Slashdot Mirror
In Wake of Poor Reviews, Amazon Yanks SimCity Download
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Geek.com: "In what must be a big blow for EA and Maxis, Amazon has stopped selling download copies of the just released SimCity. The game has at time of writing received 833 reviews on Amazon, and has an average rating of just one star. That's because 740 of those are one star reviews. Only 20 people gave it 5 stars. There's few better ways to gauge how a game has been received, and this is pretty damning as to how EA has handled the launch."
Not sure if this is good for the PC games industry, or bad. It's good, because games with bad DRM shouldn't succeed. It's bad because I like PC games, and want the industry to focus on PC games again.
Any other big releases with always on drm that actually are playable in the first few weeks that you can remember?... I can't remember any such titles recently.
I bought the sucker yesterday and it doesn't work at all. Can't get past the launcher. If only I had just downloaded the pirated version I would have a working game.
Too bad they made all the money from the idiots who pre-ordered. Never-ever-ever-ever pre-order a game, unless you don't mind getting literally nothing in return. Uninformed markets are broken markets.
I really want to buy SimCity, it looks pretty awesome, but I'm not going to allow EA to treat me like a thief and I'm certainly not going to pay them for the privilege.
Use always-on, internet-requring DRM they said. It will work fine, they said.
Sadly, EA will not admit DRM is the problem, they will just attribute it to "overwhelming demand".
Not to exempt the game from all criticism, but the one that's constantly cropping up is 'always on DRM'. Perhaps there is, I honestly don't know, but if so it's only part of the story.
The game is partly calculated server-side. This is why you need a constant internet connection, because some of their servers are doing the work for you. This is almost certainly also why they've collapsed in a heap.
It seems there are enough legitimate criticisms of the game without trotting out the true-but-half-the-story "always on DRM" line. I assume they'll eventually fix the servers and I need to wait for the Mac version anyway, but I'm still concerned - much more worried by fundamentals such as the overall city size for instance.
Cheers,
Ian
Since it's not in the summary, here's a (referral-free!) link to the download, where you can read the reviews.
Joy! Beautiful spark of the gods!
Alegedly it's not "just" DRM. EA has stated that their servers are handling some portion of the gameplay itself.
Anyway, it sucks that this game probably won't be playable after the servers inevitably go offline in a few years. Guess there's no room for nostalgia in the world of cloud computing.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I think another lesson shows here: even when 740 out of 833 people give something a one star review, 20 people will still give it 5 stars.
The game has at time of writing received 833 reviews on Amazon, and has an average rating of just one star. That's because 740 of those are one star reviews. Only 20 people gave it 5 stars. There's few better ways to gauge how a game has been received...
A star rating on Amazon is one of the best ways to gauge a game's reception? On the contrary, I'd say the fact that 20 people rated a game that lacks basic functionality as worthy of five stars is an indication that the star system is ineffective and fails to tell you much of anything. Were those 20 people rating the graphics of the splash screen? We're they rating what they imagined the game would be like once they could save? Were they purists who believe saves are a form of cheating, and they welcome this new, more-realistic gameplay?
Actual discussion of what is good and bad is and always will be the best way to gauge a product's reception.
Alegedly it's not "just" DRM. EA has stated that their servers are handling some portion of the gameplay itself.
They are. It's actually pretty damn good, when it's working. It's funny, because I didn't even know people were having problems until the /. article yesterday. I was too busy enjoying the game to see what other people thought about it.
EA is certainly not the first to have the problem of release-day loads, but game companies need to stop expecting to ride out the release boom and actually implement a solution that works. I don't expect them to spend huge amounts of money on extra server capacity just for release day, but there are other potential solutions. For example - stagger release dates by geography, random chance, or some other method.
Another failure, i wonder when they'll learn. Sad part is Maxis is the one that's gonna end up getting hurt. City size is a joke (see SimTown). Can't actually save (thats half the fun!). No map editor (really!?). Dumbed down mechanics. Oh, and the kicker, ALWAYS ON DRM bahaha. No thanks. Did you see Amazon yanked it because it received so many bad reviews?
Wasn't there a similar backlash over Spore, another EA title?
What I want to know is why people still give money to EA when they pull these sorts of shenanigans.
I call BS on that one. The servers may be handling the inter-city calculations but that's it. There's just no way that these mini-cities have so many calculations that a decent desktop stumbles with them.
The servers are handling a part of the game which is not that important. That is: The global marked placed. And while it is an interesting feature it is in no way vital to the system.
And I know this because I bought the game, and managed to play half an hour with absolut no internet connection and it worked fine. But then I wanted to change region, and I have been unable to play since. But once you get a game started you can normally play until you want to change to a new city. (Or the game crashes, or you look the wrong way).
I remember hearing that it was unstable for the first few days, but nothing past that, and NOTHING CLOSE to this much of a backlash.
Granted, I'm not into the series myself, so I'm not 100% sure on that.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
you're citing one of the biggest duds of the year as proof the system works? good luck winning people over with that argument.
i could live a little longer in this prison
Unbelievable even the front page of their website is hosed:
http://www.ea.com
redirects to http://www.ea.com/errors/error500
SimCity was going to be the first game (or toy) I bought in a long time... glad I wasn't first (or anywhere) in line...
Why not just delay a bit more and get it working properly?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The servers are too crowded. /Fry
Seriously, EA's problem here is that they made more money than they expected. This will continue until all this bad PR results in people ceasing to buy new EA releases, and recent history suggests that won't be happening in our lifetimes.
A few hiccups are normal at the start. Bunch of whiners. They can just play the single-player mode until EA sorts it all ... oh, wait.
Biggest duds of the year? For whom? Certainly not Activision.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_III#Sales
Sales
Before its release, Diablo III broke several presale records and became the most pre-ordered PC game to date on Amazon.com.[98] Activision Blizzard reported that Diablo III had broken the one-day PC sales records, accumulating over 3.5 million sales in the first 24 hours after release and over 6.3 million sales in its first week, including the 1.2 million people who obtained Diablo III through the World of Warcraft annual pass.[99] On its first day, the game amassed 4.7 million players worldwide, an estimate which includes those who obtained the game via the World of Warcraft annual pass.[99] In its second quarterly report, Diablo III was reported to have pushed Activision Blizzard's expectations. As of July 2012, more than 10 million people have played the game.[100] Diablo III remains the fastest selling PC game to date, and also one of the best-selling PC video games. As of the end of 2012, it had sold more than 12 million copies.[5]
Certainly not from critics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_III#Critical_reception
So unsuccessful that it was the 3rd best selling PC game of all time....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_games
I check the site it was up to 940 negative review, now down to 800 and something.
The only alarm bells that will be ringing over at EA is that Amazon is full of libelous astro-turfers from "the competition" and internet trolls who are jelly of EA's success. The "poor sales" will be seen as a sign that their new-angled DRM is working since most people are Pirates and can't handle their masterful security scheme.
It isn't poor sales that is closing it down... It is high returns and chargebacks.
People are going first to their retailer (Amazon) for a refund, then the factory (EA) then their banks (Amex,Visa,MasterCard) ... If they follow that, at one of the three steps they will get a refund. And the people to fit the bill at the end of the day will be EA (and I don't know if you have ever seen amazon chargeback fees...).
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
What is the reason for running aspects of effectively single player game play on a server?
Yep DRM.
It's also apparently not working. Over on the Answers HQ forum, there are more than a few people complaining about corrupt cities that can either be abandoned or rolled back, usually resulting in huge population and money loss. I can only imagine what kind of chaos this causes with the influence that cities are supposed to have over each other. I wasn't able to even get into the game in the 2 days since it launched so I requested, and received, a refund from Amazon. Last EA game I ever buy.
They are hilarious. One person wrote about how the game had given him back his (real) life during the time it spend trying to connect to the server.
Maybe we aren't giving EA enough credit. Maybe they discovered the best DRM was to make a total crap game that no one would even attempt pirate.
We can't, though. You're anonymous.
/* No Comment */
It didn't sell to me either. I did, however, buy a 4-pack of its primary competitor, Torchlight 2 for $60 (the cost of 1 copy of D3) so that I could play with 3 of my friends. Torchlight 2, incidentally, was developed by the same team that developed Diablo 1 and 2. Funny how things work like that sometimes.
and it had more issues than this one. it's only been two / three days people since launch. Maxis didnt do a huge Beta test for fear of the code being taken for off line mode (like with Diablo 3, i play it off line and i am sure Blizzard isnt too happy about it) .
So this is EA's development strategy for maximizing profits.
1. take the estimated development time from the developers and cut it by at least 20%, preferably 50% to ensure only coding and not testing is done.
2. save a million dollars on testing time costs and the expense drop from overall development timeline shrinking
3. lose 10 million dollars in sales by releasing a game that doesn't work on day 1, ruining your game's reputation forever.
4. Start making the next version but even cheaper and even less development budget because of what a disaster the previous version was
5. repeat steps 2-5
Alegedly it's not "just" DRM. EA has stated that their servers are handling some portion of the gameplay itself.
I call BS on that one. The servers may be handling the inter-city calculations but that's it. There's just no way that these mini-cities have so many calculations that a decent desktop stumbles with them.
Actually, it'd probably run a *lot* better if it was running entirely on the local machine. But that's not the point.
As was mentioned several times in yesterday's story, the setup itself was almost certainly designed this way as a form of DRM. It makes perfect sense- if enough critical parts of the game code run on the servers (and the end-user doesn't have direct access to the code), they can restrict access to paying customers only.
Sure, people can still pirate the "game" (or rather, the game client), but without access to the servers, it's pretty worthless in itself. You'd need to replicate the server functionality too- but EA obviously aren't going to let you have the code needed to run them! Sure, you could rewrite it, or hack the game to be entirely client-based, but if enough of the game is server-based, you'd have to rewrite a significant portion of the entire game from scratch.
Expect to see a lot more software (games *and* applications) use this model in future. I predicted it a few years ago- as a lot of people probably did, since it was a pretty logical step.
Of course, if a publisher is going to run things this way, they have to make sure that the servers run smoothly and are able to handle the load. Oops...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
EA ruins game. Amazon saves day.
The BETA was a trun off for be and it had this wait to logon BS.
I want to buy Cities in Motion 2
Seriously - they're like the Mountain Three Wolf Moon Short Sleeve Tee
Here are some choice examples of 5-star reviews:
"Got me off my video game addiction!"
"Like Russian Roulette, slot machines and slicing your wrists all in one!"
"Great Loading and Queue screen simulator!"
Disclaimer; actually, it seems that EA may have been lying about the importance of the servers ain running Sim City. However, the principle stands (unfortunately); it should be possible to design software such that the client did the hard work, whereas the servers ran less intensive *but entirely critical and hard to replicate* code.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Is the always on DRM. I have long loved the Sim City games and this one looks phenomenally amazing. If it weren't for that crazy bad DRM, I would have bought it. I hope EA and Maxis get the message that DRM only hurts the paying customers, doesn't stop piracy, and in the end, hurts their bottom line.
Given what peanuts it costs to rent some EC2 instances or something, I do expect anybody who wants to require a bunch of fancy server hooks to get it right. If they can't do that, perhaps they should back off and take on a challenge more in line with their abilities.
Yeah, and out of everyone I know who played the game (dozens, including me) there are maybe 1 or 2 that continue to play the game (I don't, though I'll pop in from time to time to see if anything has changed). The initial success was great and it sold like hotcakes. The continued success? Not so great because the game is so damn boring. I don't believe I'll be playing D3 in a decade from its release, like I was with D2- partly because the game sucks and mostly because I doubt Blizzard will keep its servers going that long.
EA ruins game. Amazon saves day.
I did this. Amazon was great. Return/refund is the only way EA will ever take a hint.
I suggest:
1. If you bought from Amazon return it. Amazon made it painless for full refund of my opened game.
2. If bought from Orgin ask for refund. EA says in press release you can do this. Though I hear problems from customer service
3. If you cannot get refund from Orgin/EA call credit card company and have them stop payment for defective product.
Maybe EA will fix if this hurts their bottom line?
If problems get fixed in a month or so you can always buy the game again. Otherwise not worth my time now to play with so many problems
I preordered a physical copy several weeks ago. I was never able to play the beta, because Amazon delayed my access code until it had ended. I have still not played the game, despite owning a physical copy. Tuesday, the game spent two hours completely downloading itself all over again, despite the physical copy. I was unable to join any servers in the US. It them refused to create a city once I was able to join a server in Europe. I gave up. Tried again Wednesday, still could not creat a city. Today, all servers were busy. Eventually got through, but was only allowed to play the tutorial, and about two minutes in the servers dropped out. Then back to unable to create city. Frankly, I knew this was coming. I hate EA for what they've gradually done to Maxis since the acquisition. I knew always-on DRM and shunting the region math onto the cloud was going to mean connection issues. What I didn't fully know is that my saves are on the server, and I cannot even create a game if the server is down. I love SimCity...I can remember many hours spend with SimCity (the original), SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000, and SimCity 4...and this looks like a welcome update. Shame I cannot play it.
What's needed is a true sucessor to SC4 Rush hour with NAM+Real Highways. But less kludgy and with a bit more freedom in how tiles are handled. (So you can do things like diagonal streets and services without those stupid problems relating to which directions buildings are facing.) Also better handling of modern processors and graphics, since the mechanics of that old game weren't all that terrible - just the way it does some things relating to hardware. Not saying an exact copy, but it should be damn close. Key points being challenging in gameplay, running smoothly, and looking good.
Hopefully the former SC fanbase will settle on one of those open source city games which are in early development, such that we'll have a project that's actually going somewhere in terms of playability and we wont have to put up with bullshit from game publishing companies and their ill considered DRM shennanigans.
http://www.gamechup.com/ea-refuses-to-refund-user-for-simcity-threatens-account-ban/ Very interesting chat-log... customer purchases the game which doesn't work, EA puts out a press release telling them that they will issue refunds, customer service associate tells customer to pound salt! Like he said... I hope this goes viral!
Diablo 3 was "unsuccessful" because people "only" played it for 60+ hrs before getting bored/disinterested/frustrated, instead of the 1,000,000 hrs they thought they'd get out of it after playing Diablo 2.
And those same people could log back in right now, patch to 1.07, and end up with an experience that was a lot closer to the D2:LoD clone they were hoping for.
Well, those of you who didn't get your account hacked and essentially had Blizzard be no help. After a few days of email and tech support, I just gave up and haven't (can't) go back. I prefer Torchlight II, anyway.
They did stagger this release by geography. Europe is just launching now.
The solution is to not make the game totally reliant on a server infrastructure for no reason. Add an "offline mode" button and the problem goes away.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Blizzard doesn't care what you do after the purchase, or whether you keep playing. They already have your money. If anything, many people stopping playing after first few days is better for them - less server load.
Yes, Diablo 3 was a roaring success - it made Blizard loads of money. I'd hazard a guess that this is big part of why EA dared to come up with similar scheme.
You probably do not remember all the outcry when people could not play their (single-player) game for days before servers were overloaded. In some country they even sued Blizzard that they purposefully deployed insufficient server capacity, or something like that. I wouldn't call that "pretty well".
Amazon reviews are the YouTube comments of product reviews. That is to say, virtually universally useless. That said, SimCity sucks.
Life needs more saving throws.
I'm sorry but this really surprises me. Anyone ever hear of Lasership?
Look here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/forum/cd/discussion.html?cdForum=Fx20DX5GEB7TUX8&cdThread=TxM0IX0I78173Y
Or here: http://www.amazon.com/forum/amazon%20carrier%20feedback/ref=cm_cd_pg_pg1?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2KOZSYK6OUZ6Y&cdPage=1&cdThread=Tx27GEWWFTOKU9T
It is absolutely unbelievable. I found those forums because I was deeply disturbed that this "Lasership" was used to deliver my media player which was delivered to the wrong address and then opened by "someone" and then delivered to me. I found rather quickly that I am not alone and that Amazon has a practice of simply replacing whatever was lost or stolen by Lasership out of their own pockets.
I don't buy from Amazon any longer and I won't until I find out that Lasership is either out of business or no longer shipping for Amazon. That Amazon hosts the forums which have nothing good to say about Lasership and continues throwing money their way amazes me. And now to find out that they actually read these forums and in some cases RESPOND leaves me puzzled as to why they do nothing about Lasership.
It's probably just SC's equivalent of matchmaking and DRM. If some minor calculations were being done server side, they could probably be done on any client machine and the lack of any subscription cost with the game means they certainly didn't invest much more in server hardware than they needed to prop up their DRM scheme. In any case it was shown that no more than 40 MB were downloaded from the servers for every hour of play and unless there's some serious number crunching to produce that data that any moderately powerful dual core processor can't handle, that functionality could have been emulated for an offline mode especially if it is all based around your interactions with other players.
There is no memory shortage. yes I have heard of XFCE. Go away.
Are you talking to people who aren't human? Because if you are, that's fine. But if you're talking to humans, then you certainly don't understand them. Among the things that distinguish humans above other animals is that we have a NEED to share. Not just a sense of generosity, but a need... an instinctive need. Countless studies have demonstrated this. That some people can be utterly selfish doesn't change the fact and we have a name for those outliers anyway -- sociopaths.
Sharing is a human thing. That some would insist that they need to change human nature, part of what makes us great and successful as a species, so they can make even more money speaks volumes about what and who they are.
I buy things to show my appreciation and for no other reason. If someone wants to share, I say good. I like to share too. I contribute to charity. I do good deeds. And making someone's life a little better does not and will not make me a criminal. It takes a selfish, greedy sociopath to want other people to suffer or do without so that they can enrich themselves at the expense of others.
And that's all I've got to say about that.
I think this is a first, and the whole industry is going to learn from it.
I think there needs to be some clarification as to the nature of why the game thinks it needs to be always online. Some people have suggested that ALL the computing and simulation logic happens on EA servers, but this isn't true.
It has been shown that if you lose a net connection/connection to the server, the game will continue to run offline for about 20 minutes. During this time, YOUR city will continue to simulate properly. However, neighboring cities being developed by other people will freeze in time and be held in this state until such time that your connection is reestablished (if it doesn't before the timeout, the game session ends). Once it reconnects, the state of your neighbors is synced with your city and hence any changes to your neighbors' cities during the time you were offline will immediately be represented.
If you connection drops, your city lives in isolation. Once it reconnects, it returns to the world and is affected by the effects of your neighbors. If you happen to be developing a city next to a tard who is polluting like crazy, your city will suffer the effects. That's the whole purpose of the always-online feature - to provide this MMO-style relationship between players. BUT, given the game runs fine with your city if the connection drops, this is bullshit because it means it should be trivial to enable the player to just play on their own.
The simulation logic is there, available on the installed game. EA just doesn't feel it's worth having an offline mode despite it basically being readily set up for it - it thinks being interconnected with other players who might be dicks and ruin your city is much more important.
Raenex is a dickhead
While it's probably a lot of work people have made 3rd party servers for WoW.
How much of WoW beyond simple integration of players runs on the server? Actually, I guess it must be a reasonable amount, otherwise it would be far too easy to cheat by hacking client-based logic.
Which raises the question; is WoW running on a third-party server still- essentially- WoW? That is, if the underlying logic isn't there, or is significantly different, is it "authentically" the same game, or something only superficially similar, a different game in WoW's clothes?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
This absolutely not true. Of course Blizzard cares about whether people are going to keep playing or not. It is a brand. It is IP with value. They do not want it watered down. Future sales matter, people's passion about it fuels the RMA, people buying collectors editions of future Blizzard games because of access to D3, posters, merch, a steady stream of small sales (like D2 got). On top of those concerns, top talent wants to go to places where they make great games. There are real people in these places.
Z
Amazon reviews of games are completely useless. Almost all reviews for popular games are from people who never played the game and are instead riding the hate circlejerk. I bet if you looked at the reviews for SimCity, less than 5% of them would be verified Amazon purchases.
For what it's worth, I got about 80 hours of entertainment out of diablo 3. That's about 75c per hour in Australian prices.
Entertainment doesn't come a lot cheaper than that. Was it as good as D2 was back in the day? No. But it stands up as a decent game in its own right - the only people bitching like crazy about it are those who haven't even bought or played it.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The global marked placed
You know how I know you posted from a mobile device?
Well it's been about 15+ years of EA releasing garbage so far and they haven't died yet.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Easy, he's talking out of his ass!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
What was going to be Generals 2 anyway, has been cancelled and re-made into an 'online Command and Conquer experience' 'set in the Generals universe' or some such nonsense. I hope it fails, and hard, I was actually quite looking forward to Generals 2, not some always online crap
Yeesh.. at least there's some good reviews out there.. for instance this one.
http://www.jonathancresswell.co.uk/2013/03/review-simcity/
"It's bad because I like PC games, and want the industry to focus on PC games again."
I call Troll. This is all bad and everyone knows it. There is no 'PC gaming industry'...the Personal Computer (PC) is a type of platform for consumer games.
The problem is the notion of requiring an internet connection to use. The problem is FEE PER USE.
DRM is bad for *any* industry in its current usage. Sure there is no law against properly implementing DRM in the right situation so not to harm your users, but that virtually never happens. Once DRM creeps into a type of media it is historically resulted in anti-user DRM implementations.
Lamenting something like 'PC games' is the exact wrong thing to notice. Lament FEE PER USE as industry standard across all gaming platforms.
Thank you Dave Raggett
I expect them to have working servers and the right number of them available on game day and the reason is Amazon. What EA should have done is put a few copies of their server software on Amazon's Cloud servers (EC3 or whatever it's called), tested them and threw them into the loadbalancer's server list with a low priority. When they got whacked they could have just increased their capacity with more Amazon until the storm is over. That's why this we're-ordering-more-servers bullshit is bullshit. They should have had excess capacity from the cloud for launch day and ordered servers as needed after the initial wave to save money. This should be true for everyone at this point, given the low cost of a nearly unused instance.
otherwise it would be far too easy to cheat by hacking client-based logic.
it is quite easy to cheat. what's hard is getting away with it. they have sophisticated detection mechanisms along with an army of real people that monitor the online world for strange happenings.
The latency and bandwidth needed to send calculations back and forth to the server would be a huge waste and probably make it run slower than just 100% local calculations. The only real way to do server side calculations is to offload 100% (or near to it) to the server and then send what's needed to the client for the display and receive input from the client.
I planned to buy this game this Friday, after having read enough reviews I will download an actual working copy of the game rather than pay for a broken one. As far as I know simcity has been very popular with the geek crowd, and by accounts of the few people that have been able to play it it can be a really fun game, so I suspect I am not alone. DRM is actively encouraging piracy. Awesome.
As a sucker who bought this game, let me share my two days experience with it.
Half the time the game won't even launch - It briefly flashes "Servers not available" then the text changes to "checking for update" with a progress bar 100% full. If you just let it sit there, nothing happens. Ever. What you need to do is alt-F4, and then try again until the server is back up. Once the server is up, you get to launch the game.
There are only two servers per most regions, and only one for Oceania. I signed up for West Coast, US #2, correctly guessing it would be available more often than US #1. By day 2, West Coast #2 was stuck on "Busy" so I switched to Oceanea
EA has been promoting the fact that the servers aren't region locked, but it seems like a stupid move given the game releases in those regions today and tomorrow, but they're already full with overflow players from north america....
I did not play Sim City as a child and so don't have any sentimental attachment to it - I enjoy the game but find the multiplayer experiance oddly silent. I was expecting voice chat, as is normal in multiplayer-emphasized games but rarely have I gotten so much as a chat response. Because literally every game is hosted online (single player regions are just locked games), EA had to use asynchronous communications - Functionally when you send a written chat, it has to be delivered to the other regional players in a periodic region update so chat messages can sometimes lag 2 or 3 minutes before showing up.
Now granted, I didn't go into this with a full origin friends list so it's been all pubbies, but in 7 games with 20+ players I've gotten one response to a basic greeting, that's a terrible ratio and I'm pretty charming.
The real kick to the shins is that most of the time the game just doesn't work. I've got a DVD in my drive that says Sim-CIty on it, and I just want to get back to Myrtle City - my highly successful singleplayer region on the Oceania server and continue work on New Wageslavedom, the adjacent settlement I'm also mayor of.
Unfortunately the Oceania server has just filled up and after giving me the longest loading screen in the world, literally 10 minutes, it says my city isn't available right now.
Don't buy this game
Simcity 4 + NAM good but the older game engine limits it and there are bugs that you will need the source code to fix.
Simutrans and OpenTTD good on rail. roads are OK (not on the city level and need to work the freight part) also missing what
Cities in Motion 2 TTD + more on more of a city level. Also plans to have a good road system.
I miss Railroad Tycoon 2 and 3. Sid Meier's Railroads! was not that good.
Train Fever looks like a newer TTD / Railroad Tycoon game.
CitysXL sadly the custom roads part was cut / cutdown and zoning system by class?
Not all the reviews: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we-waited-ten-years-for-this/
Although it wasn't available earlier today, I see Amazon lists the game as "Available Now."
There's a disclaimer added:
Odd, I buy my games through steam and avoid buying EAs 'always on' DRM infested games, even when they're continuations of franchises I've previously loved - e.g. Battlefield and SimCity.
So please, tell me, how is EAs DRM helping me as a potential customer? They lose out on a sale, I lose out on a game to play, and I'm still not going to buy their buggy malicious software.
I'm not going to accuse you of being shrill, or even a shill. Just naive, deluded and wrong.
Amazon (like every retailer) does not accept returns of opened software or video games:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_15015721_RRlandingFAQ3?nodeId=15015721
I predict EA will die.
Maybe they won't, but I've quit buying from them.
It seems like they're like those cities/countries where they raise the taxes, and people leave. So to
cover expenses, they raise the taxes again (and more people leave). It's a death spiral.
For what it's worth, I got about 80 hours of entertainment out of diablo 3. That's about 75c per hour in Australian prices.
Entertainment doesn't come a lot cheaper than that.
Well, there is this thing called "sex". The kind that involves neither payment nor sheep.
And there is, of course, Diablo II. Which is still going strong.
Other successful loot games that give a lot more hours of play include Borderlands (1 and 2).
Except that your cities are all saved on the servers as well - they are not locally stored, and you can't back them up locally. They have to be saved on the server in order to run the global marketplace.
You're implying they are competent and can design an architecture that can grow and shrink transparently. For all we know their very well could be a dozen servers and no way to move player accounts and cities between them.
Without payment or sheep? What kind of entertainment is that?
Posted by fallingcow above, reposted here for exposure.
Origin's "refund" policy: "... at our discression".
Don't believe the press release; They're declining refunds. Get a CC chargeback.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Yet another instance where "Wait until a month after release before you buy" would have saved an awful lot of people an awful lot of money, and forced a game developer to start delivering something people want.
I was *REALLY* keen to buy Aliens: Colonial Marines. I literally had to stop myself keep going back to the Steam page, etc. My favourite movie ever and so ripe for a decent FPS conversion with the original sounds etc. But I held off. I knew there was trouble when there were no playable reviews appearing (which suggest they were embargoed until release date), but I also knew it was sometimes just standard practice in the industry for bigger games.
Boy, am I glad. Already discounted on Steam. Pathetic ratings on any site you happen to go on. Another blasphemy to the franchise.
Holding out hope for Age of Empires II HD on Steam (certainly should be better than any other AoE title since the first time round), but I've learned over many years not to trust anything before a month after release.
Seems the last 12-24 months has been a really bad time for retro-remakes / sequels. Syndicate. Diablo III. Carrier Command. XCOM. Aliens. Sim City. Seems like someone is out to destroy every good video game memory from my childhood.
The global marked placed
You know how I know you posted from a mobile device?
That's just a pour excuse like when people mix up "their" and "there" and "they're" and blame it on the spell-checker. Miner typos on an informal internet forum are not a problem (except for us pedantic Spelling/Grammar Nazis) but it is a dangerous president for real work just to say "it's not my fault, the predictive text feature on my phone is doing it".
You are responsible for what you post. You knead to cheque what you right.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
do I understand correctly that PeerBlock may be the PC equivalent to macOS' Little Snitch, i. e. something that filters any request out and allows rules on them, per app and per address?
(and, is there something equivalent on Linux? Last time I asked that there I was shockingly told this was unnecessary...)
Herve S.
I don't know about "simulating properly" when you lose connection to the server. Plenty of people have noticed traffic acting wonky, every single bus lining up to pick up a single passenger, every fire truck going to a single fire when there're other fires in the city, etc. These problems didn't exist during beta.
It's very probable that when the game loses internet connection or when the server is overloaded, the game simply fall back on a "dumb" AI. While this might work for the few minutes the connection is down, in the long term your city will suffer from so much traffic problems it just dies.
No, this is just stupidly designed model to combat piracy.
Football Manager 2013 and Shogun 2: The Fall of the Samurai both sold on steam and easily played in offline have not been cracked yet.
I bet paying them for the DRM code would cost much much less then maintaining all the server while not pissing off your customers. Sure it might get cracked one day, but all you have to do is to change a couple of DRM code and add a small free DLC to keep paying customer buying your game.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
...all the way to the bank. Even though now it has over 1100 reviews and a one star rating, it's available for sale and it's #1 BESTSELLER!!!
The thing is, sometimes, consumers are idiots. They jump on a $60 game even if it has a 1 star review, they go to concerts where Justin shows up 5 hours late and they buy tablets for 2x the price with lower specs.
Is there any other good games of similar nature?
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
For a start, ok, let's look at the server load issues. Other games had server load issues too. E.g., WoW at launch, EA's own TOR, etc. They just had a login queue, but the servers continued working, and whoever got a connection, actually kept having it.
In SimCity's case they supposedly had a "login queue"... except it wasn't actually a queue. It didn't keep an order or adjust its predictions based on how many quit in front of you. It was just an enormous time (20 minutes!) being blocked from trying again. The clue that it wasn't really a queue was that it didn't change or even start differently if you tried different servers. You always got blocked for the same time, and there is no indication that someone who wasn't blocked and tried at the right time wouldn't skip in ahead of you. So, yeah, in 20 minutes you'd just get blocked again for another 20 minutes.
Not that it mattered for most servers, because they just were down and weren't accepting connections at all. So you wouldn't even get that joke of a "queue", you'd just get a network error.
And not that it mattered if you actually managed to connect, the server would die and nix your connection before you even managed to actually claim a city, or while trying to claim a city. (I.e., get your empty map to start a city on.)
I'm sorry, making a server that can only take a finite number of connections is ok and natural. You don't have infinite memory, nor CPU power, nor bandwidth. Making a server that crashes and burns if too many people attempt to connect, though, is just bad quality.
Not that it's the only case of bad coding. The game for example seems to have serious trouble even remembering the fucking settings. E.g., I keep deactivating the option to publish my achievements, but it seems to randomly pop back on. Especially it seems that a server crash makes it forget that option, which is to say, they fail to persist it. (And on top of that, when they pester me with it at the main screen, the game can't seem to tell if it's on or off anyway.)
Really, how stupid and incompetent does one have to be to botch saving the options, e.g., as some simple key/value pairs? I'm pretty sure even complete novices would find it hard to screw that up.
And really, what did they need multiplayer for, anyway? Reading their blog makes it sound like it being multiplayer opens so many oportunities and, werily I say unto you, make it a whole new game... except it doesn't.
The game is multiplayer in the same sense as publishing your minesweeper score makes minesweeper multiplayer. I.e., I can't even imagine how much brain damage someone would need to think that.
You can't actually be in the same city with a friend or anything. At most you can have your cities in the same zone and have a look at each other's city.
Plus, the sad part is right on the main menu screen, where it pesters you with that publishing your city events. The game tells you something to the tune of "Playing is more fun with friends! We can publish your game events in the GameLog for your friends!" Not an exact quote, but close enough and the meaning is that.
I'm sorry, but that's not "playing with friends", it's just putting a frikken log on the web. It's no more "playing with friends" than keeping a list of your Minesweeper scores on a blog page is.
I can't even imagine what kind of sad moron are they aiming for as a target demographic, that actually thinks publishing a list of events from an essentially single player game, is anything like actually playing a game together with some friends. Where the heck is the "playing together" part, ffs?
Even skipping after that, who the heck even cares to read such drivel on a web page as, basically, "PigBenis City reached 50,000 people?" Seriously, if some marketroid moron from EA is reading this, trust me, even if I were your BFF, I still wouldn't give a flying fuck about mundane events from your single player video game. The only people who care about that are those who can get something out of th
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Retailers need to rebel and send back every copy of Sim City to let EA know that their shenanigans will no longer be tolerated. Gamers and by extension, the retailers selling games to gamers, need to set a precedence that they will no longer buy or sell broken games; not broken with play-ability issues, not broken with Draconian DRM schemes.
But, stupid people rush out and buy a game on day one and either ignore reviews or don't seem to believe that the widely claimed issues will happen for them. Every person complaining about Sim City and its DRM is an utter moron. Every person claiming it isn't that bad is a moron.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If you dispute any payment made on Origin, your account will be banned with no recourse.
Yes, they're brilliant like that.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
It's not even just the personal attacks. It was also a combination of both annoying and amusing to see the fanboys come up with stuff like:
- Well, they said it would be online and have DRM, whoever is complaining can only blame themselves, bla, bla, bla, I'm giving it 5 stars out of principle!
(Really? Did they also say it would be impossible to play because the servers crash all the time? And what principle would that be? Fanboy devotion?)
- I don't believe any of the 1 star reviews, such a complex game can't be judged in just a couple of hours!
(Which part of "can't even start the tutorial" is too complex to judge? Would, say, 8 hours of servers crashing and being unable to even 'claim' an empty spot to build on, reveal some subtle nuances of experiencing a server crash, or what?)
- The game is pure genius and incredibly much fun, I'm giving it only 4 stars because I can't actually start it.
(Then how the eff would you know first hand if it's fun to play or not?)
- I didn't play it myself, I bought it for my kid and he seems happy with it, so I'm giving it 5 stars.
(Way to confess in public that you're paying exactly zero attention to your kid. Plus, if you have no personal experience with it, shouldn't the kid be writing the review?)
Loosely translated from German from Amazon.de, for what it's worth.
Really, it's the... faith-based giving top ratings or objecting to vad reviews for something they didn't even play that was disheartening at times.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The server are just handling simulating communication between region and saving the city data. That could be made local, just like your average LAN FPS. There is no part of the simulation which is on the server which could not be made local.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
(Chat between a customer and EA rep, regarding SimCity issues)
Cloud gaming
Actually, Blizzard did want players to continue playing D3, because they received a cut of every real-money transaction in their marketplace. That was a secondary source of income for Blizzard.
Hopefully enough players have quit that game to send a signal that they need to design a good game first, and not spend all their time figuring out how to connect a vacuum hose to their player's wallets.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I seriously considered pre-ordering SimCity. I loved that game. I remember my first SimCity, playing on a paperwhite monitor, 286 with 1 MB ram. (yes that's right 1MB).
I am glad I didn't. Because of the always on DRM and needing EA servers for solo play. I'm glad EA is getting burned a bit by this. I doubt it will change them because they have so much success with it in other games and platforms.
I think its a sad state for PC games. However, I also don't think it's just the game manufacturers fault, although they aren't helping the cause. Good old fashion DIY PCs is a dying market. So maybe what EA has done will have no effect in slowing or stopping the erode of the PC itself.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
Blizzard doesn't care what you do after the purchase, or whether you keep playing. They already have your money.
They should, because that's going to affect how people purchase Diablo 4 (if there ever is a Diablo 4).
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
The initial D3 sales were fueld by a passion for the franchise. The game itself has likely killed much of that passion and D4 probably will not be met with the same anticipation and masses of preorders based solely on faith. While its numbers may have it classified as a "success," I'd bet it has done harm to the value of the franchise (and therefore, Blizzard's future bottom line)
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
is not to play.
That's what everyone is doing!
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
The article description makes it sound like all the one-star reviews are what prompted Amazon to remove the product. While I don't know the inner workings of Amazon, fanboys flooding products with one-star reviews is hardly anything new. Mass Effect 3 was similarly flooded with one-star reviews, because people were unhappy with the ending, even though the game itself was very fun. It's just something fanboys do, especially video game fanboys.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
"sticks and stones will not break my bones"
Um, I'm pretty sure that they will. (That's kind of the point of the nursery rhyme, after all, which you seem to have written wrong.)
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Unimportant? Not vital? Where are you supposed to get resources once those in your region have run out? Where do you sell resources that your region may not need at that time?
"Science is the power of man"
I don't know about "simulating properly" when you lose connection to the server. Plenty of people have noticed traffic acting wonky, every single bus lining up to pick up a single passenger, every fire truck going to a single fire when there're other fires in the city, etc. These problems didn't exist during beta.
It's very probable that when the game loses internet connection or when the server is overloaded, the game simply fall back on a "dumb" AI. While this might work for the few minutes the connection is down, in the long term your city will suffer from so much traffic problems it just dies.
I believe an IGN reviewer noticed these issues as well, though IIRC he was reviewing an early release of the final product. Restarting the game resolved the issue, and it's likely this is an uncaught bug. Bugs DO make it through beta testing...
That game was unplayable on numerous occasions for weeks after release.
It wasn't really a "big" release in terms of something that everyone has heard of, but Anno 2070 has some of that always-on DRM bundled in it. I pre-ordered the game (fan of the series) and both didn't have a problem with it on release day or since. That's not to say the Ubisoft client (U Play) isn't a real pain to navigate through to actually play the game, but it didn't have anything like the problems I'm seeing about SimCity. Of course, it's a comparison of several thousand people in Anno to who knows how many in SimCity, but at least I could play it from the get-go.
I remember when EA meant a fun, innovative gaming experience, and waiting with bated breath for their next release. Of course, this was the Apple II/C-64 days, but, still...
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
Why is EA desperate to require online play that will later make the game artificially obsolete? The answer is that a well-realized city simulation has to be a vastly unprofitable game for EA. I can't even calculate all of the new games I failed to buy while I was hooked on earlier versions of SimCity. I spent so many hours with that thing my per-hour price for playing SimCity has got to be almost zero. For me, SimCity has proven to be the cheapest form of commercial entertainment possible. No wonder they need to break it.
Ahh, I disagree. I find that douchebags make ad hominens and people with honor sign things to say "I said this, and I stand by it." Maybe the internets will change that permanently, but I hope not. I like the idea behind signing things. The very act of putting something that represents me specifically at the end has, many a time, made me reflect on whether I wanted to actually say what I was about to post. But, I suppose you're just trolling and of course you can't be bothered to establish a reputation so you post as an AC.
Z
Hear hear,
Actually, I've never played an MMO where all those things weren't true. And, I've never played a better MMO than WoW (while trying nearly all of them). However, I perceive the end game to be both simultaneously better and significantly worse. The smoothness of the experiences and the quality of everything has improved, but the choices behind the bosses in cataclysm felt more like a button mash then a thinking man's boss, which they pioneered quite well in BC, Sunwell particularly, and took to rather new heights in Ulduar and the last three bosses of Icecrown.
The emphasis on DPS, gear, and rotation over survival has quite saddened me. However, the gameplay, graphics, and delivery of information about the boss and his abilities has just radically improved since vanilla. I'd say sheer gameplay is just oodles better, but the boss/dungeon design is very sporadic over the years.
Z
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EA has instituted a cooling off period, by offering you a free game by March 18. The idea is that you will hang on to your purchase, and must activate it by then to get the reward, and they should have their shit together by that date.
Do not buy into that scam. You paid $60 for this mess, and you deserve better. Demand a return now. Do not activate your game. Get your money back so this fiasco hurts EA in the worst way. The game will be on sale for $15 in a few months. It is a fiasco, and that's what happens to fiascos. At that price, $60 will be more than enough to buy a functioning SimCity game, and the back catalog "freebie," and still have money left over.
Do not let them keep your $60. No way.