So...what your saying is stop working on new content and new maps, hold work on current stuff (eg some of the maps seen in beta that were not released in 1.4) and instead fix all of the known bugs and glitches? No matter how long that takes?

I can't speak for the team, I'm just a lowly tester, but I know that they do their best to address all the problems. Remember, they are pushing the boundaries of the engine further than they were designed to go, so problems are inevitable. We on the testing team do our part to find as many problems before you do, however a team of 20 people will never find all the bugs, nor will we be able to replicate the massive numbers of players normally found after each new release. Just like any other piece of software, more problems become apparant following public release, either due to the numbers playing or because it is used in ways not foreseen by the designers.

People run in to problems early on becuase they dont follow installation instructions, such as setting view distance to 100%, checking the boxes correctly to find boxes etc. Personally I haven't had any problems with public FS that I couldn't fix, with it usually being a punkbuster issue, or an incorrect installation of a testing file!

Bite my shiny metal Tie Fighter!

Would you care to specify exactly what it is that's "worse than ever"? If we don't know what the problem is, we can't try to fix it.

Are you talking about the problems a number of people have with getting the mod to run? These are a combination of people not following instructions, and admittedly possibly a bug in the updater. Unfortunately our hands are tied for now concerning the updater as our coder is currently in Germany and don't have access to fix any problems with it.

If you're talking about ingame bugs or problems, I can only say that we're doing our best to fix any and all bugs that are found. But we can only fix the bugs that we are aware of, and like Twigs said, our current testing team can only do so much. If you discover any bugs while playing, please report them in the Bug Reports forum and they will be taken care of as soon as possible. The Launcher is an enormously useful tool in this regard as we can continually put out smaller bug fixes more quickly than before, since you would have had to wait for the next big release otherwise.

I see another thread of people complaining about ingame bugs without mentioning what these bugs are.  How is it supposed to be fixed if we don't know what the problem IS?

Yeah, there might be something wrong with the launcher, infact I belive it was said in IRC that there was a few buggered lines of code that could effect the the launch of the mod causing the modified content error.  As is stated, the dude who did the launcher has just moved to Germany. We can't help that, give the bloke a bit to settle down first.

You could argue "Then why bother with the launcher if it can't be fixed yet?"  Well, without that launcher right now, there would be quite a few really gameplay effecting bugs in 1.4 right now(take no officer beacon, various stability issues...).  The launcher is bugged, but it can be fixed with a reinstall in a jiffy.  Reinstalling takes, what... 5 minutes? 10?  I'd assume people keep the installer at least a while after installing, so downloading isn't an issue.