorted and DB will run much like HB used to run, and will have a much tighter GUI front end so that completely novice users will be able to set it up and press GO and it will do a reasonable job. I'm not happy with how DB is, but for me right now it runs OK and crashes very infrequently. It picks up the loot I tell it to, and I can AFK champ farm act 1 or act2 or I can leave it leveling all by itself. It doesn't quite match up to the advertising copy that is written up on the "Buy our bot now" page but meh - advertising copy is what it is, same as for every other company pretty much. It takes 5 mins of forum reading to know what you're getting into before you type in payment details and the forums are open to be read by anyone.
They seem to be using the same business model for Demonbuddy as for Honorbuddy, (let the community write stuff to make the bot better) only there are far fewer people playing D3 so the pool of motivated people to create good plugins/profiles is smaller to start with, hence it's not working as well.
Lets also not forget that DB is relatively new, IIRC Honorbuddy took a long time to turn into the more polished product it is today. I chose DB over other bots because of BossLands record. The company isn't going anywhere anytime soon. The legal aspect is possibly the buddyteams best asset, they just won't cave in to pressure from Blizzard to shut down, and are going to be here a while.
