Like the rest of you, I have mixed feelings. There does seem to be a considerable amount of fixes on the list, so I think that at least goes to show that they have been working on the game over the past few weeks trying to get things fixed, which is a good sign.

Dedicated servers is obviously what is going to make or break the long-term success of the game. If they do end up committing to that at some point in the future, I imagine that it will take a while to get that implemented. It could be several months or more to add something like that to the game. My hope would be that CM decides to let us all know well in advance that they do have plans to add dedicated servers instead of just being silent about it for several months and then releasing it as a "surprise". I think if they commit to dedicated server support in the long-term and keep pumping out the occasional batch of smaller fixes in 3-4 week increments, they will keep the community thriving, otherwise I'm not so sure.

Personally, I love the game. But even I never realized how important dedicated server are until they were missing. I've been surprised at how easily the lack of dedicated servers can make a great game so impractical to play.

On the AI side of seeing through the grass, it is also a problem for me. The main problem is that even if the fire is not accurate, they still know you are there, which takes away the element of surprise. If you are just 20-25 meters in front of them, and they notice the grass moving and start to fire, that makes sense. But when you are in a forest, 200+ meters away, and they notice the grass moving at that distance, it is a bit unrealistic in my opinion. But I have no real-world military experience, so take that for what it's worth.

I can say from a developer perspective, it is extremely difficult to accurately model what an AI can and can't see. I've worked on that kind of stuff before, and it's pretty challenging. One of the problems is that the more AI logic you add to the game to make vision more realistic, the more you eat into the CPU because that logic gets multiplied when you have 50+ AI in the area. You can really destroy the CPU by doing all the physics calculations on how much light is there at that distance, how much movement, how much of the player is actually physically visible to the AI, how much does the player blend into the environment, which direction is the AI paying attention to, is there anything else going on that would distract the AI like smoke, fire, etc. It's a pretty difficult problem to solve, and it might be a while before games start to get good at that kind of thing. To put things into perspective, it's been 15 years of developments in game physics and we are STILL using crude methods like bounding boxes and hit boxes which often make for some pretty crummy animations and hit detection. It's why when you look closely at a lot of games, you'll notice that player isn't really gripping the gun, but the gun is kind of "floating" in the air about a centimeter or two away from the players hands. Doing that stuff perfectly is just agonizingly difficult.

It's only when a company decides to spend a LOT of time and money on getting those aspects perfect does it really happen, and when they do, they do so at the expense of other things they could have done with that time/money, like more weapons, missions, and other features which tend to be more valued to most players than getting the really small things working perfectly. We are a different type of crowd than the average gamer I think. I think most of us would rather be stuck with an M16 for the entire game and have the shooting work perfectly, than have it so/so with a selection of 100+ guns. But, we are a pretty small market, and if the game was made for people like us in mind, CM would sell what....500 copies? Can't stay in business that way!