Sim City

[Tutonic]

EA's next attempt to ruin a classic.....

[ArithonUK]

Rock, Paper, Shotgun are questioning EA's stance on "no offline mode possible"

"we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers”, and  that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our  team to rewrite the game” for single player

The 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 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  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.

[Michelanio]

It seems like sim city can be run offline and have been modded to do so as well... Link
Nice work EA... really nice I really want to get games from you now.. NOT!

[T-Bag]

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.

[Tutonic]

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....

[ArithonUK]

What Maxis are doing is frankly peculiar. Earlier this week we posted a story  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 featuring “simcity.GetFudgedPopulation” as a function. We’ve learned that city size limits are arbitrary, pathfinding is rudimentary at best, and Eurogamer’s absolutely superb review lists many more bugs, broken features, disappearing pretend-money and never-arriving resources.

From Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It's clear, furthermore, reading this article 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.

[smilodon]

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.

[Michelanio]

:withstupid: :withstupid:

[smilodon]

It goes from bad to worse for EA as CEO gets the sack
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2013/03/18/10050/

[ArithonUK]

[Gone_Away]

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.

[T-Bag]

It 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.

[Gone_Away]

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.

[Lorr]

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

Such a shame EA are screwing over their reputation at such a rapid pace.

[TheDvEight]

Such a shame EA are screwing over their reputation at such a rapid pace.

What Reputation is that ?:g::doh::roflmao: