Screenies: http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/simcity-hands-on-preview/
Website:http://www.simcity.com/en_US/game/info/what-is-simcity
For Gromit : http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/121626-EA-Brings-Back-its-Harsh-Beta-EULA
For Gromit: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/121673-Electronic-Arts-Changes-Confusing-SimCity-EULA
ill be playing this
I'm a big fan of the Franchise, although I'm a little worried about what DRM nonsense EA will add to the game. £34.99 from Amazon is just the right side of acceptable as well, after worrying reports about it being fifty quid!
Allegedly the game is part operated from EA servers, so in-game calculations are carried out off your PC.
Take a moment to think just how bad an idea that is. Remember, "always on" DRM doesn't just mean your internet connection, as I found with Ass Creed2 and Ubisoft.com being down 4 days out of 5 when the game was released.
Then imagine that in twelve to eighteen months, when the 5th DLC has failed to meet sales targets, EA pull the plug. There goes your £35 in a puff of EA's cigar smoke.
I'm boycotting this game, as I want to firmly discourage this kind of "pay premium purchase price for what is a short-term subscription" sales model.
My money is now mostly going to GOG.com and Kickstarter.co.uk, where the customer's opinion matters.
It's all gone predictably, horribly wrong: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/05/gamers-line-up-to-play-simcity/
The fact you can grief in a Sim City game? What were these clowns thinking?
You're better off buying Sim City 2000 from GOG.com, and playing that instead.
That's the end of Sim City for me then. The idea is all kinds of horrible and add in a company like EA and it's got disaster written all over it.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2
I played 2 of the beta weekends. Loved it. I pre-ordered it, Looks like I'll have to wait for official release day though, can't seem to unlock it using VPN's. Has gone live in some regions but apparently we'll have to wait until Friday :sad:
ill keep my panties unbunched for the time being. im connected to the net 99% of time i play.
as for it doing calculations off ure computer, might not be a bad thing, as all u brits with ure
crap computers can play it too :) trailers look awesome, i can hardly wait!
Ahh the sane voice of someone on the EA payroll ;)
I called it.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/05/gamers-line-up-to-play-simcity/) reports the US release of SIM City has gone badly wrong due to problems with EA servers.
QuoteHey, want to play the freshly US-released SimCity? Well, stand in line. As Total Biscuit reveals (video below), there are already 30 minute queues. And this is just for those who’ve stayed up past midnight to be able to play. In just one country.
QuoteAnd at this point we’re only just beginning to see the issues arising from this online entangling. Softpedia say (http://news.softpedia.com/news/Origin-Errors-Affect-SimCity-Release-and-Digital-Deluxe-Editions-334343.shtml) that it’s taking up to three hours for the game to unlock due to server struggles. Kotaku are reporting (http://kotaku.com/5988286/?post=57955552) that neighbouring cities can ruin your game. And Ars Technica discussing (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we-waited-ten-years-for-this/) how many ways the game has let them down.
[video=youtube;RUl_Cj2_KWU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RUl_Cj2_KWU[/video]
30 mins, pfft, thats nothing. anyone remember D3? took quite a while before anyone could play that too
Quote from: Sharpfang;36783830 mins, pfft, thats nothing.
You're very forgiving. If I bought a lightbulb for £1 and it took 30 minutes to come on, I'd take it back to the shop as unfit for purpose.
To charge £35-£65 for a game which takes 3 hours to unlock and 30 minutes to load is pretty abysmal.
Quote from: Sharpfang;367833ill keep my panties unbunched for the time being. im connected to the net 99% of time i play.
as for it doing calculations off ure computer, might not be a bad thing, as all u brits with ure
crap computers can play it too :) trailers look awesome, i can hardly wait!
Firstly, yes you may be connected to the internet 99.99% of the time, I know I am. The point is not whether you can connect to Facebook, it's whether you can connect to the specific server where your city is located, and whether in 3-4 years time when a new version comes out they don't kill off the game. A version of Assassin's Creed had always on DRM and it would kick people to desktop every time the server glitched despite it being a single player game, and that was without external calculations.
Calculations off your computer if you are doing something complex...but this is Sim City, it's never going to be especially taxing. With a copy of Mathematica set my computer churning through Bessel functions to calculate electric fields produced by electrodes etc, that can be a computationally intensive task, I'm all for handing that to some cloud supercomputer if it needs to be done faster. If Sim City is trying that then you've completely lost the plot. If it can't run on my 4.2GHz i7 rig, or even a standard i5 then they've programmed it wrong, so they're handing off calculations simply to try and break the game for people cracking it. I've got a feeling in 3-6 months though the crackers will have got around this and will have an ultimately more stable game as a result...so it's a case of EA punishing their customers.
Basically this is a game people should avoid like the plague. It's broken by design and even if it were running fine now (which it's definitely not) there's no guarantee it'll work in a couple of years, and £35 seems like a lot for a self destructing game.
Their most heinous crime isn't the DRM (which is pretty damn heinous if you ask me), it's the game itself.
The 'plots' you get given to build a city in are about half the size of the smallest map in Sim City 4. One forum I was reading at work earlier had people complaining that they simply didn't have room to build anything bigger than a small town. How long until the chargeable 'bigger maps' DLC is released, I wonder?
Oh, and you can't save your game locally and your random internet neighbours have the capacity to grief your city into dust.
It's an alarmingly badly thought out design for a game of this type, and another 'Colonial Marines' style triumph of hype and marketing.
I'm going to link to this You Tube video rather than embed it as it is not even remotely work safe, the liberal use of the F word means headphones would be a very good idea as well.
Suitably warned here's a review from my favourite You Tuber Francis about Sim City. His concise and reasoned comments sum up the issues with this game nicely
http://youtu.be/H9VClRhU404
Francis? That's Cartman from Southpark all grown up, eating Cheesos and drinking Mountain Dew straight from the three litre bottle, as he sits in his mother's basement posting expletive videos to YouTube...
Aren't his stubby little arms cute when he flaps them? Awww..
This player had this to say
QuoteThis game is a cluster****. I could put up with one or two bad ‘suit decisions’ but this game… It’s like they let everyone in head office take their turn adding their own personal **** up so no one felt left out. I think it was the not being able to load save games that pushed me over the edge. It really hurts because fundamentally I’m behind a lot of the concepts, I don’t think the region idea is bad but they ****ed it up by forcing compromises in every other area to support it. I really really like the graphics and the visible data layers are gorgeous, and I don’t feel it looks particularly dumbed down (or, at least, I feel that it is on my level… make of that what you will!). BUT:
The game needs to be pretty ****ing polished on release to justify the absurd price that Origin are charging, I mean £45 is above a premium price for a pc game, and it clearly isn’t. They clearly haven’t fixed bugs that were present in the beta, and they have clearly taken a cynical not-giving-a-**** approach to launch demand. I understand all the proviso’s about ‘having to make money’ and I don’t begrudge companies some monetising and profit maximising but there is a ****ing limit, and considering that this game doesn’t exist in a vacuum, that I can go and play Crusader Kings or XCOM or ANNO instead, I don’t need to put up with it. I want to say that I hope EA get burned by this but I don’t know if it will make any difference either way.
Yes, saved games are ONLY stored "in the cloud" so your games are not recorded on your PC.
More from RPS this morning.
EA took to that most detail-conducive of mediums â€" Twitter (https://twitter.com/OriginInsider) â€" to explain the situation:
Quote from: EA“We are experiencing overwhelming demand which is keeping some users from accessing their games. We’re working as fast as we can to resolve. Due to the high demand for SimCity, Origin has experienced delays impacting a small percentage of users. We’re working non-stop to resolve.â€
“We’re making changes to prevent further issues, and are confident that Origin will be stable for international launches later this week.â€
So a handful of players and press who pre-ordered from ONE REGION, who stayed up until midnight to play (not your typical maximum playerbase), cripples their servers and that's "overwhelming demand".
Quote from: Rock, Paper, ShotgunAdmittedly, there are some things you can only learn by taking to the frontlines, but this approach certainly isn’t benefiting anyone in the short term. Not EA, and definitely not their customers. Frankly, it’s unacceptable. Nothing’s perfect, but â€" last I checked â€" so-called “services†were supposed to serve us.
Deja vu anyone?
(http://www.battlefieldthree.co.uk/ubi1.png) (http://www.battlefieldthree.co.uk/ubi2.png)
My internet? I think not.
(http://www.battlefieldthree.co.uk/ubi3.png)
Advice with the game was "contact us via our website" and "email support@ubisoft.com (support@ubisoft.com)" - a bit difficult when their solution IS the problem. Assassins Creed 2 was the first
and last "always on" (now there's an oxymoron) DRM game I will ever buy.
The game hits the fan in the UK tomorrow, so if you've bought it, you better hope EA's "always on" DRM is (a) actually on and (b) working. There's no pre-loading, so have a three hour game of minesweeper ready to go...
What confuses me is that always on-line gaming is nothing special. I seem to have no problems playing WOW, Arma, CS:GO, Minecraft, BSGO, LotRO, all of which require a permanent internet connection (as they're all multi player games). So setting aside the whole argument of why Sim City is a multi player game and why it uses the DRM it does EA should still be able to launch a game that works regardless. Why don't they send an email to Blizzard and Valve and ask them how to provide robust on line games that actually work. It might save them a lot of grief.
[OT]Boogie 2988 is a great You Tuber. His alter ego characters like Francis are hysterical. Some of his stuff falls a bit flat but when he's on form he's genius.[/OT]
Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/clogged-streets-simcity-launch-plagued-by-server-problems/) have more on the issues. One of their valid comments is this:-
QuoteEA had a good chance here to prove that a publisher could launch a major, Internet-connected game with proper infrastructure and planning and without significant server-related issues. Unfortunately, EA seems to have squandered that opportunity.
They also note:-
QuoteOrigin didn't allow purchasers to pre-load SimCity before its official launch at 12:01am EST this morning, apparently because the development team was "working to polish the game until the very last second," according to a post from an EA community manager. This decision appears to have led to widespread download problems and delays before the game even unlocked and started downloading for many pre-order players. Some online reports indicate that even those with the disc-based retail version of the game were delayed in their installation by Origin server problems.
You have to wonder what they were working on, since players have noted nothing (including the bugs) has been noticeably fixed since the open BETA.
The reason their servers are falling over is presumably because they don't have enough. I imagine YouTube requires far more server bandwidth each day than SimCity, so it's not the case of it being an impossible task and they've reached too far in terms of technological challenges. It doesn't help that everyone trying to play the game will all be downloading gigabytes worth of data all at the same time...but again manageable with enough mirrors.
I imagine they did ring experts the likes of Blizzard and other Valve and asked how many servers to rent, looked at the bill and thought...lets go with plan B.
Blizzard & Valve both had their problems when they launched online services.
The early versions of Steam were notorious for connection outages and slow download speeds, and WoW had horrendous login queues for quite a while after it launched. It took both companies a while to get to grips with the problems, presumably at a very high cost.
This doesn't excuse EA's shenanigans, but it's worth remembering that their not the only company to make these mistakes. Why hasn't anyone learned from them? Good question...
That's the point I agree EA don't learn or perhaps don't care to learn. People have been here before, had these problems and worked out how to fix them. Blizzard launched a huge expansion to WOW last year, more or less without issue. Valve release on-line games every day on the Steam platform. EA have a wealth of resources to tap to make make sure they can launch a game well. Standing on the shoulders of giants, is the poncey term used.
Here's a free tip or two for them. Don't be greedy, don't lock yourself into a release date long before the game is ready. Finish the game, polish it as much as you like. When you're done pre download the game to pre-purchasers. Buy/rent enough hardware to support the game, Launch the game. Count the huge bags of cash like Blizzard/Activision and Valve are doing.
But they havn't had to do any of that & I would guess people have still brought it by the bucket loads = even more profit & screw the customer, can't play your game? I'm sure they don't care - or the sensible things you've suggested would've been in place Smilo.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]1927[/ATTACH]
Made my morning :)
Quote from: BrotherTobious;367984[ATTACH=CONFIG]1927[/ATTACH]
Made my morning :)
Dang, actually thought that was real. Need to wake up.
Quote from: TommyGuner;368035Dang, actually thought that was real. Need to wake up.
did take me a while :P
EA are issuing a patch!!
To fix the game? To fix the servers? Building more servers? No. The patch will
disable features of the game to make it require the servers
less.
Quote from: Earlier today, we released a patch that temporarily cut off some features including leaderboards, achievements and Cheetah Speed to reduce data stress on the servers and effectively free up space so that we can let more people into the game. These are great features that we're proud of and we'll turn them back on soon, but our number one priority is to bring stability to our servers. This update also resolved some of the bugs and issues that have been frustrating players. You can read all about it at http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9341807.page
God forbid they patched the
single-player game to just work off-line. But hell, a single player game that works is a stupid idea right?
As the Daleks would say, "Avoid! Avoid! Avoooiiidddd!!!"
While I'm sad for all the gamers who are struggling with the game, in a way this is a good thing. The more that EA suffer and are damaged as a brand the less likely they will be to do this again, maybe?
Also other games companies must be watching this car crash of a game launch and hopefully coming to the realisation that it's not a route they want to take with their own games.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2
PC Gamer (http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/06/celebrity-simcity-day-1/) is running a feature on Sim City
QuoteAn invitational was announced, and a supergroup of talented and accomplished gamers was assembled to found great cities in the county; to build, to exploit, and to pollute the pristine landscape. Their story beings here.
From the Twitter feed of Chris Kluwe (https://twitter.com/ChrisWarcraft), one of the Celebrity Gamers in this "experiment" in game review. Talk about a celebrity endorsement own-goal!
Mar 5Bah. It uses your Origin ID for your mayor name. Knew I should've gone with TurdFerguson.
Mar 6I would like to start my celebrity Sim City thing with PC Gamer, but Origin has dethroned burning AIDS needles for Worst Thing Ever.
Wowowowowow. EA asterisked out "Poopytown". Guess I'll have to rename to "Fuqville".
And, somewhat surprisingly, EA is perfectly ok with a town named Herpes. Huh. Did not see that coming.
It also looks like cities have a very finite lifespan due to limited amount of water in the water table. Not a fan of that.
Primarily because I can already see the end of my city in sight, and I've been playing it for one day.
Hmm, Sim City servers down again. This is pretty much why "always on" has no place in a single player game.
I love Maxis, and the games they make, but I honestly cannot recommend buying Sim City 5. This is ridiculous.
As a publisher/developer, if you're going to push "always on" onto the consumer, then it's YOUR responsibility to make sure it always works.
And if it doesn't, well, I'm going to tell people not to buy your game. There are plenty of other single player games out there.
Mar 7
Error messages right away! Great job with your game EA.
And tonight's streaming ends in the most appropriate way - with Sim City lagging out and crashing.
Today's Sim City update: Apparently 9am is peak load time, as the servers still don't work despite saying "available" on the login screen.
I reeeeeeaaaaally hope Maxis does a comparison of refunds demanded versus typical projected losses to piracy. It would be enlightening.
And then hopefully they find a way to not have to work with EA ever again. Always on DRM is awful.
And for those wondering why I'm continuing to smash my face against EA's DRM, it's because I told PC gamer I would participate in their city
If it weren't for that I wouldn't try to log in ever again. This kind of treatment by a publisher is toxic.
I got into Sim City for THREE MINUTES! You're all pretty jelly right now I bet!
I really enjoy the queue system of Sim City. It's not a queue to actually get in the game, it's for a "chance" to get in.
So far I've cycled through it four times, and it always bumps me back to the same 2:09 countdown. Not really a great queue system.
Yup. Really working hard there EA. Keep up the good fight. You might get a participation ribbon! pic.twitter.com/pGvVD7ejP3
Oh, and don't bother joining a new server if you want to save any of your old progress. Cities don't transfer over.
So @SimCity, would you qualify this current state of affairs as an "unmitigated cluster****", or a "royal screwing of loyal customers"?
Next question @SimCity: How many lost sales do you predict from word of mouth versus general piracy rates? What does the maff say?
Oh! Oh! @SimCity, can you tell me why the Diablo 3 launch didn't inform you on how incredibly stupid the idea of always on DRM really is?
I guess what I'm really wondering, @SimCity, is why people should ever buy one of your products in the future based on this experience.
Now lets hit the big fish. Hey @EA, how does it feel to successfully run a developer's image into the ground? Does it make you feel good?
Tell me @EA, between this and the constant microtransactions, why should we trust you to have our interests as gamers in mind?
Are you aware of the long term consequences of seeking short term profit @EA? Should we ask for regulation in the video game industry?
The prosperous town of Herpes, home to 162,000. People enjoyed living here, and times were good. pic.twitter.com/Hwd1iXvPH6
The town after two days of @EA's uninterrupted horseshit service. pic.twitter.com/Zy7CPo9g7n
Funny feed of the downward spiralling of EA's server into oblivion.
However, I don't endorse these so-called "celebrity" gamers, a lot of it is self-proclaimed.
(http://www.battlefieldthree.co.uk/8538497430_b40ae2a6e5_o.jpg)
After
88% negative feedback Amazon.com has withdrawn Sim City. Nice.
Also, on the patch:
QuoteUpdate #2: The latest SimCity update disables a decidedly critical gameplay feature in hopes of alleviating EA's continued server woes.
Earlier today, the SimCity team announced it was disabling some "non-critical" gameplay features to help resolve its network instability. These features included leaderboards, achievements, and region filters. The latest update, Patch 1.2, continues to address the city-building simulator's online issues â€" only it axes a rather vital function. In a post on EA's forums, SimCity's community lead states that the new update disables Cheetah speed, the fastest simulation speed in the game. Instead, Cheetah speed now runs at Llama speed.
Or reviews editor Joe Juba is still in the process of playing SimCity for our review, and confirms that unlike the previously disabled features, not having access to Cheetah speed is in fact a big deal. There's currently no ETA on when Cheetah speed or any of the other disabled features will be restored.
Oh, and "Francis" has a in-game play video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCAz8hfTX-s). NSFW (or anywhere with the volume on frankly). Which demonstrates how the single player game cannot run.
So...I had pre-purchased the game.
Was able to pre-load the game yesterday, and could unlock the game at 00:02 this morning.
I attempted to join "Europe West 2", which was listed as busy....and no surpise there, I could'nt get on. (attempted this to join C4rr0t in his region).
I assumed the EU servers would be overloaded and tried joining the Oceania server (no queues, no problems), worked first time round. Claimed a region and started playing for an hour or so.
Before going to bed, I tried Europe West 3", worked like a charm. Got in without Queues and claimed my first region. The only thing that seemed a little slow was trying to claim a 2nd city within the region. But even that worked after waiting for 30secs or so.
Logged on again first thing this morning, and attempted 'Europe West 2' again. worked first time round. I was expecting worse....something along the lines of Diablo3.
Pretty sure the servers will be FULL this weekend, with everyone wanting to log-on. So, we'll see how things go over the next couple of days.
Hopefully over time EA will sort out the problems and things will get easier for Gamers. It's getting serious though when Amazon feel the need to warn potential customers that the game is having 'problems' on the purchase page. I've not heard of that before.
QuoteImportant Note on SimCity Server Issues
Many customers are having issues connecting to the SimCity servers. EA is actively working to resolve these issues, but at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed. Please visithttps://help.ea.com/en/simcity/simcity (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/redirect.html/ref=amb_link_173839947_2?location=https://help.ea.com/en/simcity/simcity&token=AABB380351EFD0C573F78C598762BFCC89A0E662&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=hero-quick-promo&pf_rd_r=0E13N4XJH9P4M9EBPS2Y&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=390320227&pf_rd_i=B00B47CP9W) for more information.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun had a review of Sim City (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/08/initial-impressions-simcity/) - post UK launch, which initially was reasonable positive.
Subsequently, the reviewer modified his post to include this:-
QuoteEdit: Since around two o’clock, when I finished the bulk of this feature, I’ve been unable to access the server that is storing my cities, even though it’s listed as ‘available’ (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/13/mar/sc9.jpg). The other European servers are ‘busy’, which means queuing to play. I can access one American server at the moment, which would involve starting from scratch and then either continuing with that or abandoning it at a later date and returning to my original developments. I remember keeping Amiga save games on floppy disks, all neatly labelled and stored within reach. This is like the time the dog ate the disks, except EA will probably regurgitate something in a few hours.
Blues News (http://www.bluesnews.com/s/139791/ea-will-look-into-offline-simcity-new-patch-released) are running a story that EA/Maxis are promising an off-line patch for Sim City - something that for me, would be a condition of purchase. Although their phrasing reads more like a "we'll say maybe when we really mean no."
Quote from: EA Sim City accounts tweetsWe have no intention of offlining SimCity any time soon but we'll look into that as part of our earning back your trust efforts.
The maybe was, shock horror, a no. EA have tweeted an update this morning that says
Quote from: EA Sim City accounts tweetsThe game was designed for MP, we sim the entire region on the server so this is just not possible
Crash and burn EA.
Quotewe sim the entire region on the server so this is just not possible
I simply don't believe they've written a game such that it needs that sort of power to run it. Not only would that make it expensive in terms of resources required (Ok for subscription based games, but not so much so one of purchases), but it would also be over complicating the whole game for no reason.
I can't believe MP wasn't something EA forced the Maxis designers to add. The only reason EA added it was for the piracy protection and possibly to prevent any sort of community based content being developed that EA couldn't earn money from. It's been a long time since EA was a company run by people who love games.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21741528
Rock, Paper, Shotgun have written a piece entitled "SimCity Is Inherently Broken, Let’s Not Let This Go (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/11/simcity-is-inherently-broken-lets-not-let-this-go/)"
And would you believe, a confirmed employee of EA has criticised the company in an open letter! Read more here (http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/03/08/ea-employee-chastizes-company-over-simcity-in-public-letter/)at Forbes.
Quote“To the executives at EA, from one of your employees
I am deeply embarrassed by the troubled launch of Sim City and I hope you are too. When I walk around our campus and look at the kind of talent we’ve collected, the amenities we have access to and the opportunities working at such a big company affords us, I can’t imagine how for release after release, EA continues to make the same embarrassing, anti-consumer mistakes. We should be better than this. You should not be failing us so badly.
Another thing I see when I walk around our campus are massive banners that display what are said to be our company values. They are on posters on every floor, included in company-wide emails and hanging above the cafeteria in bright colors. You even print them on our coffee mugs so we see them every day. But somehow when planning the launch of Sim City, you threw them all out the window.
Most important of the values you are ignoring is Think Consumers First. What part of the Sim City DRM scheme, which has rendered the game unplayable for hundreds of thousands of fans across the globe, demonstrates that you are thinking about consumers before you are thinking about yourselves? Does “first†mean something different in boardrooms than it does to the rest of us? Does the meaning of that word change when you get the word “executive†in front of your title?
You can’t even pretend that you didn’t know consumers would be angry about this. Common sense aside, consumers complained about this during your public betas. In fact, when one of them posted his criticisms on the forums, he was banned! You tried to silence your critics. The same thing is happening now as users write in to demand refunds. What part of this behavior aligns with our company value to Be Accountable?
What you’ve demonstrated with this launch is that our corporate management does not believe in our core values. They are for the unwashed masses, not for the important people who forced this anti-consumer DRM onto the Sim City team. This DRM scheme is not about the consumers or even about piracy. It’s about covering your own asses. It allows you to hand-wave weak sales or bad reviews and blame outside factors like pirates or server failures in the event the game struggles. You are protecting your own jobs at the expense of consumers. I think this violates the Act With Integrity value I’m looking at on my own coffee mug right now.
On behalf of your other employees, I’d like to ask you to fix this. Allow the Sim City team to patch the game to run offline. If Create Quality and Innovation is still a core value that you believe in, then this shouldn’t be a hard decision. Games (http://www.forbes.com/games/) that gamers can’t play because of server overload or ISP issues are NOT quality. Be Bold by giving the consumers what they want and take accountability for the mistake.
Finally I’d like to ask you to follow the last company value on the list in the future: Learn and Grow. When you made this mistake with Spore, the company and all your employees suffered for it. You didn’t learn from that mistake and you are making it again with Sim City.
So please, learn from this debacle. Don’t do this again. Grow into better leaders and actually apply our company values when you make decisions. Don’t just use them as tools to motivate your staff. With the money, talent and intellectual property available to EA, we should be leading the industry into a golden age of consumer-focused game publishing. Instead we’re the most reviled game publisher in the world. That’s your fault. Things can only change if you actually start following the company values and apply them to every title we launch.
Sincerely,
A Disappointed But Hopeful Artist at EARSâ€
This really is laughable glad I haven't got the game sad for the ones who did.
GREED
That is the reason.
Whatever the reason it sucks and is wrong on every level. For that, no matter how good the game, I shall pass.
:withstupid::withstupid:
:withstupid: :withstupid: it did at first seem like a decent game but because of all the crap EA have done its no ty
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This was on a post on HotUK Deals...
to all you haters,trolls and whiners. This game is amazing, if youre so broke u cant afford to pay 50 euros for a game u will play for at least 500 hours, then i feel sorry for you
EA's next attempt to ruin a classic.....
(http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-9cXZC54/0/950x10000/i-9cXZC54-950x10000.jpg)
Rock, Paper, Shotgun (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary) are questioning EA's stance on "no offline mode possible"
Quote from: Lucy Bradshaw MAXIS studio head"we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our serversâ€, and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game†for single player
Quote from: MAXIS Software engineerThe servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.
Kotaku ran tests (http://kotaku.com/5990165/my-simcity-city-thrived-offline-for-19-minutes) to see if this was the case and could physically unplug the network and run the game for 20 minutes before the game noticed the server wasn't there.
Markus “Notch†Persson just tweeted (https://twitter.com/notch/status/311535572596432896) to his million followers that he managed to play offline too, despite EA’s claims which just don’t hold water.
How can you tell EA is lying? Their lips move.
It seems like sim city can be run offline and have been modded to do so as well... Link (https://pay.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1a9t0e/simcity_modder_removes_always_online_forced/)
Nice work EA... really nice I really want to get games from you now.. NOT!
Well this is very good news. Well, not the fact that they make up population numbers, or lie directly to their customers about the ability to play offline. More the fact that it seems like it'll be pretty easy for modders to dig through all that code and fix all the things wrong with the game. I imagine a pirate version won't be too far away.
Apparently the game code which manages the 20-minute cooldown stuff (which kicks you out of the game if it doesn't hear from the server every 20 minutes), is written in client-side javascript.
It's almost like the developers wanted everyone to see how blatently broken everything is....
QuoteWhat Maxis are doing is frankly peculiar. Earlier this week we posted a story (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary/) revealing that claims that SimCity required online servers to run non-regional computations were not the case. That night we were promised a statement from the studio, but heard nothing. Repeated emails to EA have resulted in no response since, and the whole situation has become more muddy with each day. It’s since been revealed that population numbers are nonsense, even down to leaked Javascript code (https://gist.github.com/Montaxx/5155819) featuring “simcity.GetFudgedPopulation†as a function. We’ve learned that city size limits (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/14/modder-runs-simcity-offline-maxis-remains-silent/) are arbitrary, pathfinding (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/13/simcitys-sims-dont-seem-that-smart-after-all/) is rudimentary at best, and Eurogamer’s absolutely superb review (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-03-15-simcity-review) lists many more bugs, broken features, disappearing pretend-money and never-arriving resources.
From Rock, Paper, Shotgun (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/16/simcity-bosss-straight-answers-seem-pretty-wiggly/)
It's clear, furthermore, reading this article (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/16/simcity-modder-tells-us-offline-regional-play-easily-done/) about the modder who "adjusted" the client-side Java to run fully offline, that the EA Server debacle wasn't
ever about huge processing loads by massive numbers of players (as claimed by EA), but in fact EA/Maxis not providing enough serves
to operate their own DRM!!!
The game itself never required any server capacity.
The tragedy is that behind this mess seems to be a really great game. I would have certainly seriously considered buying it had it been a simple single player effort (maybe with some co-op thrown in as an extra) with sensible copyright protection and a fair price. Make it a Steam downloadable game and it would have been all win for EA.
:withstupid: :withstupid:
It goes from bad to worse for EA as CEO gets the sack
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2013/03/18/10050/
(http://www.battlefieldthree.co.uk/sim_city.jpg)
The sacking is in effect open admission that they've really screwed things up. Giving away an old crappy game will never compensate the fubar that once was a cool franchise.
Quote from: smilodon;368813It goes from bad to worse for EA as CEO gets the sack
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2013/03/18/10050/
What are the odds they learn nothing from the experience and appoint someone who pushes always on DRM and pay-to-win DLC in all upcoming games? I'm thinking 99% likely.
The sacking is in effect open admission that they've really screwed things up. Giving away an old crappy game will never compensate the fubar that once was a cool franchise.
Despite all the problems the game is actually quite fun to play. I do hasten to add though that i did not pay the whopping fee attached to the game, my son works for Bioware (subsidiary) and so i benefited from a copy given to him for family/friends. This may have affected how I feel since i think its okay for a free game :P
Such a shame EA are screwing over their reputation at such a rapid pace.
Quote from: Lorr;368884Such a shame EA are screwing over their reputation at such a rapid pace.
What Reputation is that ?:g::doh::roflmao:
Back in the day when you were but an ickle baby EA were a decent game developer. It's hard to imagine but they gave us
Wing Commander
FIFA
Medal of Honour
System Shock 2
American McGee's Alice
Battlefield
DAoC
Madden NFL
Yes they messed up some of these IP's and most of there decent stuff came from Bioware and Bullfrog, but they weren't always rubbish
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21802508
Full Article here: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a9n5j/you_can_edit_highways_outside_of_city_boundaries/c8vbw6k
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21828799