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SimCity 5: How Not To Design a Single Player Game
It seems that the requirement to be online and save games on a remote server even in single player mode is leading to a less than ideal launch for SimCity 5. choke writes "Players attempting to play EA/Maxis' new SimCity game are finding that their save games are tied to a particular server, are facing problems with disconnects, inability to track friends or search for specific coop games online and failures to load game, and wait times of 20 minutes per login attempt. The question is, why the online restriction? Does this possibly indicate future micro-transactions in game?"
Seems like every new EA release has similar issues. With hordes of bad amazon reviews because of it.
I miss the era simple gaming. Where myself and my buddies would have a LAN party. COD4 was a godsend when I was deployed.
From the Ars Technica story:
Hopefully EA will learn from the experience and buff up its servers ahead of the game's official European launch on Friday.
As nice as that would be, it's the wrong lesson. The lesson EA needs to learn here is the same one that every other video game publisher has to learn: don't build inherently single-player games with always-on requirements! There was no reason for this in SimCity.
Maybe the next SimCity will learn that lesson from this one. Maybe EA will release a patch that offers the option of offline play. We can hope ... but as it stands now, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the end of the SimCity series -- Maxis' version of Master of Orion III, if you will.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Didn't someone just claim that EA were not scumbags?
Because this is again stuff a scumbag does.
In another X years, you will not even be able to save progress with this game. Why would anyone buy into that?
What a ridiculous question... We know that there are at least 3 obvious reasons for this:
1) To prevent you selling the game. I'm guessing that there is some unique key for the copy you bought tied to your online profile.
2) To make you have to upgrade when they shut off the servers for SimCity 5 when they launch SimCity 6. EA are known for this. Anyone tried play FIFA 2011 or The Sims 2 online recently...?
3) To try and stop piracy. Instead of just having to activate online, which could be bypassed by some enterprising cracker, now bits of the game need a connection to actually function. Makes the job of cracking it more difficult I guess.
I think SC5 is getting really bad rep for wrong reasons - no one seems to want to remember the answer Maxis gave to the online requirement: your PC is not doing the backend work for the city simulation - its cloud based now. SimCity 3000 had an incredible amount of math behind it, SimCity 5 is the same and there is so much more of it that it has been offloaded into the cloud.
And yes, there will be micro-transactions. Be prepared for the worst.
"Looks like a hurricane is headed for your city. Pay $5.99 now to save your citizens!"
I didn't have any real trouble yesterday, although I started playing in the late afternoon. The only issue I experienced was my friends not showing up for the first 10 minutes of play. After waiting a bit they popped up and we were able to set up a region and I haven't experienced any issues with that since.
People need to put in the effort to get these DRM details before they get tricked on these EA games, because EA themselves will obviously never put it in the plain. They're really into tricking people.
That's the real reason for the failure.
The fun part comes in after they release SimCity 6 and decide to disable the old servers to save hosting fees. Where are your saves then?
This is only part of the reason I prefer better city builders, like Dwarf Fortress.
...to the consumer.
No one minds WoW (etc.) requiring an online connection because that connection serves a purpose and delivers part of your experience. Without it you lose the basis of the game. Even while farming you have some social interaction and the chance to go off and raid or help out a guildy.
But what does this bring? As I understand it there is a social component to the new simcity but is it fundamental to the game? No. Can you build a city on your own? Yep. And on top of all that you don't bother getting your auth server (and save server) working properly? What's *wrong* with the people running this show?
Microtransactions can require internet *for the transaction*. Multiplayer? Sure. But the nonsense around single player games needing to be online to check in? It just walks down the restrictive path that the music industry tried with MP3 and DRM. You won't win.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
n/t
Commerce, wont you think of the children.
We'll be having micro transactions for everything!
*This post is deliberately meant to be stupid and lulzy.
My brother talked me in to pre-ordering the game, it's been awhile since I had played any of the sim city games and I enjoyed the 1hr beta using his account.
But wow what a clusterfuck yesterday's launch was. I was woken up around 2am by our infant and used that as an opportunity to d/l and install the game. Apparently it was a very wise decision. Once I got home from work around 5pm ET trying to get connect and stay connected was impossible. Three times I got a city started only to get booted after about 15 minutes and the game did not save any of my progress. After making and eating dinner my brother and I tried to start our own region. That took around 30 minutes before it finally worked and again we were kicked after about 20-25 minutes. I gave up at that point since the baby was fussy and my wife needed a break.
The N. American servers were filling up almost immediately after being brought online. It's almost as if EA thought only a third of their pre-orders would try playing on day 1. But a failed launch for EA is par for the course. Fool me once, shame on you... fool me again, shame on me.
The game itself was enjoyable during the beta... too bad the publisher is one of the worst companies on the planet.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
EA hasn't been a game maker for years. They're just another Hasbro now. Turning out cheap copycat toy after cheap copycat toy. The only difference is who's branding they put on the game. They want everyone to pay more and more regardless of how much they paid for the game up front and that is much more difficult offline. With an always on, always tied to your account, always able to verify, always able to control the save game so you can't possibly just hex edit yourself the extra ???? you need.
The reason EA games suck is not because they are more greedy than useful, the reason EA games suck is because they are hundreds of times more greedy than useful. Ubisoft is hardly any better, those they at least learned how retarded always on was and stopped.
Remember, always connected means you in no way own your game. When they turn off the servers, your game goes away and you don't get your money back, its just done. No one will play SimCity5 again after that point.
Won't effect me.
When I first heard about SC5 after seeing the fucktarded SimCities Socities, I thought KICK ASS! A new SimCity ... and then put it in the back of my mind until it was actually released so I don't nag myself about it until then ... then yesterday I read a review on arstechnica.com ... Always on, small play area, economy is entirely unpredictable and irrational in its turns from bust to boom to bust with no logical reason why, all sorts of further issues in the full article. All of the issues seemed to stem from the fact that force you to play and depend on other people.
NOT EVERYONE WANTS TO FUCKING PLAY GAMES WITH INTERNET MORONS OKAY?
I certainly don't. Sometimes, I do. Sometimes I will play with friends, in certain games, when my mood fits it. But any game that I'm going to sit down and dedicate hours of effort and planning to, I'm only going to play with about 3 select friends who will NEVER have the time to be online at the same time as me (kids tend to make schedules hard on you). The rest of the Internet is pretty fucking annoying to deal with in those games, I certainly don't want my game to have to deal with how that jack ass sells his commodities and prices which screw my plan or spews his environmental mess at me.
I ALREADY HAVE REAL LIFE, I DON'T WANT IT IN A GAME.
In a game I want to be in control. I don't want to be at some little 'Anonymous' asshole's whim.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Simcity 5 dumbed down the road and zoneing system way to much.
I want citys in cities in motion 2
Look, this is from someone who last night made his first city about 8 times and lost it all 8 times because of the server nonsense. I was pretty annoyed.
But if we're going to lambaste someone for doing the always-online thing, maybe we shouldn't just jump to conclusions, maybe you should, learn something about i it first? Or maybe you just want to be hip & cool like everyone else and be against always-online without using any actual critical thinking. If so, bravo.
One of the cornerstone features of the game this time around is the Region play aspect. This was introduced in Sim City 4, but they've taken it to a much more interesting place in this iteration. Basically, there are about a dozen regions you can choose to play on; first, you choose one. Each region has X 'city slots'. This doesn't necessarily mean # of players, but it obviously puts a cap on X players in that region. Nothing stops you from building all X cities yourself over time. The cities have a lot of interconnection, hooked up by highway, or rail, or whatever. You can specialize one city as a college town, make another the bedroom community, etc. And, of course, you can invite people into your game (if its private, otherwise they just find it) to fill out the other cities instead -- and cooperate, fight, whatever.
That doesn't work without a server authority, so that needs always-online to work. Otherwise you'd need one person to host, and never stop. So this is logical. Plus, you can still play it by yourself if you want.
The part you can argue for the always-online component is whether they should have let you play in a local region offline. That's a reasonable question. But they didn't just 'tack always-online' on as a form of DRM (though I'm sure they were happy to have it) -- its pretty clearly a foundation of the way they expect the majority of people to play. And I think they're right -- the *only* reason I'm playing the game is so I can play with my brother. If it was a purely single player game, I'd have passed.
Now if could just get that server mess sorted out, I think this would be a fun game. From what I've seen so far, the UI is easily the best SimCity has ever had. It was pure pleasure laying out zones & drawing roads, etc. And I like their module system for expanding the utilities & other buildings.
It's not fair to say this is "how not to design a single player game". That's insipid. They've taken a single player game and made an interesting multi-player game, that if you really want to you can play by yourself. That's not the same thing.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
Why would they need an "always on" feature for microtransactions? Isn't the whole point of those to offer something cheap to make that you can quickly sell at extreme profit, so you no longer have to worry about people pirating/etc?
It sounds more to me like they're trying to fit their entire ecosystem into the same online framework, in a massive bungling attempt to reduce development costs by ruining their games and reputation.
It's a huge backward step from Simcity 4. Perhaps a group could get together, pool resources and buy the blasted SC4 source code from EA.
According to EA, hte reason for the always online requirement, is because the game truly is a client server model. Each client, runs 1 region at a time. it then sends data about what has occurred in that region to then be processed by the EA server's and then pushed to the other regions in that game. This occurs every three minutes. Welcome to cloud computing.
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/The-Benefits-of-Live-Service
I've logged 10 hours in the game already without issue. I guess with all the hate people had for the game before anyone had even played it, it's not surprising people are trying to drum up controversy that's more than the obvious "I don't like that the game is always online."
And while I'm on the subject, the "regions" aspect of the game is damn fun. You have to build your city with surrounding cities in mind -- taking a city that is successful in one region and plopping it down in another wouldn't necessarily work very well. It's not like they just tossed always-online DRM onto a reskinned SC4; the always-online requirement is fundamental to gameplay.
Sim-Autism ("Sim-Auti") does not suffer with these social need predicaments. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/auti-sim-lets-you-experience-the-horror-of-sensory-overload/
One of the other reasons for the always-on requirement is probably the fact that some computations are offloaded to EA-servers.
source
But also forcing it for save-games is a bit silly.
Sorry I got burned on Diablo 3. I love Sim City but I will never buy another single player game that requires an internet connection to their servers just for me to play. Because years down the road when they decide "Hey its not worth running this anymore" they will pull the plug and then you have a game that is no longer playable. Either that or the servers were always down when I went "Well its my day off lets go play for a bit".
The always on connection is nothing more than DRM in disguise. If the pirates hadn't been so keen to rip every game they could get their grubby little hands on this sort of nonsense probably wouldn't have happened.
Yes I know, the truth hurts. But if you're a company thats spent 10s if not 100s of millions on developing a game you're no longer going to watch that investment go down the toilet via a DVD bit copier. They figure that since most gamers now have always on broadband the inconvenience is minimal. Except when they fuck up like this of course.
Piracy isn't the issue here, EA is making it this way so when they shut down the servers in 3-ish years you can't play the game and they can move you onto SimCity6. They already killed the "used game market" for PC games and now they are moving to the "software as a service" model so they can remove games you bought to entice you with a new one. I for one won't be renting games from them, I'll go back to playing SimCity 2000 or SimCity 4 instead.
EA said you are now entitled to a refund! Rip them off!
This is considered news? Anyone who paid to rent this part of EA's temporary entertainment service must have known it was going to be a train wreck for a week or so, then be littered with similar problems from time to time, until the service is withdrawn.
Not-knowing-what-regressions-are-FAIL:
Origin 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"
Hint: you don't "work to polish the game until the last second", you work to polish and then delay launch because you can't be sure of the quality until you've retested and had a solid set of builds passing your regression testing and product testing. Who can possibly think it is a good idea to still be changing software code seconds before the launch?
Server-capacity-FAIL:
Later, even after the problems were officially "resolved," EA warned that "due to server load it may take up to three hours for your game to unlock.
Invasive-DRM-where-you-make-legitimate-users-suffer-disproportionally-for-your-FAILures:
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.
Got-it-wrong-before-and-still-managed-to-FAIL:
The issues bring to mind the infamous "Error 37" that prevented many Diablo III players from logging into the game in the days after its launch last year, though it's unclear how comparatively widespread SimCity's server issues are
It isn't surprising that EA treats their customers like shit, but it is still infuriating that they can get away with this.
Maxis/EA is treating the Simcity Franchise just like the Sims Franchise, two very different games and thus is completely hurting the Simcity community as a whole.
This is "suppose" to be a single player game. 4 generations of it has proven otherwise with at least 3 generations still playable offline with no DRM.
Maxis decides to develope it multi-player, but that is truly a smokescreen as its merely a way to fight piracy aka DRM. One of the most dreaded words in the gaming industry.
EA like others thinks the whole world is on Highspeed when 1st world internet structure is truly horrible.
Its a shame this game is getting the rep it is, as I am a hardcore fan but will not support this horrible reboot.
Vote with your wallet, and outcry to the people
X Years? try now. Players are complaining that saved games won't load back.
The game has been deliberately broken in the name of DRM, without any thought of what the outcome would be. With no commitment from EA to remove this built-in self-destruct, anyone would be a fool to buy this game. In 18 months when the "water pumps that work" DLC and the "slightly larger map, so you can actually build a city" DLC fails to meet sales targets, EA will simply pull the plug and all those people who paid a premium price will find, what they had was a bug-ridden FaceBook game.
Blaming "high demand" for these problems is an outright lie. The servers were taking three hours for people to download and unlock the game and 30 minutes to connect! This was when only pre-order clients and press who'd stayed up until midnight were on-line - hardly the maximum player-base you'd expect, certainly nowhere near "high demand".
And why would they be needed anyway for a SINGLE PLAYER game? Because EA broke it.
Again, this pointless "every game pirated is a lost sale" arguments. I'd say that most kids who pirate the game would never have had the money to buy the game in the first place.
I'd bet that companies lose more money into trying to make their games secure than the total of potential lost sales.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
So instead of EA shouldering the pain they ship it to their customers. Brilliant.
Excuse me if I don't shed a tear for a company that rakes in more money than you or I will ever see made off of entertainment.
Except it's been proven time and time again that this DOESN'T STOP PIRATES. Another day or two, if it hasn't happened already, SimCity 5 will be cracked and pirates will be able to play the game while everyone who bought it isn't. From this we can assume one of two things is true:
1. EA is run by a bunch of fucking retarded executives who cannot process facts.
2. This always online requirement isn't about piracy at all.
As much as I hate EA, I doubt they're completely retarded. This is pretty much just a test bed for obsoleting older games and forcing everyone onto the new version of the year.
I would much rather blame EA. You know, the people who actually implemented this fuck-up of a system.
There is a better game idea on kick starter
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1584821767/civitas-plan-develop-and-manage-the-city-of-your-d
EA has gone to far this this I was thinking about getting simcity 5 but the beta was a real trun off for me. I want to get this and cites in motion 2
Why are people still buying EA titles? They go as far as possible out of their way to prevent paying customers from using their products as possible. Stop giving them money and they will stop screwing you over.
I wasn't aware EA had grabbed up Maxis.
I played the shit out of Sim City and Widget Workshop growing up.
I had heard another sim city was being released and I was kind of excited, but ugh, not anymore.
Fuck you EA.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Pirates may have hastened the process, but even without them this would come eventually as a way for publishers to battle their other nemesis: Second-hand games. An effective DRM system can also be used to stop people from selling the games on cheap when they are done, which in turn means everyone pays retail rather than sensibly waiting a few months so they can buy that $60 for $10 in the used bin.
I'm not a gamer at all, but really dug SimCity 2000 back in the 90's... I was curious to try this one out, but it doesn't sound very gratifying put like this!
My deep sympathies to all EA coders that have worked like crazies to deliver at MBA fixed impossible deadline, to all OPS guys who worked their a.. off to deploy that gigantic piece of cr... delivered by previously mentioned burned out coders.
Respect. Hope your next job will be better.
EA treats you gamers like shit all the time and you keep coming back game after game like an addict needing a fix. All this crying and bitching and I guarantee every single complainer here will be first in line for the next EA launch.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I'm already boycotting EA, Activision and Ubisoft. I mostly play indies and old titles nowadays, which are usually more feature rich, equally fun to play and are build for specific types of players and not gamers in general. Plus thanks to the efforts of GOG, IndieGala and Humble Bundle, they usually come DRM free and are often multiplatform. Plus their prices are not overinflated and by cutting out the publishers, all the revenue goes to the developer so that they can turn another original idea into a game (which is basically what "indie" movement stands for). If enough people do the same (boycott big publishers) they will fall and we'll be free to play the games we want to play, and not the games we settle for because the publisher tried to cater for larger audience and protect his revenue at the same time.
of game developers have no idea what they are doing?
Mostly becasue they lack any real experience or engineering skills.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The limit of what you can do easily is not give them money. There are plenty more things you could be doing, depending on how much you really care:
1. Encourage others to not give them money.
2. Start a campaign to spread awareness about how their (and any other similar) games harm everyone.
3. Start a campaign to boycott any games similar to this. A nice fancy website listing these games would be a start.
4. Bring this up as a consumer rights issue, start a lobby.
If you get enough people wound up about something, you can get the backing and momentum to really have an effect. Unfortunately few people actually care enough to do more than complain on slashdot as they're downloading the thing they claim to hate so much. There is much that could be done, but few people willing to do it.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The N. American servers were filling up almost immediately after being brought online
The issues with always-on DRM have been known for awhile. However, if so many people bought the game for launch, then I doubt EA's going to be getting the message that it's bad for sales...
They are in business like every other single business on the planet, to make money. If you would rather steal games than pay for them then they don't have much of a choice, if you don't like it then don't buy the fucking game!
Pirates don't have to put up with the restrictive crap that developers seem hell-bent on throwing into their games these days. The ultimate result is that developers punish the people who buy their games for the actions of those who aren't. I'd like to communicate that I would have bought a lot of games in the absence of onerous restrictions (and there are MANY), but when I'm reduced to voting with my wallet, when I don't buy their games, my (non) sale is construed as a loss to piracy anyway, and the Digital Restrictions Management get even worse. Lovely Morton's Fork the developers have got set up, no?
I played all last night and I had no issues.. made about 5 cities. So I don't know what this article is talking about. They were also still there this morning.
So... breaking the game for the people that actually gave you money for it fixes piracy... how?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Note: I don't own the game, and likely won't.
That said, EA was pretty clear in that Sim City 5 is a multiplayer game that has the option of a private game with only 1 person, not a single player game with a multiplayer option.
Calling Sim City 5 single-player is like calling Tribes (letting my age slip) a single-player game because you could setup a private map with bots.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Because of their practices of dumbing down games to increase sales (see dead space going from horror to action like resident evil), forcing multiplayer into games that arent about multiplayer for the sake of more sales, having to sign up and login into games to get content that should be in the game already (see mass effect 1 and 2, dragon age 2, etc), the way they constantly nickle and dime customers to death with DLC, pimping out DLC for games that havent even been released yet, online connections required to play games single player, requiring origin for their pc games, constantly just shitting out sequel after sequel and whoring out a franchise instead of doing something new, their horrible customer service, and multiple other reasons I do not buy EA games new anymore. I only buy EA games used so they do not actually get any of my money. I would rather give some guy on ebay (to hell with lamestop) my money so he can use it for what he wants instead of EA getting even 1 cent from me.
So EA gets no money from me at all and they never will and not because I am pitching a fit about one thing, its about the dozens and dozens of things they have ticked me off about over the course of many years now.
EA, bethesda, capcom, activision (although I still support blizzard but they are quickly starting to get on my nerves), sega, nintendo (yeah I said it), gearbox, bioware, ubisoft, rockstar and a few others are all on my list of companies I will never buy their products new or support them either with my words or my money. I might play their games but I wont buy them in such a way they get my money.
Won't pirates simply remove the online check and play offline though? Perhaps you can point me at a single example, since the start of video gaming, where a game couldn't be modified in this way. Come to that, can you point me at a single example of any game, ever, which has had it's copying prevented via any copy protection system?
Every dumb ass that bought that EA shit stain deserved every second of their queue times. Lets see: Gutted map sizes with Regions 1/4 the size of Sim City 4 (+1 step backwards) plus actual cities smaller then Sim City 1 (+4 steps backwards) along with gutted gameplay (no underground utility design, no subways... +3 steps backwards) along with always online requirement and DRM (+10 steps backwards), pre-order nonsense (imagine paying up front at a restaurant for you food.... +2 steps backwards) in exchange for Curved Roads (-1 step backwards... wait, nm Sim City 4 had mods that added those +0 then) and no modding support (+10 steps backwards).
It's almost like EA was jealous that Monte Cristo made a shittier Sim City game then Societies (Cities XL) and wanted to 1-up Monte Cristo in the fucking horrible Sim Socialist genre so they made this "Sim City" which is more a Cities XL 2 then anything else. It's just missing that magical "No, the state has decreed that only Executives can purchase these homes. Be gone peasant and free market subscriber!"
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
There is already micro-transaction with extra DLC content no ? There is even ingame advertisement to buy more content.
If you would rather steal games than pay for them then they don't have much of a choice, if you don't like it then don't buy the fucking game! It is pretty simple
Which I imagine is exactly what most of the pirates will do. Has the PC game industry done better for itself since the advent of always-online DRM? If not, then it's obvious to see that it is not effective. CD Projekt Red (makers of The Witcher and The Witcher 2) seems to be doing great with sales of their games, despite the lack of DRM.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Last time I wanted a game with an online requirement, I ended up downloading a pirated copy with the online requirement removed, instead of just buying it.
So, explain to me again, why is it that PAYING customers get all these stupid restrictions, that they could have been without, if they had just done the smart thing and downloaded a cracked copy?
Piracy has never been shown to do as much damage as publishers claimed. Somehow I doubt that if each incident of piracy was a lost sale and that piracy was double digit percentage points of the userbase that we'd see recession proof growth in the video game industry. There are a multitude of reasons why each incident of piracy is not a lost sale and why pirates eventually become paying customers as well as whhy EA's DRM stances could be doing more harm to them than the piracy they're deterring. That's why people don't like EA. They're not scumbags, but they are complete morons who don't understand why what they're doing is completely absurd.
There is no memory shortage. yes I have heard of XFCE. Go away.
Second hand games isn't that much of a problem on the PC.
There is also no correlation between copy protection and increased sales so while it's probably the correct reason it only works in their mind. (And your apparently.)
From my experience this isn't just a DRM screw up, but it did help to make it far worse. I'm crazy and refuse to play on Windows so I got it to work though Wine last night. I couldn't get into the NA servers so I opted to log into the other available server. I must have got things working at just the wrong time because every game that had been made was suspiciously all at 15 min. or more. It then refused to allow me to create and claim some land. I'd log out then back in after 30 min and still no new games had been made. This morning I was able to get into the NA servers and start up a game. However, the interface was different. Rather than an interface that allowed me to choose the tutorial or not it was a forced tutorial before you'd be allowed to go and do your own thing. At this point I suspect that some servers were running the wrong version of their software, and that is the source of the save game corruption. I don't really understand why the Tutorial wasn't an Offline option. Starcraft 2 got that part right by making it after I log in once I can play the campaign offline. Some single player offline content would have saved them some stress on their servers. They could also monopolize on the Pre Order scene a bit. If they insist on an Always Online model with the servers holding the load then they're going to need to do a tiered release over a week. Otherwise you're going to have everyone logging in on the same day. One one builds a system to have 100% of their users logged in EVER. It's like the phone company. If everyone picks up their phones at the same time 80% would get a busy tone or no dial tone. Having a single launch day ensures that everyone is going to login during the same window of time. This always online model needs a lot more work, or it needs to be scrapped.
The tiny city sizes chased me away from this one, but the online only requirement didn't help. Everybody but EA (and "professional" reviewers) knew the servers would collapse at launch just like they did with Diablo 3, and once again here we are.
That's okay, lots of other companies are happy to take my gaming dollars. Hopefully more people get the memo and stop buying. When a few games fail totally because of this always online nonsense, the publishers will get the message. In the end it's really only dollars that they understand.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
There is no "truth" in your post. There is clearly your opinion but it is a poorly informed one at best.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I'm content with SimCity 2000 and 3000, and 3000 has a native Linux version. It's the same stuff anyway, build and manage a city, I don't care about graphics. Best part, no always online garbage or games saved in the 'cloud'.
If you don't really care about graphics, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of awesome old games out there begging you to play them. And none of them treat you as a slave. Don't be a slave to these pricks, they don't care about you anyway; how much more do they need to do to you to prove this?.
Ridiculous. Pirates always find away around DRM. Always. It's naive to think otherwise. Creating a simple DRM system that ensures that 95% will buy the game and will not be impeding is fine. These 'always on' systems are seriously impeding, however, and I won't be purchasing games that use them.
Looks like another classic game is going to suffer the effects of Greed, and be made into a money-grubbing, online-only, don't-even-think-about-playing-it-offline-by-yourself game.
Surely, I am not the only one out here to want games that I can play when there is no access to WiFi or any form of internet. Decent, engaging, immersive, single-player game play that does not require an account online somewhere, or constant call-home-to-mommy-for-permission-to-play crap.
Maybe I just want to play something to keep myself entertained while in the "boonies" or out of touch with the world?
Perhaps I don't want anyone else constantly monitoring my feeble progress through their killer levels with my n00b skillz while others snicker at my attempts, or spawn-camp me to rage-quitting something I've spent en exorbitant amount of money on in the first place.
Sorry for the rant. I just can't seem to part with my hard-earned cash so that I can be someone else s' target-practice.
Am I truly that alone out here?
That's a series of rather ignorant statements, considering all of the (often DRM-free) success stories on the PC.
A more accurate statement would be that lazy components within the videogame industry have been blaming piracy for the lacking success of their bad games for years.
http://youtu.be/0Qkyt1wXNlI
That assumes the person who would have bought the game for $10 will now buy it for $60. And it assumes that the person who cannot get $10 back by reselling will still be willing to buy it for $60. And it totally ignores that selling the game for $10 will give him $10 to buy more games (and he's the kind of person who does buy new games, or he would not have had the used game to sell). And it ignores the fact that people who wouldn't have sold the game second-hand but would have kept it for occasional replaying now might not buy it because they already know that they won't be able to play it later.
All in all, I'd guess they won't make a single cent extra through this policy. And I'd not be surprised if they actually make less money.
Does this possibly indicate future microtransactions in game?
Yes.
I haven't seen this mentioned yet in the discussion above (maybe I missed it somewhere), but EA's CFO announced that all of its games would include microtransactions from now on.
Requiring an online tether would be a logical way to add or take away features in the future through microtransactions. Requiring your save file to be in the cloud would also prevent people from hacking around it. The launch problems won't stop this – EA will chalk it up to a server glitch, fix it and move on – because they see too much money sitting on the table. They watched the rise of Zynga, who made money on the most senseless games through addictive microtransactions, and said "we want a piece of that pie."
They simply failed to notice when my response to their CFO's announcement was: "20-year customer of EA to stop buying all future games." Not that I expected them to notice. It would take a lot more people than we have on Slashdot to wake them up, because for every person here who understands that microtransactions are a method for making you pay repeatedly for something you already bought, there are 10,000 average Joes out there who think microtransactions make the game better.
I'm with you; I love that, some 10 years on, I can still just fire up SC4 from time to time and play around for a little while. Then, if I'm changing PCs, all I have to do is copy a directory full of files to the new box. Sad that this is now a "killer feature", being able to control your data.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
I've waited, no, begged, for a proper new Sim City game to be released, to replace the ageing but still robust Sim City 4, offering better gameplay and something to take full advantage of all the improvements to technology since SC4.
Games like Cities XL tried, and failed, because the developers it seems simply don't care about fixing the code, so every new version of it has seen zero real bug fixes, and nothing but community content packaged up and sold, despite the new looking city building it was an absolute turd. When Sim City 5 was released I was overjoyed, no way they could make it worse than SC4, they were finally doing a serious game. If there was ONE game I was going to buy the in coming year to spend my now limited time playing that was it, it was a must, must, MUST have title.
I still haven't made that purchase, I'm not going to make that purchase, ever. I don't need to reiterate the reasons, plenty of people have already done that for me on these very pages. Sim City 5 might as well not exist.
It's so sad what EA has done to the series. No "true" SimCity since SC4, each iteration seems to pander to the lowest common denominator rather than the true enthusiasts, which is understandable since they're in business to make money, not satisfy an enthusiastic fanbase. It's just sad that it's ended up this way. They could've built of SC4, added curved roads and much better pathfinding, and the majority of us enthusiasts would've been very happy, I'm sure. Oh well, haven't bought SimCity since SC4, and it looks like that shall continue. Won't even go into the pitfalls and idiocies that I read about in a few reviews (small map size, bugs, etc.).
For what it's worth i'm enjoying the game, it's alot of fun and I've only had 1 disconnect in over 8 hours of playing. I agree that they certainly could have made a single player mode with no achievements or other players in the region - I'm running all the cities in my region except for one guy who wandered in, but I do think the mutli region interaction is way better than what it was in Sim City 4. I got it at a discount for about $40 from a amazon promo and I think it's well worth it at that price ; maybe not the full $60.
Well I had already skipped over buying this over the DRM, Origin, DLC crap and the price but reading this really opens some eyes in that they really seemed to have built SimFarmVille http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we-waited-ten-years-for-this/
I believe it's much more than 'checks' some of the core functionality of the game is run on their servers.
I'm guessing that's why the city sizes are so small, it's based upon the amount of CPU/RAM they are willing to dedicate on their servers per-user, which is far less than your own sweet gaming rig can provide.
Or it's limited to what an XBox 360/PS3 can handle if there is/will be a port.
The person who gets a job and raises a family will tend to find their leisure time is at a premium. If they can game at all, it will tend to be on a very tight schedule. Now such people are far less likely to 'pirate' their games, given they have income AND lack the time to mess around with such solutions. No, they will pay for a service and EXPECT that service will operate as needed.
What happens. Our honest family man finds he has a free 50 minutes, and readies to play SimCity5, having switched on the computer 2 hours earlier to deal with the dozens of automatic updates just about every piece of installed software demands these days. He clicks 'start' and EA impolitely informs him "tough, our servers are down or busy or something". Disbelieving his eyes, he spends the next 20 mins tracking down the game forum, and then reads to his horror as EA official trolls scream abuse at complainants, informing them that EA's TOS allows EA to do anything it damn well likes, and only 'dirty pirates' think this is a bad thing. Threads are locked, threads are closed, and users are banned with the threat that the ban may well include the ability to use the single player version of the game itself.
Let me re-iterate the last point. Multiple game publishers have BANNED users from their purchased single-player games because of comments posted to official game forums. The same publishers PAY game review sites to applaud the TOS that illegally claim the ability to ban you from playing your paid-for single-player game. The publishers have actually turned the paying punters into the enemy, if such punters only seek to purchase the game outright.
Some of you 'out-of-touch' ex-gamers will think this insane and untrue, but you are wrong. Publishers are seeking to create the conditions where, after buying the game, you must continue to pay to use it. Yes, these morons want their games to be purchase AND a service- like THAT business model ever works. The truth is that games companies currently have the worst management and owners from an business education POV. Whatever cretinous immoral idea pops into the heads of these idiots, they try to implement.
It gets worse. As you might expect, the so-called services that flow from the game being partially 'online' are almost always hopeless and very half-baked. The game itself may be great- there are established teams that craft great product- but the services side is created by the worst teams of unenthusiastic wage slaves. What artistry is there in code merely designed to rip off the user.
It gets worse. The best games have excellent communities that support them, but these communities are 'free' and a consequence of hundreds of people showing their love for a game in terms of mods and other crafted elements (like Wikis and the like). No company has EVER come close to offering support even one hundredth as good as that provided by gamers for games like 'Doom', 'Quake', 'Fallout 3' or 'Skyrim'.
Bottom line. It should be ILLEGAL by consumer law for any single-player game installed on a user's computer to require online connection to play. New companies and industries never follow appropriate moral codes uncoerced. The consumer has RIGHTS and companies like EA should be thrashed for seeking to undermine these rights. Sadly, in a land where idiots still buy DVDs that force them to watch unskippable ads, new consumer rights are a dead letter. Your politicians (especially Obama) are bought and paid for.
last time I checked Simcity4 was available through steam. or are you one of those people who don't like steam or want the game to be free (as in no charge)
Yes I know, the truth hurts.
You wouldn't know the truth if it bit you on the butt. This is exactly like the non-skippable DVD piracy warnings:
Piss off all your customers who actually *bought* the damn thing *legally* by forcing them to watch stuff accusing them of being pirates every time they watch the film.
Meanwhile the pirates carry on happily watching the film without the retarded warnings. Yeah, that makes sense. Show your paying customers that they get a *better* product by *not paying*.
Look at the list of games supported. It's pathetically small.
Xbox games can't have dedicated servers so you're screwed if they decide to shut down games like they did with Halo 2 and they are doing the same for Halo 2 PC. Halo 1 still online though.
Really, the permanent fix for DRM is a law that forces companies to publish the source code. IMO, piracy is not the main reason source code is closed. That's just a convenient excuse. Just about every software has been pirated and very few people bother to look at code.
at the time Doom was basically fully immersive virtual reality to us. Given that the Cyberdemon barely ever even had a pain animation, a lot of my friends were sure you had to lure it somewhere and squish it, or something like that.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
buys the rights to all your old favorite games implements them poorly, making them virtually unplayable.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
EA is a publicly traded company. They answer to the stockholders. All you need to do is band together enough gaming geeks that have money to purchase stock in EA and voice your opinion.
The problem with this is that 101% of the shares outstanding are institution owned (OPM - Other People's Money, i.e. pension plans). Good luck competing with them on an individual basis.
Simcity 4 needs some bug fixes and other work that needs the source code to fix.
Cities in Motion is sweet. I wish you could take that and blend it with SimCity 4000.
I am an AVID SimCity fan. As much time most people have sinked into diablo2, I have dropped at least that much into the previous simcities. Bought all the expansions, first day. Loved them all to death. I know I'm not alone in this.
I will not be buying this game. In part because of the "always on" nature of the game, in part because it's EA. What's amazing to me is how these companies can take such brand loyalty and absolutely destroy it. And not just by releasing a bad game. Hell, how many of us are fans of franchises that have stinkers? No, they destroy it by abusing customers, by kicking them where it hurts, then trying to charge you more for the privilege.
So no thanks. As much as it will pain me not to play this latest installment and get my city on, I'm sitting this one out, thanks.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Cities in Motion 2 looks good!
I like that it has a good road system and I hope it get's some like the NAM mod for Simcity 4
EA's problem is that their chief competitor is themselves. What can a new SimCity offer that wasn't available to me, either out of the box or through mods, in SimCity 4? Microsoft has this problem with new versions of Office.
EA used always on DRM to give themselves the ability to shut down their main competition when the next SimCity is released and also to have some new, shiny feature (Regions) to justify why you should upgrade.
Locking out pirates is just a bonus.
I don't buy games that have these kind of requirements.
Two reasons.
The first one, technical. Most of my gaming is done during my off-shift hours at work, which is at a remote location. I cannot have an always-on connection. When I am home from work, I have no time for games.
The second, matter of principle. Not putting up with this kind of crap.
But i havent even thought twice about buying simcity 5. Screw you & your DRM too EA... & that goes for you too Valve, blizzard, rockstar, and Ubisoft.
Four years ago I got a copy of the original Bioshock for my PC. I had just moved into a new place and didn't have internet yet, so I decided to install this single-player game for entertainment until I had connectivity. Lo and behold I couldn't install the game, as it required a phone-home. I haven't purchased a computer game since. I've discovered hobby board gaming, which works great in the absence of power and internet connections. The new way of doing things in the world of video games can go eat it's own asshole.
Parts of the game engine is on the server. Without the server part nothing would work. That is until someone writes a server emulator.
High highs and low lows. My all time favorite FPS game BF2142 started out so buggy you could only play 1-2 rounds before a crash, then EA abandoned support for it, then rubbed it in releases new maps a year or two after game was all but defunct. They turned BF3 into CoD with vehicles, and now I'm expected to leave their damned server running on my machine 24-7 just to play (yeah you CAN turn it off by see how long you can keep that routine up).
They're capable of creating great content, but they act like they don't give a shit after they've got your $50. I don't even play BF3 any more the cheating is so flagrant and I'm tired of the waiting for the anti-hack patch to come out (probably conveniently around the time they release a new expansion set from what I've seen).
That's the problem with bean-counter driven development. You might milk your customers in the short run, but you lose them in the long run.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
If you want an example... Diablo 3 is exactly the same way. There has yet to be a working emulator that has working quests and mobs for Diablo 3 released to the public.
There are a couple private servers out there but... if you'd still need an internet connection to connect to the private server then you might as well play on the official blizzard server.
No, because the game engine is split between EA's servers and the local client.
Unless they also pirate EA's server-side simulation code and run their own servers, they aren't going to be playing offline.
Sim City Classic (Micropolis) works fine on my Linux system and Sim City 2000 works on my XP system.
Have they really added any got to have features to their many updates of the game, or are they just trying to capitalize on a well-known title to rake in more cash?
EA embraced Agile Development a while back. Coincidence? Look at all these big companies that have gotten suckered into drinking the Agile koolaid. Bugs, bugs, and more bugs. Angry customers galore. Negative reviews. Nobody wants to look deeper within organizations to find out what's going on. Some of you may want to blame management. Well, management embraced Agile. Maybe it's time we took a critical eye towards Agile.
All the same, it's getting so out of hand that instead of just boycotting games that have horrible DRM, I'm thinking of actually buying games that don't. Even if I don't really want to play them. Vote with my wallet and all that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"What really annoys me is the absolute limit of what I can do to these bastards is not give them money."
Son, this is the United States. Sue the fuck out of them like I did.
I won pretty easily, go find yourself a competent lawyer.
Docket link or it didn't happen.
Diablo 3 seems to do rather well.
I don't get why you're all upset. Heck, I'm the person who cracked most of the SimCity codes (double hex encoding) back in the day, and contributed all the original design ideas for wind, hydro, ferries, and various other things that popped up later in the game.
They told you, EA did, that they were going to included microtransactions in all their game platforms.
They are doing what they said.
The only good thing is they haven't done it to Sims3. There you can save locally, and upload if you want, but the customer base for that game is perfectly willing to buy "golden" items or things that use SimCash to buy on the Exchange.
It's because SimCity players aren't used to "buying" fancy toys for their cities that you're upset. If I was EA, I would have made certain building types purchaseable for SimCash, and let you buy "monster scenarios", kind of how Sims3 they have you buy "towns" which include extra content like hot air balloons and clothing patterns and kid toys.
Look, do you want to pay $100 a game? Or would you rather pay half that and then pay $10 or $20 extra for "premium" content?
This is why when I ran games, I gave away the game rules and charged for the service of processing them (also shows up in a different area of tax returns, for accounting purposes). Game cost the same in the end.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
More cash for other games!
There may be other stated ancillary reasons: social gaming, cloud enabled, anti cheating, but the main advantage always online has is Digital Restriction Management. The big dev houses and publishers are all over this. Given the current state of gaming, there isn't anything we (the collective we) can do about it. The EA's of the world have all of us by the short hairs and they know it. There is no viable market reason they will change anytime in the future.
Reason? There are way too many gamers that will still buy the product. These gamers range from too young to care to gamers who buy the game while grumbling about always on restriction and gamers for everything inbetween. The only way to change this developing trend, is to hit them where it hurts. Don't buy their game at all. You could take the time to write them a dead letter about why you refuse to buy their product, but they will relegate those letters to the looney trash bin.
So enjoy the always on DRM. Maybe technology will catch up and nearly everybody will have gaming friendly Internet connections in the future. This is unlikely in the next couple decades. So there may be a chance where the new generation of gamers will discover why DRM is a bad thing for single player games. Thus adding to the percentage of those that refuse to buy the game. But even then, a new set of gamers that are completely unconcerned will come into the market. It's a losing battle.
I wish the prospects were better, but with the instant gratification gamers types are in general - the Publishers will keep a firm grip on the bit and we'll go where they tell us. And we'll like it dammit!
Didn't like SC3K? It's my favorite one.
I really liked the old Sim City games and would really like to try this one but I won't.
re: Is Linux support a possibility?
"Yes it is, we originally wanted to list it as a launch platform, but we decided to wait to add it to make sure that we would really be able to support it at the same time as the other platforms, due to time constraints. We didnt want to promise it, and then not deliver. Us linux users get enough of that as it is. If it is not available on linux on release day, it will be very shortly after."
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
There is not enough data being exchanged to be more than just a savegame , and barely anything else. If you look up you see , what, 50 Megabyte download per hour ? And that count what the other guys in your region is doing. Far more likely there is no server calculation beyond sharing the department / checking whose sims are going to where when they go from city to city , and that's it, and that is certainly something which could easily be calculated locally, if it was a single player with all your region/city saved locally on your PC. It isn't as if you can work on more than a city at a time anyway, only the current city "changes" , the other city in offline mode do not change, the system just calculate what you get from them per hours and locallly simulate it to you.
Basically the multiplayer aspect are asynchroneous, and you get more problem from them than advantage and have to break your own gameplay down, than you are really "enhanced" or helped. Heck some review (was it ars technica) mentionned how he was royally fucked because his enighbor city changed/razed/or did somethign different, and all his worker lost job or something and his finance tanked so much the city was compeltely unusable.
Is EA going to sell us things like Big Ben, Eiffel Tower and The Empire State Building when "SimCity" can't simulate a city the size of London, Paris, or New York? I don't know if "SimCity" can even do 20 square blocks which isn't even a quarter of Manhattan.
Holy shit. I bet EA nailed plywood over their windows and staked a lookout on their roof after seeing this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9VClRhU404
I've been looking forward to SC5's release for a while, but now I can't buy it. It's marks the end of one of my favorite game series of all time.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Makes you long for the days when the biggest uproar was about a one-time online activation...
+1 Disagree
I have been so looking forward to this game for so long. After Societies or whatever it was called sucked so bad this game looked like it was going back to the roots of being a stupidly detailed city building game. It was actually going to be the first PC game I've paid for in a few years, and now I am left disappointed :(
You ruined my day Slashdot, shame on you for making me an informed consumer. Jerks.
How about Assassins Creed? That had a similar requirement. It was all in the name of DRM, yet it took less than a week for someone to create a program that imitated the server. Yes that's right to play the cracked game there was a line change in the hosts file to redirect the request to the local machine and you simply ran the server software on the computer. The game was none the wiser.
Piracy happened. Legitimate users got screwed.
There is nothing sweet about cities in motion
It was pretty
that was it
the traffic patterns were shit
the people you moved had no impact on the game, the development was completely pre-planned, the game didn't respond to a thing you did, and there were so many bugs that traffic became a nightmare, cars would always stop on crosswalks preventing people from crossing the road, trucks couldn't turn left because they could never get enough time to do it, boats would stop for oncoming boats when they had enough time to go to the other side and come back twice, trams had weird collision physics so that when they were pulled into a station, well back from the road (going in the direction away from the road) somehow they had an invisible caboose that would block traffic for awhile. Every map was the same, start plopping subways and watch the money roll in.
Cities in motion failed in just about every department but the graphics
Creating a simple DRM system that ensures that 95% will buy the game and will not be impeding is fine.
I don't think so.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Yes, blame the pirates. The people who actually implemented the DRM had nothing to do with it! It's true! Really!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
*This post is deliberately meant to be stupid and lulzy.
You succeeded and failed, respectively.
Sure their basing it on an online server sucks, but SimCity 5 was great, hands down. They're still having difficulties with server connection and stuff. But when it all works (like it did last night), the game can keep you entertained for hours.
The game itself was good. It's really just a simplified version of the previous SimCities. (And, in the company's defense, I never had trouble with playing SimCity 4 either.)
I call BS. This has nothing to do with piracy, except as an excuse.
Game companies can't admit that piracy increases sales because it's the perfect scapegoat for additional profits (artificial expiration date, micro sales, targeted advertising, no secondhand market etc).
Look, if 3 people pirate a game (and it's a good game) they will recommend it to their peers, say 5 people each = 15 people. Of those 15, some will buy the game, talk to more peers etc. Eminem is rich because MP3 existed, not because of his talents alone.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
The always on connection is nothing more than DRM in disguise.
While part of the truth, that's not the whole truth. See other posters for other reasons for the always on nonsense.
If the pirates hadn't been so keen to rip every game they could get their grubby little hands on this sort of nonsense probably wouldn't have happened.
Completely wrong. Utterly.
The pirates couldn't care less about the DRM / online requirement, since they don't have that in their version(s). It's long gone. Not an issue. Not there. Does. Not. Exist. The pirates have no online requirement or any other DRM crap in their versions.
As always, the only one being hurt by shenanigans like this is the legitimate customer. It's extremely bad business, in the long run.
Yes I know, the truth hurts.
It does indeed, but the actual truth isn't the one you thought it was.
I hope you have learned something today.
The reason it's tied to online servers is to control software piracy in order to maximize profit. This is why virtually all their new games have no offline mode.
but no way am i going to spend my money on a product that i can only use when the internet is on so if i have internet problems or my internet goes down i might as well forget passing my time on simcity .no think i will wait till the game gets cracked which it will do just a matter of time . i will buy the game but i will use a crack to play offline i pay for something its mine not yours E.A or anyone else's .would you buy a car and then have to wait till somebody else decides you can use it no . that's not how it works guys you buy something its yours no matter what the fine print says it belongs to the person that purchased it . so what disappointment was looking forward to buying this game for ages . glad i didn't though after all the server trouble i would be taking my copy back and throwing it at the person who sold it me .
I keep reading this anti-EA posts, and wonder why poeple don't get more involved. Take these educational games open source for an instance: what keeps you from writing your own simcity clone, or joining existing projects like lincity or opencity. Simcity 4 already showed the uge modding potential of simulation games, so let's move on, and code a complete game whose ultimate purpose is NOT turning you into a corporate slave.
Since the average player spends hours on simulation games, why not invest a small part of it into coding ? Since most of the work behing games is not actually C++, but more careful planing, team work and a lot of artworkt, there is definitely a place for everyone...
You can download Simcity 5 here: http://tipstrue.com/simcity-5-download-pc/
This is full version of game.
Get ready folks....
This is a sign of things to come.
Every 24 hours,up to 200 species of plant,animals become extinct.[According to the UN]
And you guys show your displeasure about a FUCKING GAME?
I love Sim City...I love Gaming[lot's of games that EA make]
And you Wonder[if you do at all] why the[Real] world is fucked up?
Because everyone is too busy complaining about a game they KNOW will be fixed soon...
Fuck all of you Whiney Cocksuckers.
Shame on all of you.
Like this SHIT matters,idiots.
Back on Planet Earth,real problems await us all.
And a Video game has you up in arms?
FUCK YOU.
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http://www.geek.com/articles/games/ea-wont-green-light-any-single-player-only-games-2012095/
Frank Gibeau:
"We are very proud of the way EA evolved with consumers. I have not green lit one game to be develped as a single player experience. Today, all of our games include online applications and digital services that make them live 24/7/365." Fire him, too, please.
are the reason the rest of us who do not want to run cracked stuff (both because we want to pay the creative people AND avoid the infection risks associated with crackware) end-up stuck with all the DRM garbage. Thanks a lot. You are what makes if possible for companies like EA to honestly testify under oath in court cases and in congress about software piracy as a FACT rather than as an imaginary threat.
It's called "do not buy their products"... this is the honest and principled thing to do. Nothing says you HAVE to play a computer game...and if you desperately desire to, there are plenty of other games to play, including many free games. That's how you "punish" a company for producing garbage. You double the "penalty" if you instead spend your money buying from a competitor whose products and/or business practices you prefer. Your post seems to carry a frustration that other people are rewarding EA by continuing to buy from them... that's an issue you just need to get over... to borrow (and paraphrase) line from Charlie Sheen's character in Ferris Bueller: "Why do you care about what your brother does?" There are plenty of nasty businesses on Earth with bad products and bad practices that are propped-up by dumb customers who keep buying from them... I care not. I do not work for them or buy from them and do not care about how much money they have or how nice their buildings are.
If you take the approach of pirating the stuff, then all you have really done is admit you are a dishonest thief and any further debate is ONLY about WHAT you will steal, or from WHOM you will steal.
"My experience is that people don't even want to hear about how the game companies are boning them. They complain that it impedes their enjoyment of the game"
THEY are apparently sufficiently happy with the experience they are getting in exchange for their money... that's a free market. Leave them alone unless they complain about it (in which case you can introduce them to alternatives and they will likely be more open to the options). How does it hurt YOU if the person next to you is HAPPY about being ripped-off and abused? News flash: There are people who pay others to abuse them... and they enjoy it. Get over it. Leave them alone in their happiness and worry instead about people who are actually unhappy victims.
Simcity crack without origin : http://filespeedy.net/download/25024/YTFhN
I found some crack. It seems legit. It's probably SKiDROW's official website.
You can download it from: Simcity 2013 crack