Well friend I believe nobody was specifically talking about that sound of doom bug. I don't think you even mentioned it before, and neither have I said that "noises" are simply noises. A noise is something you need to answer. That's why it's distracting and stressful. It can be an important input or an unimportant one, but it's still a distracting noise.I was talking specifically about a bug that made anyone playing the game almost deaf. This bug report as you say isn't simply "noise". It's a pressing matter that has to be fixed. You can't simply look over it and move on.
Like i said, i don't know what kind of applications you create, but the way you describe it, it seems like the software you develop only goes live when it's completely finished. Early access is a complete different approach to this as you're shipping it to your "client" or consumers in this case in an unfinished state.
You could fix a bug later on when you know the software in question isn't actively being used right now, but this isn't possible for bannerlord. You can't do this for an early access title. Bug fixing is a top priority regardless.
I will make it clear now, that I'm not defending TW here. I'm merely talking about this topic, whether or not the playerbase should decide what TW should do. All I've been saying is just to explain why it's a bad idea to do so.
Just to answer your curiosity tho. I work commission projects, and my main clients are government bodies. We do show the unfinished product during the dev process, once a week or so. Just like Early Access but way sooner. We deploy a demo as soon as possible for the clients to try, and we get feedbacks and bug reports from that. The software is deemed complete after everything on the contract is done, and by that point we have a few months of maintenance period for bug fixing and minor updates if the client demands any. We have returning clients who want to commission updates for products we've already made for them. That's iterations. Kind of a mess if it's old and the original devs are gone but eh...
Unfortunately for us, Bannerlord is neither one of these:That aside it's good practice to listen and analyze honest feedback on what's good and what sucks in your product and improve it accordingly, they aren't making the game to keep for themselves after all but to please a public and profit at the same time.
1. A mainly multiplayer game that relies on an active playerbase to live and sell (ex: Guns of Icarus)
2. A Software as a Service product like those anime gacha games that rely on active purchases, content updates and popularity
3. A subscription-based online game which income relies on players not quiting the game (ex: WoW the MMORPG)
It's a mainly single player game with multiplayer game modes. We buy it once, the money comes in, and business is done as far as they're concerned. There's no financial reason for them to keep updating the game, especially after they've reached their target. If they were scums, they could just ignore us completely.