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I've closed down the old patch thread as I wanted people to see the following, rather than it being lost, and to let everyone know exactly what is going on with the patch, and the process that has been gone through thus far.
I'm not interested in getting involved in the war of words that is going on- it's very easy for people to say things on an internet forum in the heat of moment, and most of us here have done it ourselves from time to time. We understand that some people are disappointed with the time the patch has taken, and some are disappointed with the game as a whole too. We've learnt over the years that it's not possible to please all people, all of the time, particularly not when you have as rabid and passionate a community as we have, so we concentrate on doing our best at all times.
For some of you, that best is not good enough, and there will be nothing that we can ever do or say that can change that. The constructive comments are always noted, and the destructive ones are ignored as much as possible, as getting annoyed, angry, or hurt just slows down the whole work process - we are a bunch of guys who make computer games with the purpose of entertaining people. What we do gives many people enjoyment, and we're very proud of that, but it's not as if our actions are the difference between the world being saved or not. We'll leave that to Hiro and his friends.
So, the patch. When the game was released, or with some things, between the game going into manufacture and it being released, there were a handful of issues reported that we deemed "must fix". There were also some little things that we wanted to look at. The senior team members here concentrated on the "must fix" side of things, with the less senior the other things.
Probably the most spoken about one of these is the "closing down" bug.
Whilst there were certainly workarounds for it, it was very frustrating, and Paul Collyer set about working on fixing it. The problem with fixing things in the match engine is that any tiny tweak can put the whole match engine out of sync. Paul fixed it quite early on, but other knock on problems occurred, and the match engine needed to be re-balanced to take those into account.
Whilst Paul was working on these, the Scottish fixture issue (whereby if you save between a certain couple of weeks of ingame time, and exit the game, and reload, the fixtures weren't generated) was fixed, some of the long term confidence issues were also sorted, as was a stadium expansion problem, along with lots of minor niggling things that wouldn't have been noticed by 99.99% of the people playing the game.
At this stage, we noticed that the matches were taking a lot longer to process, due to the extra calculations that were going on to fix the closing down issue, and the aforementioned other changes that developed from this.
We decided to release the beta patch as we were unhappy with the speed decrease, but also felt it necessary that people could play the game, with us thinking that it was only the speed issue that needed to be sorted.
The beta patch threw up some more confidence issues that we hadn't seen, so those needed to be fixed aswell, and Paul and a coder on another project set about optimising the match engine.
The optimisation took slightly longer than we were hoping, and the match code then went into test internally here at SI (we've kept a lot more testers here than we would normally do after a game has come out to ensure that lots of testing is done on the patch) and what we call our "Dream Team", which is some of our most constructive vocal posters on these forums over the years. This threw up a few more match engine issues, and balancing issues compared to real world stats due to, as I mentioned earlier, any tiny changes in the match engine, even optimising, causing other issues to occur.
The stage we are at now is that Paul is finishing off some match engine tweaks over the next couple of days, and we'll then get that version out to the Dream Team and the QA guys, and get it tested over the weekend. If that all goes without a hitch, you can expect a patch early next week - it takes a day or so to build all the different versions of the patch that are needed.
If this testing doesn't go as well as we hope, and more problems are found, then I'll add to this thread, and give a new estimated timeframe.
There are no promises with any of this - I just wanted to explain the processes, which hopefully I've now done.
We are, as always, committed to everyone having the best gameplaying experience possible. Some people will not be happy, and that is the case with every game that is released, but some of the vitriol on these forums really surprises me sometimes. I've been playing the same version of the game that everyone on these forums has, and have been enjoying it immensely, in my 6th season with Watford and in the Champions League. I came across one of the bugs myself to do with confidence (and found one to do with stadium expansions that hasn't been reported here, but has been fixed before anyone could do!), so lost a couple of seasons of my "record" which was frustrating, but those have been minor issues compared to my enjoyment of the game thus far, and less "showstopping" than some of the issues I'm having with other games at the moment. There are no excuses though - we would love to have released a game with no issues at all, but sometimes things just slip through the net, and there's little we can do about that apart from try our best to fix them as quickly as we can. We're all working round the clock to achieve this.
You've done a great job with FM2008. Don't listen to the boo boys - its a great product and has given me hours of entertainment! Keep up the good work.
The all new patch thread. 
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