The leadership is incompetent.

The leadership are the ones who look at the programmers alpha work and say "Yeah that looks good, it plays. Slap a few more pixels on it -that's what the kids want, right?- and we'll call this done. Now excuse me, I gotta go tell the execs how we're doing so they can tell the stock holders"

343 themselves, are full of talented workers who care about their product.

Unfortunately, they can't play the game like Bungie did and say "It's done when we think it's done and we make games we want to play".

343 can't do that. They aren't owned by MS, they ARE MS. If Grim1 gets pissed that they are cutting corners on the narrative to cram in more warthog skins, and he voices his displeasure at that, they can just fire and replace him.

Read this.
http://www.engadget.com/2014/11/24/broken-video-games/

More and more of these articles are popping up.

It's endemic of the whole goddamn AAA gaming industry right now, and gamers are the ones that let it get this way.

I used to be able to give my CoD friends shit for how generic and bland the same yearly CoD was, and how progressively buggy they were getting.

And I used to be able to say that smugly knowing it could *never* happen to Halo, not MY Halo. No.

And look at where we are today.

It's the gamers fault. I've been saying this for awhile. People roll their eyes at me when I say "vote with your wallet" and yet they continue to perpetuate the problem.

They keep buying things that aren't finished.

They keep encouraging bad behavior.

Why, in all of creation, would I expend resources to fix something that you bought from me, when I KNOW that you're just going to do it again in a year?

Why should I care if I'm a board member, or a stock holder? I already have your money.

I'm plenty sure the programmer cares and the artist cares.

They don't want to be associated with a turd. They don't want to see their work get run through a lawnmower.

I've been eagerly awaiting to get the game and console myself. I very badly want to.

I'm bored with Destiny. I really want to do some classic BTB.

BF4 was the last straw for me. I stopped pre-ordering games and every single time I've benefited from it.

People need to stop letting them have their cake and eat it too. This isn't OK. This isn't the norm. This isn't acceptable.

I'm not heartless.

When a game's online doesn't work day 1, I don't get mad, because as an IT person, I KNOW that you can plan and plan and plan and you just can't simulate that server load until it's live. Beta all you want. It won't help help you on that mass flood of people getting on at the same time. Shits gon break.

But beyond the first two days, your shit needs to work. The core product needs to work.