Hacker Skips SimCity Full-Time Network Requirement

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Hacker Skips SimCity Full-Time Network Requirement

Posted by timothy on Thursday March 14, 2013 @02:30AM from the expected-lies-and-got-some dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Geek.com: "Ever since SimCity launched, there has been a suspicion that the need for the game to always be connected to a server was mainly a form of DRM, not for social game features and multiplayer. Then a Maxis developer came forward to confirm the game doesn't actually need a server to function, suggesting the information coming out of EA wasn't the whole truth. Now EA and Maxis have some explaining to do as a modder has managed to get the game running offline indefinitely." The writer names a few small ways in which the game is actually improved by being offline, too.

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Not a huge surprise... by AdeBaumann · 2013-03-14 02:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

Not a huge surprise... Though I wonder how they're going to wriggle their way out of that one. I'm guessing they'll just try to ignore it and hope it goes away.

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1. Re:Not a huge surprise... by PhxBlue · 2013-03-14 02:50 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  It will just go away. If people were really upset by this type of thing they would have fought it long ago.
  Bullshit. Ubisoft got smacked upside the head. EA's been smacked upside the head -- HARD -- in the past with limited activations and other shenanigans. If customer outcry is loud enough, EA will take the hint this time, too.
  
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  !#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
2. Re:Not a huge surprise... by Looker_Device · 2013-03-14 03:05 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I keep hearing a lot about "consumer outcry" about EA games. And yet every time a new one comes out, those same consumers seemed to be lined up around the block to buy them.
  
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  Your political party doesn't care about your rights and only represents corporate interests.
3. Re:Not a huge surprise... by Ben4jammin · 2013-03-14 03:09 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I don't think they have any plans to wiggle out of it. This "always on" setup is by design:
  
  Frank Gibeau, the president of EA Labels... is very proud of the fact he has never green lit a single project that consisted solely of a single-player experience.
  http://www.geek.com/articles/games/ea-wont-green-light-any-single-player-only-games-2012095/
  
  So the engineers were REQUIRED to do something that made it "social" and thus needing to be always online.
4. Re:Not a huge surprise... by PhxBlue · 2013-03-14 03:19 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  And yet every time a new one comes out, those same consumers seemed to be lined up around the block to buy them.
  This launch was so bad Amazon actually stopped selling it. It was so bad that EA's offered a free game to anyone who made the regrettable choice of purchasing SimCity (though they still won't offer refunds to anyone who ordered the game through Origin). It was so bad that Polygon's reviewer downgraded their initial review from a 9.5 to a 4.
  So trust me when I say people are going to remember this the next time someone takes a traditionally offline game and tries to add an always-online requirement -- for any reason.
  
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  !#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
5. Re:Not a huge surprise... by Time_Ngler · 2013-03-14 03:32 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The reason for all that was because too many people bought it and it crashed their servers! All EA has to do is turn on the hype machine, and people will come flocking regardless of whatever happened in the past.
6. Re:Not a huge surprise... by Lithdren · 2013-03-14 03:33 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  ...Polygon's reviewer downgraded their initial review from a 9.5 to a 4.
  Wow...if that doesn't tell you something about how the game was reviewed, nothing will.
7. Re:Not a huge surprise... by Charliemopps · 2013-03-14 04:12 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Or... Reviews are bought and paid for wholesale.
8. Re:Not a huge surprise... by Lithdren · 2013-03-14 05:10 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  My point is more about how fake a review score has to be, to even do that.
  I get people are upset because the servers wont even let them play the game, and I fully support people who are angry at EA over it, no question.
  But how can you cut a games review in half, after the fact? Either they're riding the wave of hate and trying to keep it off themselves; which means you shouldn't trust their reviews because they're not being honest about what they are reviewing; or they're honestly saying the game is half as good as it was before the release; which means you shoulnd't trust their reviews because not not being honest about what they are reviewing.
  An honest review should have come out saying the game was (for example) a 7/10, because of the possible issues the always-online DRM could cause, even if its a fantastic game. Still good, but be warned, there could be issues. It just highlights how unreal they're being with game reviews. a 9.5 out of 10 means its almost perfect, which is clearly absurd on the face of it. The scores are getting paid for, either over or under the table (or both) and clearly shouldn't be trusted.
9. Re:Not a huge surprise... by amicusNYCL · 2013-03-14 05:21 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The reason for all that was because too many people bought it and it crashed their servers!
  And another way to say that would be that the reason it happened was because the game was required to connect to a server in the first place in order to play. If it didn't need to connect, then there wouldn't be overloaded servers, would there?
  
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10. Re:Not a huge surprise... by PhxBlue · 2013-03-14 05:37 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  No, seriously. Show me one time where this was the case. Show me a single road bump this sort of thing has ever caused in either Ubisoft's or EA's business plans. ... Yeah. You won't find any examples. You CAN'T find any examples. I know you can't.
  There ya go. Took me about 10 seconds on Google, by the way.
  
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  !#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
SimCity Rescued? by Frightened_Turtle · 2013-03-14 02:38 · Score: 4, Insightful

This is probably the best thing that could have happened to SimCity 5 in order to save the SimCity franchise.
It's a pity how corporate greed can ruin an otherwise excellent product. Management at EA/Maxis was obviously incredibly detached from the product. Comments such as how surprised and unprepared they were for the massive response they got to the new product speaks volumes to the fact that the people in charge had absolutely no clue about the products they make, nor what it takes to make them successful.
The good news? At least there is one team out there that gets it!

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THEY LOSE: Just don't care any more by mabhatter654 · 2013-03-14 02:41 · Score: 4, Insightful

I just don't care to spend that much effort fixing something that should have had the option out-of-the-box. EA is a big company, if they want sales, sell a finished game. Getting upset and spending my TIME trying to hack it or pirate isn't worth the $60 anymore... The have created a situation where even FREE is losing me money.
The solution is that the servers needed to JUST WORK. As a grown up, waiting twenty minutes even twice has wasted more of my money/time than the price of the game... They're jerks, fix it.
1. Re:THEY LOSE: Just don't care any more by Cid+Highwind · 2013-03-14 03:14 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  They can't build for the max usage scenario, because that's just not going to last.
  They don't need to. This is one place where "the cloud" is an improvement over physical in-house servers. Build one complete server image, then in the days after launch you can stand up as many EC2 hosts as it takes to satisfy demand, and later as numbers of simultaneous players drops you can start taking them back down.
  It's not impossible to launch without day-long server queues, EA is just either incompetent or too cheap to pay for the sort of infrastructure their always-on DRM requires.
  
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Let us ask Data by nitehawk214 · 2013-03-14 02:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

Here is what Lt. Cmdr Data thinks about this.
I was a big fan of the game since the original and thought it odd it was one of the few mega-popular EA franchises that did not get updated frequently. I was anticipating the release, but I have learned not to pre-order any video game, nor buy it until it has been out a number of months for it either to be "fixed", for customer reviews to roll in, and beta test NDA's to expire. The bigger the game company the worse the lies become.
Professional game reviewers and magazines can simply not be trusted. Shorly after release metacritic scores showed the "professional" critics giving 90's and 100's, while no customer aside from a stockholm syndrome candidate gives a good review at all. Now that it is popular to bash the title, magazines being rolling in with the poor reviews.

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