SimCity 2013 - Oh how you sucker punched me in Love!

[Tom]

Two Saiyans Play: Sim City

[Melbosa]

Two Saiyans Play: Sim City

LOL

[Melbosa]

Looks like EA is giving us a free game (hmmm think its going to be Sims?): http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/a-simcity-update-and-something-for-your-trouble

And looks like Maxis is also saying something publicly: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/building-for-the-future

[Tom]

What I want to know is how didn't they see the demand comming? Forget the demand shown by pre-orders and beta testing. ITS FSCKING SIMCITY. Nearly every gamer type person our age is likely to have played it, and want to play the new version. It's a classic. I would want to play it if it wasn't bound to origin and ea. Well I still want to play it, but I have these inconvenient things called principles.

I really don't know what they expected.

Did the cry for offline play surprise them? It shouldn't have. Sim City at its heart has always been a single player offline game. I can't imagine it'd be that hard to have an offline mode where your stuff just isn't shared on a server. Plenty of other games do it. I know they say that the hard bits are all done on the server, but a decent modern pc should be able to handle a decent sized offline city without problems. They could even dump the code into a library and /share/ it between the client and server for this type of thing. Bah.

I think the online stuff is cool, but the way its been implemented seems short sighted to me. Your city is only available on a given server, and you can't get to it if the server is down or busy. You just can't play that city. I dunno. Making cities available on multiple cities would likely have complicated things on the backend, especially if you're on a shared region. It'd have to support connecting players from multiple servers to the same region. That'd take some fancy footwork I think. doable, but stupid fancy footwork. Though, it may have handled the load better, as any front end server could have taken load, instead of specific ones falling to their knees right away.

Just random crap I've been thinking about

[Darren Dirt]

Looks like EA is giving us a free game (hmmm think its going to be Sims?): http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/a-simcity-update-and-something-for-your-trouble

And looks like Maxis is also saying something publicly: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/building-for-the-future

from the corporate blog, found these...

Petition Level: lame* http://www.change.org/petitions/electronic-arts-100-refund-for-simcity-2013

Petition Level: reasonable http://www.change.org/petitions/electronic-arts-inc-remove-always-online-drm-from-simcity-and-future-games





*750 signatures, whereas the 2nd petition has reached 50,000 signatures.

[Mr. Analog]

The reality is publishers are greedy and will casually step over common sense to make a buck. If a game does poorly the blame can be assigned to the development team and management gets off scott free, except this time where you have a corporate strategy that's trying to make Origin into something as profitable as Steam, a desire to squish piracy and second hand game sales and you get ass backward thinking just like this.

The thing that irritates me so far has been EA and MAXIS response, they refer to the issue as post-launch teething trouble but it REALLY exposes the main problem, which is much bigger than badly calculated capacity requirements, there is a single point of failure for gamers that is 100% external to the users control.

This is something most gamers would be more sympathetic toward if the game model was more like an MMO or a free-to-play game.

Again, all these weaknesses are apparent in other games and online content providers like Steam. The key for success is either failure points like this are are so well covered they never (or rarely) fail or there is an alternative way to play your game that isn't dependant on some kind of host.

I was watching a livestream of a friend playing ranked Counterstrike last night and the queue was ridiculous, after 3 retries of 5+ minutes she and her team just gave up trying to play after having only one round. This is a problem for games like this, always has been and when your product is a multi-player game you really can't afford to have players stop playing because they can't connect to each other, but if your product is a single player game and your users can't connect to themselves? Well you better damn well fix that or suffer every single sling and arrow the combined rage of your customer base is going to throw at you.

It's a justifiable scorn well earned in my opinion.

[Darren Dirt]

It's a justifiable scorn well earned in my opinion.

idk why but that just jumped out me as a really cool rock band name.

[Thorin]

Looks like EA is giving us a free game (hmmm think its going to be Sims?): http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/a-simcity-update-and-something-for-your-trouble

And looks like Maxis is also saying something publicly: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/building-for-the-future

Wow, there are some angry, angry customers out there.

..

And some really disconnected reps writing blogs.  Both of those articles were basically just trying to trivialize the problems, the way they were written, and neither actually addressed the outcry of "give us offline or give back our money".  From what I see, that is really the core complaint - that SimCity 2013 requires you to stay connected to a server at all times.  Giving out an old game for free doesn't address that complaint, it skirts around it.

One of the comments pointed out something funny: the always-online feature is perceived to be anti-piracy, but if anyone has pirated the game and found a way around the always-online feature, they're having a better experience than paying customers.

[Tom]

If their client code is capable of running the city sim itself, I don't see why they'd be so adamant against actually saying they may provide it in the future. My best guess is they never actually implemented anything but lag hiding simulation on the client, as in entities will continue doing what they were doing if they haven't gotten an update in the past N ms (its a bit more complex than that sounds, but you get the point).

[Mr. Analog]

If their client code is capable of running the city sim itself, I don't see why they'd be so adamant against actually saying they may provide it in the future. My best guess is they never actually implemented anything but lag hiding simulation on the client, as in entities will continue doing what they were doing if they haven't gotten an update in the past N ms (its a bit more complex than that sounds, but you get the point).

That's the real key, and it has nothing to do with providing great gameplay...

It doesn't seem like a great leap to imagine the reason for this architecture was to:

• Promote the use of Origin
• Dissuade Pirates
• Discourage Secondary Sales

If that's not the case, if it REALLY needs to send detailed calculations on the server then I have to say that it is a deeply flawed design that shouldn't be repeated, ever.

[Melbosa]

I can tell you outright that in my current experience with the game, many times you are told you have disconnected from the live servers, sometimes 1H at a time, and the game still functions.  So the idea that the "single" player game requires online interaction is a BS statement.  Well that is unless I am missing something with my 6 cities in one region.

That being said however, there is one component that does not seem to work in this "disconnected" state: New inter-regional connections.  What I mean is if you are already sharing something between cities and you get disconnected, it continues to work.  If you want to establish something new between cities in terms of resource sharing; it will let you click through the sequence but then nothing will start happening until you get re-synced up.

This is what I have been experiencing anyway.  The new server capacity they brought on after a week seems to allow me to play any time I wish without a Queue.

[Mr. Analog]

For my money, hearing that seals the deal. EA could make this an offline game.

Very interesting there Mr. Melbosa. Very interesting...

[Tom]

For my money, hearing that seals the deal. EA could make this an offline game.

Very interesting there Mr. Melbosa. Very interesting...

Ah, indeed. So it's purely for regional sharing. Makes me wonder what exactly the servers are doing then in sessions that aren't shared? And why it caused so much load?

[Lazybones]

http://kotaku.com/5990165/my-simcity-city-thrived-offline-for-19-minutes

It apparently can run for up to 19min disconnected.... interesting.

[Darren Dirt]

http://kotaku.com/5990165/my-simcity-city-thrived-offline-for-19-minutes

It apparently can run for up to 19min disconnected.... interesting.

or maybe quite a bit more than 19 minutes:
http://kotaku.com/5990165/my-simcity-city-thrived-offline-for-19-minutes?post=58212606