No way to kick players out of your shared region in SimCity, ghost towns a possibility
By Tim Colwill on February 26, 2013 at 12:34 pm
An extensive developer Q&A with Maxis published on the SimCity fan forum SimCity Hall explains that once you’ve invited another player into your multiplayer region, there’s no way to kick them out — even if they abandon their town, and crime and anarchy starts spilling over into yours.
“As of now, no there isn’t unfortunately,” is Maxis’ paraphrased response — which does leave room for a further patch to eliminate the problem.
Maxis also explained that there would be no ‘reset button’ in multiplayer, arguing that to do so would enable players to repeatedly claim the $50K starting cash boost and thus exploit the game.
SimCity is due out very soon on March 5th.
Source: SimCity Hall via PCGamesN
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sooo much griefing potential.
Trolls are gonna be rampant in this game.
Build a town with nothing but houses, give them nothing, let them turn into zombies. GG
Hooray for adding horrible on-line junk to a perfectly good singleplayer game!
Yep, great stuff EA. Now I’ve really got incentive to allow other players to build nearby. Wow, this online stuff you’ve added really sounds awesome, I can’t wait to have a city surrounded by ghost towns ripe with criminals ready to come raid my place and cause havoc while the players behind them have given up and left them. Sounds really awesome!
Am sure they will patch it out, or allow you to ‘reclaim’ abandoned towns in some manner?
I doubt it, their “you can’t restart” claim in this article doesn’t bode well for this thinking.
But yeah, making this a persistent multiplayer game was a HUGE mistake did maxis not learn from all the Penis creatures in Spore… Are they really stupid enough to make this mistake again?! (I for one welcome the Penis Shaped Towns)
10 region limit, no reset button, no kicking people that stuff up their shared part of the region. No preorder.
Is everyone missing the bit where it says once you’ve invited another player into your multiplayer region?
Once upon a time I was so keen for this game I didn’t even care that it had always online DRM. Slowly but surely with every announcement my attitude is changing.
So if you can’t reset your cities, and it’s a persistent online world, what happens if you get bored and leave the game for a couple of months?
Not all my mates might hang around in simcity as long as I do. So because they stop playing after I invited them, I have to suffer with god ugly sections of towns? Makes sense? Right? WRONG!
At least you have to invite people to participate in your regions so there is no random troll that is going to occur – you will have to have invited that person to share the game with you. Which of course means players will need to exercise discretion about who they invite to their regions and live with their decisions.
This game does have a fair share of restrictions though which hopefully will be lifted/relaxed ie region limit. If it turns out it really makes the game experience a stinker then Maxis would work towards rectifying it.
matty,
Yeah I just noticed that in the article. So essentially, with those two things, I can see the game being filled up with ghost cities real quick. The worse part is the inability to just start a new city means any desire to experiment is just gone. Some of the more entertaining aspects of Sim City have already been shredded to bits, meaning anybody even remotely wanting to look sideways at the disaster buttons are suicidal lemmings. It’s an online game so you can’t just restore from an earlier game. You can’t just start a new city. If you flatten the whole thing you’ll just be stone flat broke and make it even harder for yourself.
You know what? Screw you Maxis. I’m going back to Sim City 4.
personally I think this sounds like a pretty cool side effect…
EDIT: not saying it wouldn’t get old, but it would definitely cause some interesting scenarios
Are people allowed to make a new city? if not (like it sounds like), your only gonna get ghost cities if people buy the game, and then never play.
Thats alot of people buying a full-retail game and then never playing, just to ruin ‘your’ game.
This is topic is definitely sounding more alarmish than factual
im shocked. in SC4 i would start a new city every 5 minutes until i got it right to allow it to flourish and grow.. this is proving to be a silly idea. and knowing EA it will be a release and forget kind of deal
Something sounds off. Surely there must be another mode other than multiplayer as they’re literally murdering this games potential to be successful by not allowing you to create multiple cities as that’s pretty much the soul of SC, creating many different cities and just messing around having fun with different styles and methods of city builder. I find it really hard to believe that the new SC won’t allow that.
There’s a public mode and a private mode.
Public is obviously public, anyone can join neighbouring areas, private is invite only.
I’d laugh if everybody just played private. Then watch Maxis try to deal with that. :P
exe3,
They are rebooting the franchise. This is a totally different game to Simcity 4.
Why are people bashing EA, and not Maxis?
You mean just like everyone did with Spore lol.
By the sounds of it, the problem (if you can call it that) is in the fact you can transfer money from city to region. So they’ve made it ‘perma-cities’ to stop people from simply ‘starting, transferring money, destroying, repeat’. Unfortunately from a multiplayer perspective that means once a player has control of a city, its theirs for good. This sounds like something that can and, maybe, will be patched at later date (but I don’t put much stock in ‘maybes’).
Perhaps a sensible approach would’ve been to scale the initial grant money based on some mechanic more advanced than “here’s some money for pressing start”.
*Waiting patiently for final release…. Will from judgement then.*
if the starting bonus is really that attractive then I’d argue that their starting bonus is waaay too high. And if you can’t balance an economy, then why the fuck are you playing Sim City..
Mods are another question. Most likely the only mods supported will be from the in-game SimCity (Sims 3) Store.
Does feel like a short term game, compared to SC4, which will get drip fed from the SimCity Store with DLC. Maybe you will be able to buy DLC to remove in-game adds or nuke another player.
Who remembers the days when most games weren’t multiplayer? and you would be playing a game and think “this would be so good if I could play against other people and not just hopeless AI”
I can honestly say Simcity was the last game on earth I would ever have felt that way about, why would they try to make it multiplayer? I want to build and control a city the way I want, I want to play Simcity to get the hell away from people, not be forced to work with them.
Wyld,
You and your logic, though I did wonder the same thing.
Probably the idea that every single choice they don’t like must be because of the evil EA overlords.
makena,
Nice to see the overlords take the time to send an employee in to our little site to try and discredit descenders.
Sim City reboot report card:
Curved roads: A
Simulation engine: A
Random maps: F
Terraforming: F
Large cities: F
Transportation options: C (no subways, no ferries)
Tunnels: F
Multi-player: A (but who cares?)
Off-line mode: F
Overall grade: D
FAIL
What makes this result even more stupid? It is almost an exact copy of Cities XL, which is now in the bargain bin. If you are going to plagiarise someone elses work, at least make sure its good work.
badbl00d,
I would’ve said Sim City Societies myself, but yeah I do see a lot of Cities XL in this game as well.. And both are far far far superior in art and graphics. Maybe not so much in gameplay though lol.. (because all 3 games are shit-tastic in terms of gameplay).
I gotta say, 3d city builders are over rated.
I’m going to love the reaction from EA if they can emulate the simcity master server and run one for yourself locally to backup/restore saves, along with ensuring that you can play the game when they get flooded and they implement the same bullshit queue they did in the beta.
If they feel the need to bash anyone, shouldn’t they be bashing both? While Maxis may have screwed the pooch (I’ll wait to judge when I play it) are not EA also responsible for the decisions Maxis may have made?
Either way, I see the word “invite” as being your choice on who your neighbours will be. Should you just choose willy-nilly to let anyone join your region then unfortunately you will have to deal with that choice down the line.
Now if you can just build other cities in your region with that intention to see what effect it has on your prime city, that will be interesting. Also might help you with how you could deal with that situation should it arise in a MP game.
I think you’re right and like you I am willing to judge it when it is released.
Yes please. Yeah once they do some kind of Emulation I think this game wouldn’t be “as” bad as it sounds right now lol. Missed opportunity for EA here.
so the game will be useless when they decide to shutdown the servers?
No the game will become useless when EA have decided for you that you no longer have any interest in playing an old game you love, and that it is time for you to purchase the new version of simcity.
I thought you were already allowed to buy multiple cities in a region yourself