I'm more of a lurker then a poster, but I just have to throw my 2 cents in on recent westwood games.
I bought C&C Renegade when it came out for full price; I've been a C&C fan ever since the first one was released when I was in high school. Well, Renegade was so full of bugs that it would just crash out of nowhere in the middle of the game. Sometimes it would crash on loading saved games, sometimes while fighting. I had a wintel Dell machine that should have handled the game no problem. The big thing was that the tech support forums were filled with countless others in my situation. Westwood did nothing to solve the problem, leaving users to try and tweak their systems on their own. Then one day the tech support forums were actually REMOVED cause there were just so many complaints. The admins said something like "Well, if you had specific problems you shoulda patched your system and contacted us directly. Since everyone here is just vaguely complaining about non specific problems we are shutting down this forum." This was not true, there were hundreds of posts with specifics, (I have this, my game crashes here, I've tried this and that) with no answers.
Well now Generals has come out and although I'm thinking about it, I still haven't bought it. When you have such a great game like War III as competition, which is fun to play and works smoothly, its just much more fun not to go through the hastle.
-purpleD