People who aren’t having issues don’t go online to post about it. Since we know the daily player count hovers around 29,000, those hundreds of complaints can still be a very small portion of players, who are experiencing issues.
Edit: Off my phone, so I can type more easily.
The other side to this is that differences between patches can be huge, so reports of a bug that everyone is having could be irrelevant a week later when the new patch drops, but unless you’re checking every post’s date and patch number, you could falsely conclude the bug is still present, or view those bugs as cumulative with bugs that are in the current patch.
The 4.3.x patches are some of the most stable, bug-free patches I’ve played. If you’re insistent on finding faults with anything, you can, and lord knows there are plenty of things to find fault with in SC, but bringing up issues like the ‘deadly’ elevators and doors from last year or older, is an unserious criticism.
I haven’t had any elevator issues in a while, though I know some people have with the freight elevators. Guild chat isn’t something I care about, since every guild/clan/alliance I’ve been a part of has always used mumble/TS/discord.
It’s not really that buggy now, and I don’t know what you mean by “game loops don’t consistently work”?
Un-sarcastic answer, it’s actually in a really good spot. The backend changes they put in over the past year have boosted the per-server player counts like crazy, they churned through most of their ship backlog, and they’ve been running a bunch of story events. Performance is way up, especially for client fps in high-population areas (15 fps this time last year if you were in a crowd, 35+ now).
PCG has been super negative on SC for years. Sometimes very justifiably, but many times not.
A good story can be (and usually is) told with minimal exposition. AAA games being exposition-fests is a result of game executives and writers infantilising players in the name of “widest audience appeal”.
This is not a good argument for unnecessary exposition though, this is just an argument for shorter, bite-sized narratives, or even what some games already do (like The Witcher 3) where they recap where you are in the loading screen. If anything, unnecessary exposition just wastes what little time you have to play, or forces you to skip the dialogue entirely.
This group in particular (Collective Shout) is Australian, and they’re anti-gun, it’s just not a key part of their advocacy. They have claimed that GTA is responsible for mass shootings.