Not to throw a wet blanket on the idea, but I kinda doubt it. I mean, you acknowledge that the powers that be aren't willing to put in whatever money and effort would be needed redeploy the server that restricts premium modules to paid purchasers. (And, that would at least potentially justify allowing online sales of the premium modules. Any idea has a better chance of getting approved if a business case can be made for it.) So, if that is already too much work, I doubt that the idea of putting up the money and effort required to release a patch to satisfy offline players who mostly haven't bought the premium modules anyway is really going to get much consideration.
[BTW, people often lose sight of how much effort actually goes into putting together a release-worthy patch for a commercial product. On top of actually coding the fix for the problem the patch is nominally supposed to solve (and fighting off all of the inevitable "as long as you're fixing that, why not fix the little bug where..." requests), that code has to be alpha tested internally to discover the 90% of easy-to-catch bugs that it inadvertently introduced, then beta tested to catch the other 90% of new bugs introduced, then it must be packaged in a way so that people who routinely burn their owner's manuals to heat cans of soup can install the patch without accidentally deleting the OS from their computers, then train customer support to deal with the people who can't get it installed properly anyway, and finally release the patch. And even that's not everything. I know a company that worked for months on a patch for its recently released game, created a patch that addressed most of the issues (none were show-stoppers anyway) and had it beta tested and pretty much ready to go (I was a beta tester). They never released it because it caused issues with
some of the foreign language versions of the software and (one assumes) they were contractually obligated to provide any upgrades/updates for all released editions. I'm not saying the same constraints apply here, but with all of the complicated arrangements between Bioware, Atari, Hasbro, etc., I would easily believe the NWN situation is even more convoluted.]
Not that I am against the idea, but I think any new NWN-related patches are an extreme long-shot at this point, particularly any patches that cater to add-ons that are essentially freebies now.
Modifié par MrZork, 02 juin 2012 - 11:01 .
