SimCity 2013

[Morreion]

Hah! ;D Understood about EA!

I've decided not to buy this game because I don't like the 'product as a service' model. Playing a single player game online is

1) dumb
2) painful when you have to queue for a single player experience or have connection issues
3) when the next SimCity game comes out, I expect EA to shut down the servers so that I have to buy the new game- in other words, my 'single player game' will expire

For MMOs and multiplayer games, I understand the 'product as a service' business model. For single player games, I think it is abominable. I understand they want to limit piracy, but the way they go about it is not acceptable to me.

[Oatik]

I think Blizzard does this to a degree with their games, I'm sure I need to log into battlenet before I play a single player mission of StarCraft.

[Loendal]

But SimCity 2013 isn't a single player game, it's programmed and designed as Multiplayer. Everything interacts with everything else out there in the region and I think even the game as a whole. This is why the servers have puked on this launch because of the sheer amounts of data being passed around through the entire system. All simulation aspects are controlled on the servers and those all affect everyone else in the region you're playing in. So when my crime rate shoots through the roof due to introducing gambling casinos and my police are up to the task, the criminals stop terrorizing my city and start to go around the region to rob, mug and murder. My commercial districts are fairly minimal in number, yet are showing skyscrapers for buildings. Why is that? Because of the people coming into my town from the region zones to spend their money.

When I finally hooked up a train station, my roads became utterly clogged with traffic because of all my sims having to cross town to get to the train so they could go to the next city over and spend their money! I had to upgrade them two levels and add a bus stop and street cars to handle the flow! All that data is handled server-side, and must be communicated over to the neighboring city so it can process the info for THEIR commercial buildings and roads and everything. If I go and observe that city, I will see my sims walking on their roads.

There's very little that is actually single player about this new SimCity, other that the fact that other people in my region haven't been logging in due to the server problems. I currently have the biggest city in the area

[Morreion]

That sounds interesting, multiplayer can have some fun possibilities, but 2 critiques:

1) I've always played SimCity as single-player- that's no longer an option. I don't like that. Less choice and more problems/complications because that's the way EA wants it to be- that's a fail in my book.

2) What's to stop people from making purposefully bad cities to cause disasters to nearby cities of other players?

I dunno, 60 bucks for a former single-player experience that's now a wonky multiplayer internet-only game doesn't thrill me. I'm sure it's a good game otherwise.

'SimCity' owners to get free game after launch woes (USA Today)

"A lot more people logged on than we expected," says Bradshaw. "More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta. OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it."

Translation: our 'game as a service' model is screwing our customers, but that's the way we designed it, enjoy the game!

[Regolyth]

Wow, Gack's being totally harsh on EA. LOL - Well done sir!

I agree though. They should have a single player aspect to the game. There's no reason not to (hacking aside... but honestly, who cares?)

As for Blizzard, yeah, they do that too. I don't like it there either. I don't play Diablo single player though, so it's not so much of a problem there. I do play StarCraft single player though. There I have a problem with it, mostly for the reasons Gack mentioned.

P.S. Not my fault... Gack drove the EA hate train through this thread.

[Morreion]

I see my work here is done ;D

Don't get me wrong, everything I've read about the actual game sounds interesting and cool. I just am depressed that you can no longer play a freaking single-player game without DRM or being online. *sigh*

[Morreion]

EA Disabling User Accounts Because It Thinks Any Contact With Amazon Must Be A Refund Request (Consumerist)

...Jeff says he was finally able to use the relay to talk to EA, and found out that indeed, he’d been banned from the game because Amazon had instituted a chargeback. Except, it didn’t, because he never asked for a refund or chargeback of any kind. He adds that Amazon was nice enough to give him a $40 credit for the problems it hadn’t caused, while EA simply gave him a 15% discount off his next Origin purchase and blamed Amazon for his troubles.

According to the post on Reddit, an Amazon CSR said EA is “aware of the issue” and will be busy re-enabling user accounts.

Further proof that the word refund is a dirty word to EA these days? If you needed evidence, that is: EA is reportedly replacing its own support number with asterisks in the SimCity forum, just because players don’t already have enough hoops to jump through and hey, why not make it even more difficult to log complaints?

EA going for a repeat of the Worst Company in America title (Massively)

When EA won the Consumerist's "Worst Company in America" title last year, many gamers were not surprised. But considering the sheer number of horrible companies that there are in the US of A, non-gamers were at a loss for perspective. With more than 250,000 votes cast by the Consumerist readers, the final tally showed that video games are indeed serious business.

The Daily Grind: What advice would you give to SimCity fans? (Massively)

While SimCity isn't an MMO, the multiplayer component, online servers, and horrible queue times certainly have a lot in common with our industry. Frustration amongst SimCity fans was high-pitched this week, especially at the slow and incomplete response on behalf of the mega-game publisher.

Rumor: Maxis insider claims SimCity servers not essential (Joystiq)

Though EA's official stance on SimCity's persistent Internet connection has been that it's absolutely required for the core game to function, a report from Rock, Paper, Shotgun claims that is not the case. An inside source who asked to remain anonymous told RPS the online servers are "not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing."

According to the source, the servers are coordinating social messages between cities in a region, as well as "cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they're not doing anything."

Even when the servers go down, certain cities have stayed online and playable for a period of time, suggesting off-site computation is not entangled in the main gameplay loop. The RPS source claims servers are also being used to repeatedly check for instances of hacking and cheating – and the game's verification messages to servers are creating queues and hampering responsiveness.

SimCity GM: 'In many ways, we built an MMO' (Massively)

Now Lucy Bradshaw, General Manager of Maxis, is stepping up to re-frame the situation. In a "straight answers" update today, she pointed out the gameplay reasons for building SimCity to be always connected. These include features like collaboration between cities in a region, social perks like world events and leaderboards, player gifts, and the global market. Additionally, cloud-based saves make for easy access anywhere.

"In many ways," she concludes, "we built an MMO." Somehow, we don't think MMO gamers would agree.

SimCity sales top 1.1 million (USA Today)

Despite connection problems plaguing the opening days after launch, city-building simulation SimCity has sold more than 1.1 million copies, publisher Electronic Arts announced.

More than half of those copies purchased were digital downloads, EA says in a statement.

8 Tips for the New SimCity (Ten Ton Hammer)

The faster you expand, the more infrastructure you’ll need to avoid critical failures such as fires, sickness, and crime waves. In addition, infrastructure is insanely costly and inefficient the further any of the services have to travel. If you can’t afford the additional expense of the infrastructure, then you’ll start having bigger and bigger problems later on. In addition, exploiting industry will result in massive pollution and lack of workers (industry requires a lot of people to operate) which results in abandoned villages, a drain on power/water, and tons of pollution.

SimCity Newbie Mayor's Strategy Guide (Ten Ton Hammer)

Be careful as you’re building roads; there’s no undo function and the only way to delete a road you’ve created is by bulldozing it, which wastes your precious simoleons (money). If you’ve drawn a road you don’t like, you can undo it before it’s completed by pressing the Esc key before you release the left mouse button.

Amazon SimCity 2013 user review

9,072 of 9,244 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars What a lousy toy, March 6, 2013
= Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars

This review is from: SimCity - Limited Edition (DVD-ROM)
Fundamentally, SimCity has always been a 'software toy'. That means that there's no real end state, no way to win. It's just a thing that you play and experiment with. You build, and tinker, and mess around. It's a toy, not a game; it's a sandbox, not baseball.

So, in this iteration of the game, you don't even get to buy your toy. Rather, you rent a toy from EA, who lets you play with it only in very limited, circumscribed ways, only on their servers. So you have to have a live Internet connection at all times, and their servers have to be up, and have to have space for you. And the rules for play are draconian. If you want to, say, build a city, save it, blow it up with something terrible, and then restore from save, you can't do that anymore. That's an unauthorized usage of their toy. And if you figure out ways of using their toy that they don't like, they'll ban you forever.

All third-party modding is shut out. One of the best parts of SimCity 4 and The Sims is that users can create and share content among themselves for free. You will no longer be able to do this. You will be required to run only Official Authorized Content.

Further, you're not getting the whole game for your $60 or $80, depending on what version you're buying. EA's plan is to sell you Simcity 5 over and over and over. They've directly admitted that they already have it running with larger cities, but they're not releasing that now. They claim it's because it "won't run on Dad's PC", but the real reason is so they can sell it to you again later. Want subways? That's gonna be $20. Want railroads? Another $20. Bigger cities? Oh, that's in the $30 expansion.

Right now, if you look at The Sims 3, the game costs $30. But if also you buy all the DLC for it, it's *four hundred and seventy dollars*. This is what they are doing with SimCity 5; locking you into their server infrastructure, and then exploiting the heck out of your wallet.

This is a lousy deal, and you would be stupid to take it. Always-on DRM, and a deliberately crippled game, so that they can slowly uncripple it, charging you for every restored feature from prior versions.

Simcity 4 still works pretty well. It's not quite as nice as most current games, and can require you to 'pin' the process to just one processor on a multi-core system (ie, most current machines), but if you want a city builder where you won't have to pay extra to breathe both in AND out, that would be a better option.

But buying this game? In my opinion, you would be wiser to take three twenties out of your wallet, and light them on fire.