And they turned off that stuff today to try and make the servers work.
The only thing the servers are doing right now is handling authentication, save games, and doing calculation for stuff between regions. All the actual work while you're playing a city is done locally, as shown by the fact that you can lose your connection and it'll keep going just fine for a while.
At my work, the people who do support got a new management structure. Their management is big on metrics. Sadly, their metric is "how many tickets did you close."
Unsurprisingly, service levels have gone to total shit. The people who actually solve hard problems take more time than the ones who bounce tickets to other people and only handle easy ones, and thus don't look good to the morons in charge. What used to take minutes now takes hours, but apparently it's "more efficient."
I see a lot of the same type of faulty reasoning here. Slacking off happens at work all the time, and people "being unavailable" is just code for "I can't walk over and talk about my dog for 45 minutes". I doubt their previous VPN logs really say a lot that's useful, but if there were actual abusers they should have been dealt with. Blanket bans don't tend to work.
It's particularly weird in Yahoo's case since it's already not exactly a place that top tier talent wants to go, and this isn't going to help them recruit.
The preloading thing doesn't even make sense anyway. They weren't working on assets at the last minute, those have been ready for a while. Those also happen to be most of the size.
They could have done a preload and a patch, and reduced the amount of data anybody who did the preload would need on launch day by 2/3. Steam has done this for years. EA is just not learning anything from what others are doing.
Yep, many people have had save games get corrupted due to the server instability. I know one person who lost three cities that way. They're still there, but can't be loaded.
And then one of those players stops playing and their corner of the area stops developing.
Or they blow up the power plant that everyone was using before leaving, and now every city is having a bad day.
Yay?
It's fine for people who want to use that model, but there is no reason they had to break the single player with this always online stuff to make it work.
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.
Man, the amount of wrong on this thread is getting annoying.
It's actually pretty easy to solve this. Quite a lot of people aren't playing multiplayer. They're not inviting other people to their regions. They are not getting anything from the always online requirement except a broken game (as your first line mentions, before you go ahead and dismiss that clusterfuck as apparently not a problem).
In fact, other games have had the same thing without always online servers. The easiest implmentation is to say that if you're creating a region you want to use in multiplayer, then it goes to the servers. Or when you actually invite someone, it goes to the servers. This is not that complicated and it doesn't require single player maps to be on servers for no fucking reason.
The fact is that the servers are there for DRM and microtransactions.
Absolutely false. in fact the reason Maxis gave for why they can't increase city size is that people's computers aren't powerful enough to handle it on the low end. If cloud magic was doing all the math, why would that be a problem?
The actual simulation is running on your system, using your CPU. The severs are there to enforce some rules and make multiplayer work... and to act as DRM.
Oh, and totally break the game for no good reason right now. How is the game getting an undeserved bad rep when people have had their cities corrupted by the servers and become unplayable multiple times? "Load save games" is not some nifty addon. If your program can't do that, it's fucking broken.
The multiplayer part only happens if you actively invite someone into your region. If you don't take that step, it's an entirely single player affair, with you controlling all of the areas inside the region yourself. As a result, there's quite a large number of people playing it as a strictly single player game, and the always on nonsense is nothing but a dependency that breaks the game with no benefit.
Eh, I never said that another system was better.:) But posts like "we need to have tests for elected officials before letting them get in" really annoy me.
The root of the problem is with the voters that are willing to vote for anybody with a given party label and don't really bother to check if "their guy" has any clue WTF he's doing. If these kind of fools keep getting elected, what's the incentive to do better?
Unless we jam transmissions so that you can't control your drones in the target area. At that point throwing more drones at the problem isn't going to fix it.
Just how much money is being spent on flu shots each year? At 9% effectiveness, is the value for dollar really there?
At some point the CDC has to fess up to reality - their preferred method of telling everyone to get a shot that doesn't work isn't a good idea. The longer they try to pretend it is, the more money will be wasted and the more people will be convinced that the CDC is full of shit.
This is entirely normal when you take a government that chronically under-staffs on IT and relies on consultants. They go and try to do something big, and they don't have the expertise in house to deal with it. Enter more consultants, particularly of the variety that like to write a lot of powerpoint presentations and bill a lot of hours but never actually deliver a bloody thing. Of course, since the government doesn't have enough IT expertise to actually figure that out, the high level senior managers that love powerpoint and high-level mumbo jumbo MBA talk think everything is going well.
And then, scope creep happens. It follows one of three lines: 1. Election happens. New government comes in, with new priorities and a new way they want to do things. This is obviously bad for a huge project in progress. 2. The existing project has a new department join in, which means new managers and thus a new set of demands. Instead of starting up a new project, they try to shoehorn those into the current project to satisfy management's desire for design by a giant committee of managers. 3. Someone realizes that the project didn't actually have all the requirements properly captured in the first place, which is pretty much inevitable in my experience.
You'd think at some point the government would learn that they can't manage projects in this way and rely on consultants to sort it out, but they never do. Of course, in the case of #1 or #2 even in house IT doesn't really save you, but in my experience they tend to be more flexible than a giant Enterprise consulting outfit (mostly because there's no contract they can hide behind to deliver X, even if X doesn't actually solve the problem that prompted the project in the first place).
Math professors at Universities have been complaining about this same trend for a very long time, to the point that they actually created a set of non-credit classes that basically teach high school math again. You have to take an entrance test before taking a first year math course, and if you fail you have to take the non-credit course first.
Why? Because the math failure rates in first year became astronomical due to the pathetic job that high schools are doing in teaching it.
Other fields (like writing) are suffering similar problems now. Generally speaking we do a pathetic job of teaching basic skills like these in elementary and high school. But on the upside we've boosted everyone's self-esteem to the point where they don't know what failure is.
They had a Renault engineer on the phone during all of this, and couldn't come up with a way to stop the car.
So if it can be stopped by the brakes (which the article says actually sped the car up), neutral, or just turning it off, wouldn't they maybe have thought of that at some point?
No, the real problem here is these cars are too computer reliant and if the computer has a problem the driver is just along for the ride.
Just speculation, but I wonder if this is cost related. It can't be cheap to keep Presto up to par with Webkit and Gecko. Using Webkit instead means they can spend less money on that, and devote more to the UI without particularly affecting the browser's standards compliance.
So in that sense it seems like a sound business decision.
Slashdot Mirror
... what? Yes it does. I do it all the time.
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.
Those 20 are probably the "professional game reviewers" that gave it scores like 9/10 and "GOTY Candidate!" reviews.
And they turned off that stuff today to try and make the servers work.
The only thing the servers are doing right now is handling authentication, save games, and doing calculation for stuff between regions. All the actual work while you're playing a city is done locally, as shown by the fact that you can lose your connection and it'll keep going just fine for a while.
Amazon was getting bombarded by refund requests. That is why they pulled it. Selling it was costing them money.
At my work, the people who do support got a new management structure. Their management is big on metrics. Sadly, their metric is "how many tickets did you close."
Unsurprisingly, service levels have gone to total shit. The people who actually solve hard problems take more time than the ones who bounce tickets to other people and only handle easy ones, and thus don't look good to the morons in charge. What used to take minutes now takes hours, but apparently it's "more efficient."
I see a lot of the same type of faulty reasoning here. Slacking off happens at work all the time, and people "being unavailable" is just code for "I can't walk over and talk about my dog for 45 minutes". I doubt their previous VPN logs really say a lot that's useful, but if there were actual abusers they should have been dealt with. Blanket bans don't tend to work.
It's particularly weird in Yahoo's case since it's already not exactly a place that top tier talent wants to go, and this isn't going to help them recruit.
The preloading thing doesn't even make sense anyway. They weren't working on assets at the last minute, those have been ready for a while. Those also happen to be most of the size.
They could have done a preload and a patch, and reduced the amount of data anybody who did the preload would need on launch day by 2/3. Steam has done this for years. EA is just not learning anything from what others are doing.
Yep, many people have had save games get corrupted due to the server instability. I know one person who lost three cities that way. They're still there, but can't be loaded.
It's a total mess.
Meanwhile, anybody with a high end computer sees most of it's CPU time sitting idle while playing.
Funny how that works.
And then one of those players stops playing and their corner of the area stops developing.
Or they blow up the power plant that everyone was using before leaving, and now every city is having a bad day.
Yay?
It's fine for people who want to use that model, but there is no reason they had to break the single player with this always online stuff to make it work.
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 the people who have had their cities locked and unable to load now are complaining without reason?
Welcome to the world of a fanboy - where "save games can't be loaded" is apparently just whining.
Man, the amount of wrong on this thread is getting annoying.
It's actually pretty easy to solve this. Quite a lot of people aren't playing multiplayer. They're not inviting other people to their regions. They are not getting anything from the always online requirement except a broken game (as your first line mentions, before you go ahead and dismiss that clusterfuck as apparently not a problem).
In fact, other games have had the same thing without always online servers. The easiest implmentation is to say that if you're creating a region you want to use in multiplayer, then it goes to the servers. Or when you actually invite someone, it goes to the servers. This is not that complicated and it doesn't require single player maps to be on servers for no fucking reason.
The fact is that the servers are there for DRM and microtransactions.
So... breaking the game for the people that actually gave you money for it fixes piracy... how?
Absolutely false. in fact the reason Maxis gave for why they can't increase city size is that people's computers aren't powerful enough to handle it on the low end. If cloud magic was doing all the math, why would that be a problem?
The actual simulation is running on your system, using your CPU. The severs are there to enforce some rules and make multiplayer work... and to act as DRM.
Oh, and totally break the game for no good reason right now. How is the game getting an undeserved bad rep when people have had their cities corrupted by the servers and become unplayable multiple times? "Load save games" is not some nifty addon. If your program can't do that, it's fucking broken.
Not true.
The multiplayer part only happens if you actively invite someone into your region. If you don't take that step, it's an entirely single player affair, with you controlling all of the areas inside the region yourself. As a result, there's quite a large number of people playing it as a strictly single player game, and the always on nonsense is nothing but a dependency that breaks the game with no benefit.
Eh, I never said that another system was better. :) But posts like "we need to have tests for elected officials before letting them get in" really annoy me.
The root of the problem is with the voters that are willing to vote for anybody with a given party label and don't really bother to check if "their guy" has any clue WTF he's doing. If these kind of fools keep getting elected, what's the incentive to do better?
Yes, they need to be dumb enough to appeal to the "moron voters that fear intelligence" demographic.
Said demographic is quite large.
There is one. It's called an election.
Unfortunately it relies on voters not being total fucking morons and voting in their own kind. As you can see, that plan has significant flaws.
Unless we jam transmissions so that you can't control your drones in the target area. At that point throwing more drones at the problem isn't going to fix it.
Just how much money is being spent on flu shots each year? At 9% effectiveness, is the value for dollar really there?
At some point the CDC has to fess up to reality - their preferred method of telling everyone to get a shot that doesn't work isn't a good idea. The longer they try to pretend it is, the more money will be wasted and the more people will be convinced that the CDC is full of shit.
This is entirely normal when you take a government that chronically under-staffs on IT and relies on consultants. They go and try to do something big, and they don't have the expertise in house to deal with it. Enter more consultants, particularly of the variety that like to write a lot of powerpoint presentations and bill a lot of hours but never actually deliver a bloody thing. Of course, since the government doesn't have enough IT expertise to actually figure that out, the high level senior managers that love powerpoint and high-level mumbo jumbo MBA talk think everything is going well.
And then, scope creep happens. It follows one of three lines:
1. Election happens. New government comes in, with new priorities and a new way they want to do things. This is obviously bad for a huge project in progress.
2. The existing project has a new department join in, which means new managers and thus a new set of demands. Instead of starting up a new project, they try to shoehorn those into the current project to satisfy management's desire for design by a giant committee of managers.
3. Someone realizes that the project didn't actually have all the requirements properly captured in the first place, which is pretty much inevitable in my experience.
You'd think at some point the government would learn that they can't manage projects in this way and rely on consultants to sort it out, but they never do. Of course, in the case of #1 or #2 even in house IT doesn't really save you, but in my experience they tend to be more flexible than a giant Enterprise consulting outfit (mostly because there's no contract they can hide behind to deliver X, even if X doesn't actually solve the problem that prompted the project in the first place).
The whole process is a giant mess.
Math professors at Universities have been complaining about this same trend for a very long time, to the point that they actually created a set of non-credit classes that basically teach high school math again. You have to take an entrance test before taking a first year math course, and if you fail you have to take the non-credit course first.
Why? Because the math failure rates in first year became astronomical due to the pathetic job that high schools are doing in teaching it.
Other fields (like writing) are suffering similar problems now. Generally speaking we do a pathetic job of teaching basic skills like these in elementary and high school. But on the upside we've boosted everyone's self-esteem to the point where they don't know what failure is.
They had a Renault engineer on the phone during all of this, and couldn't come up with a way to stop the car.
So if it can be stopped by the brakes (which the article says actually sped the car up), neutral, or just turning it off, wouldn't they maybe have thought of that at some point?
No, the real problem here is these cars are too computer reliant and if the computer has a problem the driver is just along for the ride.
Just speculation, but I wonder if this is cost related. It can't be cheap to keep Presto up to par with Webkit and Gecko. Using Webkit instead means they can spend less money on that, and devote more to the UI without particularly affecting the browser's standards compliance.
So in that sense it seems like a sound business decision.