My Beef With Gearbox

Ed note: The following doesn't necessarily reflect the opinions of the site. We just like to promote interesting and well-written pieces from the forums.

Does anybody else feel a little cheezed with Gearbox's approach to the widespread issues that surround Borderlands?

As everyone knows already, the game is far from perfect, and as such cannot ever be expected to be completely perfect, it was an audacious, imaginative endeavor anyways and is good for the most part.

But after selling however many millions of copies worldwide, it seems that Gearbox has dropped the ball on customer satisfaction and continued support of (their) game.  Multiple issues have been reported, as of yet, no results, but the promise of 'pending deployment.'  

In the meanwhile, Gearbox continues to rake in additional revenue through the sales of TWO DLC packs already, with one more in the works.  I think they are missing something here thats VERY important only because consumers like us are only too happy to pump them up with even more of our hard earned tax-dollars.  Erm, so when are you guys, like gonna fix the stuff thats already broken? 

Gearbox should be concentrating much more on resolving current hot issues that plague systems currently to make the original game a much better, stable platform, by addressing viral items, modified game-breaking items, glitches and other known issues.  These issues have been known for MONTHS now and it is unacceptable by any standard that there is no patch as of yet to address the most pressing of these issues which affects game quality and ultimately users enjoyment of the game.  

The online component of the game is essentially broken because of all the widespread modification abuse which should have not occurred in the first place.  I wonder if Gearbox has even been listening to their customers - its not a small sample of people who have issues with modified items, we are talking about the vast majority of the existing customer base who are patiently waiting for some very needed changes.  

Instead, Gearbox have their developers working 'hard' to deliver additional content on what is essentially still a buggy platform with the expectation that many consumers will buy into it regardless of its quality because its obvious that quality concerns are of low priority to Gearbox.  Gearbox, its the gamers that should be your #1 priority, not trying to bleed every last dollar out of consumers.  Get the first part right and you will be ensured success because the gamers will support.  Right now, Gearbox is just coming off as another greedy corporation.  Nonetheless, it is partly the consumers to blame for this.

Tsk Tsk Gearbox... get your gears in order and start fixing the pressing stuff already.  Lets put it this way: other reputed game development houses like Infinity Ward are waaaay ahead of the curve compared to you.  The main reason? They actually listen to the gamers, and are committed to delivering high quality games. Gearbox can't even compare in terms of product quality, there is no comparison.  

Borderlands was a good unique title but was released with far too little playtesting and this is very obvious.  Ask any gamer and they would say that they would rather wait for a developer to get a game right the first time rather then purchase a broken product, to only have to wait for some patch 'x' number of months down the road to be released.  All that does is piss gamers off.  Take some tips.  Lets not get started comparing how long patches take to deploy because other developers don't nearly take as long as 2 months. 

You have kept everyone waiting long enough, and I am sure this will not reflect well on the attitude of your valued customers to your organization and future games.  To be honest, had I known that Gearbox would act in such regard to support their own product, I would not have invested my dollars in the game to support, and do not intend to support further until consumers see some results.  I have been a gamer for years and all I know is that development houses with this kind of track record do not reap success in the long run.