SimCity’s launch woes: Another nail in the DRM coffin, a red flag for games reviewers, and bad news for consumers
By Tim Colwill on March 8, 2013 at 3:45 pm
SimCity’s launch isn’t going very well.
Far from the smoother European and Australian launch EA were hoping for, things have actually gotten worse. In fact, they’ve begun disabling “non-critical gameplay features” in an effort to bring their servers back under control — even taking the somewhat extraordinary step of disabling the game’s highest speed setting in the latest patch. Amazon has thrown them a vote of no confidence and is actively warning users of persistent problems with the game.
EA and Maxis are working hard. They’re working around the clock. And, eventually, they’ll get it under control. But in the meantime, hundreds of thousands of users are outraged about a game they can’t play.
What does this mean for gamers? And what does it mean for those of us who write about the games they play?
Who even understands numbers
Many games sites, including this one, were offered access to a review event where SimCity could be played in a controlled environment prior to launch. Many sites (although not this one, for reasons detailed here) published their reviews based on these events or, in some cases, on additional playtime on specific dedicated review servers. Some sites waited, played on the live servers — or tried to! — and then published their reviews. That’s fine — after all, what other options are there?
High-profile site Polygon initially gave the game a glowing 9.5 out of 10. Then, they knocked it down to 8. Then, they knocked it down to 4. There’s a collective gasp from the crowd. A four out of ten! That’s a genuinely bad score! That ain’t no seven.
No. It’s not. And it doesn’t matter, because Metacritic — which is the only reason publishers actually care about review scores — never alters a score, once it’s been published. So the Metacritic entry for SimCity from Polygon still stands at ‘95’. In fact, according to Metacritic, the critical consensus is sitting at a nice, healthy, 81. The servers could catch fire tomorrow, EA could shut down the servers, fire everyone at Maxis and flood the entire office with venomous snakes, and the Metacritic score would remain unchanged forever. Bonuses for everybody! Or not, as the case may be.
Meanwhile, the average user score is 1.7. Out of ten. Is anybody surprised?
It is broke, but can we fix it
We ditched review scores nearly a year ago here at games.on.net, for a number of reasons, one of which was of course that situations like this prove what we have felt for a long time: that review scores are utterly meaningless — especially when the independent third-party that collates them doesn’t even think they’re meaningful enough to bother keeping track of.
Games are changing from a product to a service, and this has been true for a long time. What SimCity shows us that attempting to apply the review model a service is at best difficult, and at worst impossible. In the review event, the service works! 9/10. On days one through fifteen, it’s broken. 4/10. On day twenty, everything is stable but it’s still missing features. 8/10.
When does it end? Are you going to keep updating your review for every major patch? Is this a score for the game as it should be, or for the game as you want it to be, or the game that it could be if only it worked?
As Tom Chick over at Quarter to Three puts it, “anyone who has reviewed it favorably at this point is reviewing it entirely on its promise.”
“If that’s how you want to evaluate games, have at it. There is pretty much no reason any game shouldn’t get a stellar review. The industry should be grateful for your enthusiasm.”
Harsh words. But, at the end, reviews are consumer advice for people who buy games, and it’s fair to say that consumer advice shouldn’t be based on promise. And with the entire model of buying and returning is changing, what does it all even mean?
Nowhere to turn
As Australian PC gamers, we often look to CD key sites to help us in our hour of need. Such is the volume of chaos brought about by this launch, however, that even key sites have been sucked into the mess. CJ’s CD-Keys, a popular key retailer, has offered free refunds and exchanges after all the CD keys they were supplied with turned out to be Russian language only. Their Facebook page is a PR nightmare, littered with angry complaints and shrieking demands from customers to see the key they forked over for.
Meanwhile, customers who do have keys and turn to EA for a refund are being told that Origin, in general, does not offer refunds on digital download games (unless you’re in the EU, where it’s mandatory). So you buy a game that doesn’t work (yet) and then if you change your mind and want your money back, well, you can’t. Unless you purchased it through a physical store, apparently — but good luck trying to convince EB Games to give you a refund on a game you’ve already redeemed to your Origin account.
(That said, the stories you’ve probably seen about EA banning people who ask for refunds are, flatly, untrue. Mr. Mark Serrels over at Kotaku Australia has written in-depth about whether or not Australians can demand refunds, and that’s worth reading too.)
The end
It’s in the interest of games publishers — if they’re confident in their product — to get reviews out early, to encourage more pre-orders. If on the other hand they’re not confident in their product, reviews will often be delayed as much as possible to ensure that any existing pre-orders aren’t cancelled, and people don’t have a chance to read it before they hit the shops.
EA were confident in their product. They had no reason not to be. But they vastly underestimated just how good a job they’d done in marketing it, and they didn’t learn from mistakes of other high-profile titles which also suffered launch woes.
Within 48 hours, Diablo III had sorted out nearly all of their problems. 48 hours on, SimCity’s actively appear to be getting worse.
The difference, one might argue, is that Blizzard have experience launching MMOs and Maxis do not. But the end user doesn’t care about that. The end user just knows that they’ve paid money for something they can’t use, money that they can’t get back. They shouldn’t have to wait and see, and they shouldn’t have to keep an eye on reviews and hope — hope! — that those reviews update to reflect the latest service status.
In an ideal world, Origin would have allowed pre-loading, to keep the server traffic at a minimum on launch day. Beta tests would have gone for longer than 24 hours at a pop, and actually allowed users to try out the multiplayer features that are, supposedly, the key to Maxis’ new approach and, apparently, the number one cause of the current problems. Server capacity would have been scaled up hugely for launch, to handle that demand — or, hell, maybe even the drastic step of delaying the European and Australian launches could have been taken.
This is a bad situation, and it doesn’t appear to be getting any better. It remains to be seen whether EA will take any lasting PR damage from it all, but one thing is clear: situations like this do nothing, nothing at all, to convince consumers that always-online DRM and un-refundable digital download policies are acceptable.
Waving your hand and saying “It’ll all go away in a few days” or “online games are always a fustercluck at launch” isn’t an answer, and it ignores the very reasonable expectation that products paid for should actually work. We don’t have any answers, and certainly I don’t have any grand solution. But this is another straw on the back of the camel, and is a huge, huge missed opportunity on EA’s part to reassure people that always-online DRM needn’t impact their gaming lives.
Three months from now, when the financial year ends and we get a look at EA’s investor reports, we’ll have a better picture of whether or not any of this was more than a blip on the radar.
SimCity 5.0 changes to focus on multiplayer, multi-city play
Regional improvements and bugfixing mark this fifth "major" patch.
SimCity Amusement Park DLC now available
Roller coasters are the best, end of story
Maxis keeps the big numbers coming: SimCity to get 4.0 patch tomorrow
Still no offline mode. Sorry, fans.
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Quite a few issues that could have been easily avoided by not enforcing their always online multiplayer version on consumers, I have no sympathy for them.
Not only are you absolutely entitled to a refund in this situation, but it is against the law for EA to tell you that you aren’t entitled to a refund.
link
The ACCC should smash them. As usual, they won’t.
We are being sold broken merchandise, and it’s plainly criminal that refunds are not always available.
They just spend heaps of cash on advertising, and who gives a flog if the game actually works or not.
Pretty sad state of affairs, good article.
Two Words: “Class Action”
Make em pay for selling faulty products. Its the only way they will learn.
On the down side they most likely took a note from Steam’s book and put a disclaimer in their eula (but it doesn’t mean the eula will hold up in court).
Yes, in Australia it is illegal to tell someone they are not entitled to a refund.
The gaming industry has been plagued with this for ages. Day 1 Patches, DLC to fix things etc
It’s going to continue to happen unless the government steps in
What’s the current situation?
Origin will ban you if you do a charge back on your credit/debit card.
They won’t however ban you for asking for a refund which they will decline stating that refunds are processed ‘at their discretion’.
nit001,
Dear god, WoW wasn’t useable for 3 days after any patch and people didn’t get so butthurt about it now did they? The game’s officially been out a day in most parts of the world and people are already screaming for refunds. That’s what happens when you hammer the servers, a freaking tragedy of the commons; the game was actually working for the first 2 days for most, and still is for me anyway but I understand for many it isn’t.
“Maxis’ new approach and, apparently, the number one cause of the current problems. Server capacity would have been scaled up hugely for launch, to handle that demand — or, hell, maybe even the drastic step of delaying the European and Australian launches could have been taken.
“…situations like this do nothing, nothing at all, to convince consumers that always-online DRM and un-refundable digital download policies are acceptable.”
Your article was good up until these points:
1. You can’t just ‘scale up’ demand, you as a writer for GON, of all people should know this. If you say double your server count on release then how do you let all those excess servers go? You can’t just repurpose them, you’ve already sunk tens of thousands of dollars into making sure people can play day 1 when EVERYONE ELSE wants to and not day 3, because god forbid we need the game right now. We’re Australians, get over the few day wait.
2. It’s not always-online DRM, at least from what we’ve seen, and I’m disappointed you didn’t research this as that’s just sloppy journalism
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/12/20/maxis-explains-the-use-of-simcity-always-online-drm/
“GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game—the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city. There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player’s local computer,” Bradshaw writes.
If I’m understanding that correctly, Bradshaw’s saying that offloading certain aspects of the simulation to SimCity servers is not only the way the game is designed, but a technical requirement. Bradshaw reflects this again in a later paragraph: “Trades between cities, simulation effects that cause change across the region like pollution or crime, as well as depletion of resources, are all processed on the servers and then data is sent back to your city on your PC. Every city in the region is updated every three minutes, which keeps the overall region in sync and makes your decisions in your city relevant to any changes that have taken place in the region.”
Anyone seeking a refund already (like some are) is an honest to god an imbecile; wait a week, and if you’re still unhappy with the game you’re playing then grab one (preferably before the 7 days are up).
The ACCC is also unclear on where licenses stand, as well as the fact that the product is fit for purpose for many; I know many aren’t even bothering to troubleshoot server issues or at least wait because, as I’ve said, they’re imbeciles.
This release is just a testament to the ‘gaming community’ and how ‘intelligent’ the majority are who go to the effort to review this as 0: Miraculously below many other titles that are actually awful (because we are impatient and want things NOW SO LET’S HATE ON EA AND NOT WOW, GW2, OR STARCRAFT 2 RELEASES THAT ALL GO SWIMMINGLY!) like MoH: Warfighter, Towns, Lost Planet, or the likes.
Loads sim city 4 ahhhhhh
Total and utter b.s.
Do you really believe that EA is funding a bunch of supercomputers to crunch these amazing numbers, or that it is viable to constantly stream the massive amounts of information which would be involved over the internet?
It is a transparent attempt to lock down the game and destroy it as a single player experience, so that EA has total control over it and the way that consumers use it.
As for calling people asking for refunds on a totally broken product “imbeciles”, well…
For the most part all of the PC gaming I now do is through Steam, Origin, Uplay. And yes these launches aren’t ideal, but the benefits outweigh a couple of days of launch mess. What about when L4D2 came out and was unplayable for a day, cause so many were trying to decrypt their preload (Preload’s aren’t that great when they are encrypted, so millions access the servers, and then you still can’t play the game).
I’m not defending the launches but I understand the economics of this. Why buy 10x servers you need for the rest of the games life for just day one? Unless you can set up some sort of cloud arrangement for the first week, it isn’t worth wasting your money. Maybe they need to charge more for early adopters to cater against the demand, who knows?
I think the issue is not that users are upset and angry that there are bugs on release, they’re upset and angry because they could have been so easily avoided if they weren’t so obsessed with their DRM.
nit001,
Steam give refunds and Steam actively helped people get refunds from Ubisoft after the From Dust release.
forumrabbit,
“WoW wasn’t useable for 3 days after any patch” Not sure what WoW you played but I played for 4 years solid and sure some patches had kinks but never was the game unusable for 3 days.
As for the always-online being a technical requirement. So what? They didn’t need to build it that way. They chose to. It just gives them a neat little cop-out when it comes to the always-online argument.
And of course, no game launch is perfect but this is really bad in comparison to others. There’s a big difference to bugs on release and not actually being able to play at all. Not to mention, they’re having to disable features to try and fix things.
It’s also quite clear that no effort was put into stress-testing the servers during beta which means that instead of the minor server overload hiccups you get with online multiplayer games you have this massive issue instead and really the only imbecile around here is the person trying to defend them.
See the biggest problem i have is the server issues. I have seen so much rage at this game with most people not realizing that the actual game itself is quite good if you can actually get in.
forumrabbit,
You are very quick to wave your rights as a consumer. That’s your choice.
Don’t expect the rest of us to “suck it up” so to speak. These company’s should be held accountable for their actions.
If you buy in AU from a overseas storefront (which I believe Origin would try and claim to be, despite regionalising the product to us and gouging the crap out of us), I wouldnt think the AU law applied. somewhere in the T&C it will say “all purchases subject to the law in XYZ country”, probably the US.
If our ACCC took them it would be good :) much like the EU guys did.
Also, same applies to CJ’s, dont know if you could claim a refund via them by “law”, more rely on their good will.
raven1417,
I’m not picking on Steam here raven1417, I’m just pointing out they have a disclaimer in the Steam eula that says you can’t use Class Actions against them.
A game is released, you can’t play it, of course it deserves a 0. – It certainly doesn’t deserve a 10 for not letting you play it.
As a writer for GON I do, absolutely, know that servers can be purposed to something, then repurposed later when they’re no longer needed.
When TF2 went free-to-play, here at GON we repurposed heaps of our servers into TF2 ones to meet the demand. Then we repurposed them again when demand went down.
A company with the resources of EA absolutely can afford to requisition more server capacity in data centres across the world when necessary, and at short notice.
The game literally can’t be played offline. This is the definition of always-online DRM. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make with the GlassBox engine but SimCity is, absolutely, online-only.
Meanwhile, Arma 3 launched with only 1 major hickup on the exact same day… and no one cared because they were too busy paying $90 for Sim City and not being able to play it.. If they had bought Arma 3 for the $32.99 they’d had not only gotten a brilliant game even in its Alpha buggy state, but they would’ve been able to buy it 3x over.
I think this is case enough to show that Pre-ordering is obsolete and that the Crowd Source model that Bohemia and many other developers have employed is in fact the superior solution (as its designed to reward early adopters- whereas pre-ordering punishes early adopters because they get a much worse game for maximum price- crowd sourcing they might get the same quality sure, but they got it for way way way cheaper than they would’ve had they pre-ordered).
I hope this goes to convince developers that the Pre-Order model is dead.
Can anyone play it yet?
stop pre-ordering geeze….hasn’t this shown over the last few months
If you sell it in Australia, you can’t “contract out” of consumer protections, nor can you tell consumers that they don’t have Australian consumer protections.
Given that they region lock the hell out of us, I don’t think they could weasel out of Australian law. They are clearly selling stuff “in” Australia, insofar as that means anything in a digital age.
On top of that I’d imagine that EA would have some physical presence in Australia.
What’s even more sickening about EA’s behavior is the fanboys who willingly defend EA to the death even though they’re basically arguing against the rights and reasonable expectations of the buying public, with a lack of critical thinking. It’s disgusting some people think EA need defending here.
The moment people believe always-online DRM is a reasonable part of gaming is the day I give it up entirely. I don’t want to be part of a hobby where people get fucked over and reward corporations for doing so.
ya’ll be mad right now, but ya’ll be praisin it like you did with diablo
The ‘servers’ they are running are just Amazon S3 instances hosted in Europe (for all the servers US/EU/Oceania) it shouldn’t be taking them that long to request more.
Also EA charge GST in Australia so there is no possible way they can /legally/ decline a refund. That of course doesn’t stop EA from saying they decline to refund, people cave when they say “No Refunds” simply because they don’t know their rights.
snazz,
Yep. Watching my girlfriend play it now. Works fine. It took a couple of goes to get in, but other than that, there haven’t been any issues.
Waiting for my key now.
Sim City the game? – it’s very entertaining, it’s quite reminiscent of past SC games with a cleaner approach to things, you can see where the interactions between cities has a big impact on your play (be it for good or bad).
Sim City the DRM experience is quite horrible and broken, the gamer rage is vast (proving that this game was a hell of a lot more popular than many thought) and people who have rightly purchased the game are the ones worst affected. The frustration is completely understandable as is people wanting a refund. Sadly many can’t seem to effectively convey their disgust at how things are going without the usual slew of threats, profanity and general e-rage that in the end benefits no one.
It’s obvious that EA are working hard at trying to rectify things and at least at that they are starting to succeed. The problem is of course unlike companies like Blizzard who experienced similar issues, they don’t have much goodwill banked with gamers. Someone commented before that WoW never had much downtime – it had tonnes of downtime at the start and people whined big time as well, Blizzard though, at those times happily gave you extra game time as compensation – damage control is what retained them a lot of customers in those early WoW days.
The sad thing is that these sort of DRM features are becoming more prominent due to continued piracy, this is the way publishers see as protecting their investments. If their weren’t so many thieves out there you would probably find a lot less draconian iterations of DRM. *cue a million posts of people justifying theft – 1) wasn’t going to buy it anyway 2) why should I support them now 3) I just try it as a demo 4) it’s because of the DRM 5) it’s to take down The Man 6) I’m short on cash right now 7) I don’t earn enough money.. etcetera. Taking what doesn’t belong to you is theft, these are the measures the companies are now taking to combat it and it sucks for the honest gamer.
Really need a lawyer to comment but I’m pretty sure in Australia you can demand a refund for a product that is not working as intended. EA could play the “we aren’t a n OZ company card” but of course they do region lock us and price accordingly so it would be rather hard for them to weasel out of it easily – of course the upside is they could drop all the prices and unregion lock us!
wolfstar90,
Thanks for replying, where are you getting your key from?
One day these big companies will figure out that putting out quality that actually works is what will get big sales, sadly can’t see this happening anytime soon.
For those that took the jump with this, is there lag like D3 has? lol
Ha quoting Tom Chick, you got the best sources GON.
EA always fuck these things up, they never budget bandwith/servers well. Even their Origin store is a slow POS the few times I’ve been. They took something like 5 months to fix that Simpsons ios game and still had problems on the relaunch. And with Maxis didn’t they have the same launch problems with Spore?
Maxis might not have MMO experience but EA do. We all saw this coming.
A few more million people pissed off with EA is a good day in my book though, don’t buy the fucking game next time.
snazz,
Amazon. I made a US account to get it from them. Everywhere else was way over priced, sold out or questionable…
I got my girlfriend’s key from Amazon as well. Took an hour or two though to arrive.
supr585,
The situation in SimCity is different to D3. In Diablo 3 the game logic was being run on Blizzard’s servers, whereas in SimCity the game logic is being run on your machine – it’s the world which is being controlled and managed by EA’s servers.
I wrote about exactly how it works here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3526293&cid=43111267
ElectroTyrian,
EA claims that the simulation portion is on their end. The claims have been disputed. We’ll see once a pirate version comes out (I’m doubting one will given you’d have to emulate the server regardless).
forumrabbit,
You know how you can spot that bullshit about the simulation being done on their servers? disconnect from game and watch how the simulation is completely fine. Not only that but if you see the transfer rate, it’ll be quite low.
Quite honestly it was a very interesting idea but no doubt EA pushed for no singleplayer for obvious reasons.
Also its obvious EA isn’t trying hard to fix the issues. They have the money, the profit and the extra hardware to just “add” more servers and get a better pipeline and to also distribute the connections better. But they just won’t because they aren’t looking to fix it now, they are looking to have barely enough servers for the lifetime of the game instead of making an access of servers for release then make redundant servers when needed.
gammad,
I’m not so sure. The fact that people have had the game continue to run and simulate cities for a limited time after a disconnection (confirmed by the Maxis Reddit AMA a while ago) means that the game DOES have the simulation logic backed into the client. It’s just that it won’t be able to react to neighbouring cities and their effects on the environment until the game can reconnect. If you don’t reconnect within those 20 or so minutes, the game stops the session because you’re probably too out of sync with the rest of the world, I guess. I’ve read the comments from people who’ve had it disconnect and this does appear to be how it works.
Maxis/EA have pushed this interconnected world of cities thing pretty hard as being the focal point of the game. They seem adamant that incorporating an offline mode to allow solo play is counter to this vision of theirs, even if it would have resulted in far less drama. In other words, they aren’t listening to their customers who screened continuously about this always-online BS.
Reminds me of Microsoft and its stubbornness to have a traditional Start menu + boot to desktop in Windows 8, which would have eliminated most of the complaints. But hey, they have their own vision; fuck customer concerns, they’ll get used to it apparently.
wolfstar90,
Thanks, Amazon gave me the key straight away. $20 saved.
ElectroTyrian,
If companies always made things exactly how their customers wanted them and they just wanted them the same every time, then things would never change. We’d just stagnate. See Call of Duty for details. EA/Maxis are trying something different with this game. They advertised the DRM up front, it wasn’t hidden away. They developed this game, they told everyone what would be in it. From this information, it was clear (to anyone who has played a game which involves centralised servers) that there would definitely be issues on release as the entire world tried to simultaneously log in. These are worse than expected, granted. However, once these issues are sorted out and people can log in when they want to, I can see no issue with the DRM. Yes, EA can close down the servers whenever they like, but I can’t think of any games that have been released recently that I’ve wanted to play for more than a year or two.
Gets online game.
Expects game to run properly.
Complains about server being pushed because you the player is trying to acsess it along with EVERYONE ELSE.
You guys are a bunch of babies. Personally, I can’t wait for the problems to be fixed, because buy the time it is, I will have my retail copy from OzGameShop, and will have no problems at all, and will be able to play my copy of SimTown2.
nit001,
And do…… what exactly? What rights? What actions? You’re going to have a class-action suit against a company because you can’t play their game for 2 days?
Do you know how much the judge will laugh at you?
Tim Colwill,
I was referring to the fact its sole purpose wasn’t as a DRM (not the always-online part… which isn’t in debate… anywhere), which is even what I quoted, but you just skimmed that part as far as I can tell.
It’s also not even remotely economically feasible to just buy a few extra servers for 3-7 days then just put them elsewhere (where? All the other games they own have the correct amount of servers they need; they’d just be wasting thousands of dollars to make a few people happy when their game is selling like hotcakes). They have indeed bought more servers as they underestimated the average playing time someone who bought the game would have, but not because of the initial launch release.
There’s a reason companies don’t just ‘requisition’ more servers for a release Tim; it’s because it’s just such a stupid financial decision to set up servers for a week.
I can’t believe you’d even be so naive to think dedicated servers for a multiplayer game is even remotely comparable; I’m shocked.
raven1417,
I was at BC, Wrath, and Cata launches, and cata was the smoothest. By ‘smoothest’ I mean the game ran at 1fps (if you could get on and servers weren’t full) and there was enormous rubber banding. But that’s better than not getting in at all right?!?!
By the way Raven, the primary purpose of the betas was to stress test the servers, and they did just that.
wolfstar90,
Tonight I’m going to be continuing a playthrough of The Nameless Mod, a mod for the original Deus Ex – a game which will be 13 years old in a little over three months. A game that is still quite fun even without the mod. If said game was wrapped around always-online DRM and activation and bullshit, I doubt it’d be particularly playable by now.
DRM is a blight on anyone who cares about being able to control the content that they buy. It also adds an artificial lifetime when there’s no need to have one. It’s one of the worst things that have been added to games in recent years – and people won’t give a shit until it’s too late.
ElectroTyrian,
What’s this DRM is sin garbage?
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/12/20/maxis-explains-the-use-of-simcity-always-online-drm/
Not purely DRM purportedly, but you keep living in your fantasy land.
forumrabbit,
Let’s just say my fantasy land shields me from having to deal with this bullshit now or in the future. Do I miss out on games like SimCity? Maybe, but then again people who bought the game are missing out regardless so I don’t see the problem. :)
The one point here that game publishers should start to take note of is that the vocal social media outlets on the internet are rapid and ruthless in starting a hate storm over anything (which I think is quite pathetic really), and they (publishers/developers) must keep that in mind when launching games like this. They need t have crossed all the T’s and dotted all the I’s or it will be ugly. It’s not a matter of if or maybe, the hate storm will follow.
They should have known to be better prepared for this.
“Three months from now, when the financial year ends and we get a look at EA’s investor reports, we’ll have a better picture of whether or not any of this was more than a blip on the radar.”
This. When the financials come in only 2 things will be said of the SimCity launch:
1. Just as with current PR leading every update on server status, EA will continue with the investor line: SimCity was a huge success selling far better than expected, leading to a need to expand server capacity due to all the extra players that bought the game, blah blah blah, they sold X many copies and made X dollars.
2. That the massive influx on to the servers shows that EA’s DRM solution works and EA will look to improve and innovate on this form of community based DRM in future etc. etc.
Its a load of crap but that’s because its aimed at selling more shares, not appeasing their customers. Investor calls are not for the customer and never have been. They are about painting a picture of how the company performs and they are going to spin this every way they can to make it a positive (and they already are if you read the PR crap in their service update posts).
I have not based my decision to purchase this game on any review or score but on my love of the Simcity game and for those types of games and also from a video playthrough I saw of the beta. It looked like a lot of fun.
Sure, I expected there to be issues on launch, although I will admit nothing like shitstorm of what is happening but while I wanted the game early it really wasn’t to play it early, it was more to capture the lower price the place I purchased it from was offering (there were cheaper places – but I had at least heard of this site).
I still haven’t got my copy yet though, so I can’t comment on any problem other then not receiving my game! :p
I purchased my (yet to be received) key through CJ’s key site and it has been my first purchase through them.
Sorry, but I could care less if they have been caught un-aware by the demand as when I pre-ordered it, the reason was because they stated that the game would release on the 5th of March and i would be able to preload it a few days in advanced ready to play on release.
But each time its been, oh it is coming on the 5th… then it was “now the 6th” … “wait now the 8th, the other release was for the standard edition and yours is for a limited edition” (yet they didn’t have any of that when they wanted me to purchase it early). But seems to be alright for them to pass the buck to EA and Maxis and not take blame for any problems their end.
BTW, I don’t have facebook so they could at least publish what is happening on their own website rather then push the details to some other site, as I only just saw the kefuffle on their FB page thanks to this article.
I suppose I’m in the unique position that I should technically be able to say “sorry, don’t want the game, give me a refund” considering I haven’t even got the game yet, but I am still going to grab the game later on. May as get it now.
So basically what you’re saying is that any attempt to better a situation with a little additional financial expenditure, you’d rather see your companies name get wrung through the PR meat grinder that is happening?
Man I’m glad you’re not running my company. I’d have fired your ass by the end of the day.
dgeraghty,
It’ll actually be about 4-5 months until they’re actually prepared (being pedantic); I imagine they’ll stick with SimCity in terms of DLC and the likes seeing as their company has only just come out of a series of losses over the past few years (they got through because they have about 1.9bn in liquid cash) so they can start to spend more money to make more money.
I think FIFA + BF3 + Crysis 2 combined made about 900million when they came out, I think? It’ll be interesting to see if SimCity is listed separately on the financial reports or not that’s for sure.
kinkykel,
I didn’t know you owned a company, but in any news, why would you do that after paying out bonuses for the enormous sales SimCity is experiencing? It’s not like EA’s PR can get worse (voted worst company in the USA? They don’t deserve that), and the consumers are already being idiots about it with the review scores.
It’s not so simple to throw money at servers to fix the problem; there’s enormous fixed costs involved with that as they’d have to either rent them out (and spend at least a week accomplishing them out), or buy new ones and bring them online (which is taking them days as it is anyway and what they are doing to cope with long-term stress), which they’ve done anyway as the average playtime for any one person is higher than they expected.
<a href="#comm
I don’t think so, this only proves that publishers will do anything to drum up pre-orders by providing a staged, unrealistic platform for review. Sighting also the recent deception with ACM.
To have a product not work or only partly working out of the box is pretty much exclusive to the gaming industry and its really not acceptable compared to most other products and services. People have every right to be pissed. I think its going to take more than this to shake up the major publishers, my sprunger is starting to tingle though *scratches neck*.
We need more votes of no confidence and retailers/e-tailers getting on board and refusing to sell defective products. Frankly I’m pretty sure I won’t ever pre-order another game in the traditional sense.
I agree with you in regards to Bohemia’s model being far more attractive. I had a crack at ARMA 3 last night and I’m pretty impressed with its Alpha state. I’m really excited about the full release. And for $32.99US with access to the alpha, beta and full release this is supoib value for money. Thank you Bohemia for doing it right!
The publishers will be dead soon. They forgot who made them.. they forgot who can ultimately break them. THQ’s death should’ve sent a warning to them all, THQ was no small fish in the scheme of things, they were a major multinational publisher with studios and branches all over the world. They made some stupid mistakes, it ultimately killed them. If I were EA I’d be worried, their shares have been declining rather regularly due to their major failures (TOR was a big hit to their share price and overall capital- hence the firings at Bioware).
With crowdsource models, its a case of Vote with you wallet.. quite literally.. Pre-ordering is not voting, Crowdsourcing is because you’re making the decision of if this game should release or not (and if the consumer wants more of it). Pre-ordering the game is released regardless so your vote doesn’t matter (TotalBiscuit stated this). This is why its a threat to pre-ordering. The best thing though.. It eliminates the publisher completely. Embrace Crowdsourcing.. you kill the publisher.
So glad I dodged this one. So sick of Origin and EA’s crap. And yes you can get refunds. Although in my situation it has taken 10 months to resolve the issue (long story short EA banned my account under false accusations and now there is an escalation to return my purchases and not to mention the compensation I’ve claimed in expensive phone calls to their support service).
Tim Colwill,
Exactly EA is always releasing new games so servers could easily be re-purposed. Their release scheduled isn’t that slow that it would be an issue.
its times like these that I can only sit back and laugh at everyone who be hating when I said I was boycotting EA.
can’t believe the fuss over this, blind freddie must have seen this result coming and EA will still be laughing all the way to the bank.
Classic case of I told you so, EA….LOL
Can’t say DRM was the sole reason for me not getting Sim City, not with the constant list of bad design decisions they were proudly announcing but i’m glad we’re once again reminded of why always online DRM does not work. Not that it’ll stop them from trying but hopefully others are watching and learning so when the publishing model collapses (as so many predict) those who come next will be more humble and not try these anti-consumer schemes.
As for games as a service. Unless it’s some multiplayer only game like an MMO or LoL I will never accept it and to me the idea of games as a service is just another nail in the coffin for games being an artform. Games as a service have a use by date, it doesn’t work when art is suppose to be timeless.
Just sad I have to miss out on what could have been a great city builder. I’d try Cities XL 2012 but I hear it has its own problems like game crippling memory leaks, limited installs DRM and generally isn’t as good as the Sim City games.
forumrabbit,
Your consumer right that a purchased product actually performs as intended.
I personally do not have a problem because I did not buy SimCity and nor will I.
I cast my vote by not buying the game.
I’ve already experienced the joy’s of always on DRM with Diablo III. The fun of not being able to play my essentially single player game experience because of overloaded servers during launch, errors, constant disconnects and ongoing maintenance down time every Tuesday night. Even Blizzard have seen the error of their ways by announcing that the up coming PS3 & PS4 versions of DIII will work offline.
And for your reference of judges laughing at people. I don’t think so:
I don’t think any judge or Blizzard themselves were laughing when the Korean Government launched a Lawsuit against Blizzard for issues that made DIII unplayable. I hope the same thing happens to EA.
lets not get too carried away… a world of nothing but Journey’s would be just as dull as a world full of Call of Duty’s.
Game has issues, whats new?
Grow up, have a little bit of patience and enjoy the game like I have been tonight.
Also, on always-on DRM. My internet is always on, so its a non-issue for me.
I swear there’s a form of Stockholm Syndrome going on in this thread.
ub3r,
That only really rings true if the server is always-on as well…
Got to agree with Jez. Seems people want the game to be good so are doing the equivalent of hugging their knees rocking backwards and forwards with the mantra “It will get better”.
Games should work at launch. Not a few days/weeks/months later – at launch. If some part of your game was not ready, it should not have been launched.
@Forumrabbit – You seem to have some things confused. As others have pointed out most of the simulation keeps going when disconnected except for the interaction with other cities. Thus the primary purpose of the online requirement is DRM, since the game can clearly keep functioning for a while without a connection.
Also as to the servers, have you heard of this amazing new concept called cloud computing? Simply put they can requisition new servers for short periods since they effectively hire them from other companies. If they’ve set stuff up right, bringing new servers online shouldn’t take too long. From some of the comments, the current servers are set up this way anyway.
Finally I think you’ll find a judge reasonably interested in a company selling a clearly broken product. It doesn’t matter if they promise to fix it later – if it is broken when you received it you can get a refund.
Wow there is alot of people that have a opinion about a few topic in this story it’s a interesting read!
Were do you stand on the opinion of games being art as you seem to bring it up?
Just simple question maybe….
Agreed with above. All products and services should work fine without any issue at release. I think you are silly as a consumer to believe that “it will get better” over time. It is because of this thinking that organisations are releasing these kinds of games.
The consumers can encourage this by not pre-ordering forcing publishers and developers to release only when it is perfect.
jonlee,
How is that even remotely possible? Even if they’d run an open beta months before they released the game, they would have still not fully known exactly how many people were going to attempt to log in. EA still have to run a business. They can’t buy an extra hundred servers for a few days of issues.
For people who are actually playing this game, as opposed to the others who are just talking out of their asses about how terrible it is without ever playing it, this game is great. I’m absolutely loving it. I’ve had a couple of issues in the past 6 hours I’ve been playing. A couple of server drops, which didn’t stop me playing at all. The server I’m on (Oceania 1) came straight back up and I just re-synched. That’s it. So to those that couldn’t wait a day or two for the servers to stabilise, you missed out on a great game. Unfortunate. Hopefully they keep the servers up for a good two years at least, by which time there will almost certainly be a new game, and I’ll be quite happy.
you know what? im gonna look at this another way, im thinking that ea dont wanna lose their “worse company of the year” title and thats why they are doing this. I mean they said a few months before hand that they have learnt from diablo 3 about the release server rushes and we gonna be prepared for it. And all this time the problem has been getting worse and not better like teasing us with functionality then taking it away with patches, not to mention nearly no updates. I am convinced this is all in effort to keep that golden poo award they got, cause no company should operate like this with new products.
The Amazon review section for SimCity is going off. When I first checked the page, there were about 1200 reviews, then 5 minutes later it had hit 2,000 and 1,800 were one star reviews.
Amazon
This thread: A lot of fanboys /armchair experts (Used in the context of knowing nothing about server systems/programming/etc)
Any excuse for their horrendous always online DRM is bullshit. What I’ve seen is that all of their regional MP crap can be done in a few syncs every couple of minutes (Like it currently does) and not require you to be constantly online. (Which obviously.. they require you to be constantly online for some silly reason)
That being said, their regional play for SP does not need any sort of internet connection.. and yet it does. There is absolutely no reason too. If its just you in your own region everything is done client side (Don’t even bother debating that point… please.. unless you are actually going to tell me that every sync we send ~100k(Each Sim counts as one.. This isn’t including all the other crap) and push that to the server every tick then RECEIVE THE UPDATED DATA EVERY TICK.. for each person online that would be around.. If i had to make a rough guess… 1megabyte(minimum)/s (or whenever the tick is.. noting that we’d have to account for if we miss a tick and thus also send previous ticks otherwise simulation gets all screwy)
Only reason why they keep you connected is the whole global market thing.. WHICH ALSO GETS DONE AT THE SYNC TIME.
tl;dr its always online DRM and anyone stupid enough to believe that its justified for some crucial gameplay element (such as simulation or that some things can’t be done offline) needs to go learn how computers and the internet works.
/endrant
LOL , no one said BUY servers, there are THOUSANDS of companies you can just rent them from, you are the one being naive here if you think a games company with a brand new AAA title couldn’t get their hands on temporary servers.Sure it wouldn’t be pretty, but it would be do-able.
And yes, given they underestimated the load and already have peoples money, i would EXPECT that they do whatever it takes.
And i don’t know what Warcraft you were playing, but i have been playing through all the expansion launches except pandaria, and the oceanic servers were for the most part fine, a few rolling restarts here and there, but for 3 expansions i was able to race for level cap (along with most of my guild)
Semantics. You accused me of sloppy journalism, and then you argue that the “sole purpose” of the need for an always-online connection isn’t DRM? Look: if you cannot play the game offline, then it has always-online DRM. That’s literally the definition. I don’t understand what you’re arguing here?
The point was that when you have resources, you can re-allocate them as you need.
If you really, genuinely think a company like EA, which had over $4 billion in revenue and $76 million in profit last year, and which has hundreds of thousands of employees around the world, can’t afford to put up new servers when necessary, then… I really don’t know what I can say to convince you.
I think you went way to easy on CJs Tim. There are people in the Whirlpool thread who still dont have their keys from those guys.
All the other key sites have delivered on or before the dates they promised but those guys are still making a mess
EA have made a mess of this release but the problems people have had with CJs are of CJs making.
Maybe 15 years ago, this would be a situation that actually existed. As someone else already mentioned, EA are running off Amazon’s S3 cloud server platform, which allows for instant scalability based on fluctating demand. Hell, you can even set thresholds and the instances will automatically widen to accommodate the demand and shrink when it settles.
Before you accuse Tim of shoddy journalism, I would recommend you investigate how cloud systems work and realize that this situation would have been easily avoided if EA actually bothered to stress test their multiplayer servers and gauged what sort of infrastructure they would need to avoid this sort of day one mess. I’m sure companies like Rackspace or Amazon would have been happy to help.
It’s no longer the case that someone has to physically find and bring online another rack somewhere. It takes roughly 2 minutes to spin up a new instance.
James Pinnell,
I know they’re using Amazon’s system, which is notorious for unreliability as it is. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s simply release traffic and most Australians can get on at our peak hour now anyway, and the game’s been out here a little over a day.
If you’d read what I wrote I was noting how it’s just economically unfeasible to bring up servers for 3 days at the cost of tens of thousands to then dissolve them.
Tim Colwill,
To your first point: There’s just no point in continuing that line of discussion, you can’t be told that it’s not solely DRM and you continue to ignore it.
To your second, if you’d read the rest of their financial statements you’d realise they’ve been making a loss for several years now, and putting up servers isn’t an instantenous thing at any rate, let alone the fact that Australians can actually get on if the traffic isn’t so bad. I know you may think dedicated servers for a shooter is comparable, but they aren’t.
So much for EA being able to add more resources at a whim…
EA Suspends SimCity Marketing Campaigns
http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/8/4079894/ea-suspends-simcity-marketing-campaigns-asks-affiliates-to-stop
Judging by the server list today, they’ve added about 3 servers each to the US and Europe since last night, and extra one to Australia.
Forumrabbit – Amazon’s unreliable? I’ve been using their services for months and they’ve been rock solid.
You’re completely missing the point in any case – it’s not unfeasible to bring up the servers for 3 days because they don’t have to. They can scale their existing ones or temporarily add additional clusters for the exact amount of time they need them to match the exact amount of traffic they are being hit with.
Considering the amount of awful press, lost sales and such, the costs of paying for increased traffic would be minuscule in comparison. But hey, neither of us run an enormous publisher.
This ^, I lol’d so hard I nearly wet myself. This guy has it right, for some reason every fanboy is bowing down and licking the hand that beats them.
kablekill,
I think games can be art one day but we’re not there, not even close. Games are just far too monetized and ultimately don’t have any longevity whether through planned obsolescence (eg: online DRM), the publisher just simply abandoning it once the sales have been made or the ever changing hardware required to run these games ultimately becoming too rare as they age to easily run the games anymore.
As I said before, art is timeless, but one way or another all games have a use by date.
Great article. I have a few points.
1. The “reviews” that are games being played in controlled conditions should actually be called “previews” and not given a score based on that. Real reviews are when the retail product that you and I buy is played in real world conditions – therefore being more indicative of what a regular gamer would expect.
2. Actually it was Sony that started the whole “you can’t sue us” clause off (most likely due to the PSN hack) with EA following suit not long after. A similar clause was added to Steam’s TOS a while afterwards. As has been noted, whether such a clause would stand up in court remains to be seen.
3. I didn’t buy SimCity because I knew this was going to happen. EA’s PC launches tend to be a clusterfuck by default (remember BFBC2?) and it was only going to be magnified by the use of always online DRM. By contrast, the only time Steam’s DRM has bitten me in the arse was when I tried to install Aliens Colonial Marines before its official release date (Steam would activate the key on my account but wouldn’t let me install the game from the disc because it hadn’t been officially released yet).
4. Following on from point 1, if a game can’t be played in real world conditions for at least 5 hours at a time due to gamebreaking issues like a reproducible crash at a particular point early on or server connection failures, it should get a 0 by default. This is particularly important for games like SimCity and Diablo 3 with always online DRM.
Screw this Sim City noise. I want more Spore!
Now EA’s offering bribes in the form of free games.
http://www.ea.com/news/a-simcity-update-and-something-for-your-trouble
At the moment, I’m still waiting for my CJs key, but I’m not in a massive hurry as Telstra has decided to disconnect my area’s cable internet for the last couple of days.
After reading CJs blog on what’s been happening on their end, I think to criticise them may be a little harsh. Getting stooged by their supplier who in turn was stooged by EA isn’t really their fault and they have offered refunds to those who don’t wish to wait for a key. At last check their waiting on the last of their keys to arrive (which are the Limited Editions) and the ETA puts it around 8PM AEST.
As for always online DRM, I think this really needs to be an optional tickbox. Personally, I’m looking forward to playing online (once Telstra sorts their s***) because I got tired of city jumping in SC4. It will be nice to be able to focus on only my own city.
Worst.
Game Launch.
Ever.
Tim, James I feel your pain. Trying to explain things to people who “know” what they are talking about, but actually have little to no knowledge or experience about what they are commenting on is really tough.
Amazon’s cloud is one of the more advanced ones out there. To think EA and Amazon couldn’t have got together and had a discussion along the lines of “Hey Amazon how about we make a deal for day one release where you scale to demand and send us the bill for our usage of your Cloud Server setup…”. It wouldn’t have been hard, it would have cost EA an order of magnitude less in the short and the long run, and it would have given EA the Golden Release award instead of the Golden Turd award.
Thing is with D3 there was a bad reception they should have learn’t from. With Settlers 7 by Ubicrap, that’s the one they should have taken note of. That was basically this release on a smaller scale due to less demand, but still more demand than the stupid AO-DRM system could cope with.
Definition of Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. This can apply to both EA and it’s customers :(
“and a little something extra for people who bought the game.” – Here’s a crazy idea EA, instead of giving people something they haven’t paid for how about giving them what they actually did pay for.
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/simcity
“The consensus among critics and players is that this is fundamentally a great game.”
Metacritic Disagrees.
I was really looking forward to this. I dont care so much about the DRM. What pisses me off is the bloody price gouging in Australia. Our dollar is better then the US but we are still paying heaps more. Screw you EA.
What does this even mean?
I said the game had always-online DRM. You said that was sloppy journalism. I pointed out that, no, it DOES have always-online DRM, and now your argument is “Oh, it’s not SOLELY DRM”. I have no idea what we are even discussing?
SimCity has always-online DRM. That’s… just how it is. Yes, being online does more than just DRM, but that doesn’t negate any of the fact that it IS an always-online game.
Yes, I am aware that EA’s history shows some losses, but they have more than enough money to put up new servers as and when necessary which is proven by the fact that they are doing it right now. What I am getting at is that they could have done it a lot earlier and saved themselves the trouble, but clearly they weren’t expecting this reception.
Not expecting this reception? No offence but it’s standard EA practice to not have enough servers up at release to minimise costs on release. That way they expand to accommodate hence my point above where they should have had a logical discussion about the proper use of cloud servers with Amazon…
@ forumrabbit – you are just highlighting that you have no idea about server structures and how they are utilised now. The cloud service that supports Sim City is not the same as bringing up another server for an FPS. They don’t work the same. They don’t even resemble the same kind of network. The cloud service is scalable, it can dynamically increase and decrease capacity. The fact it wasn’t setup correctly AND EA didn’t allow pre-downloading of the game to prevent server overload is just inexcusable.
EA’s financial position is that they have a crap load of cash to throw about if needed. Despite some losses they have a lot of capital to work with. Claiming that’s a reason for them to be prudent with paying for servers for their own damn game is just stupidity manifest.
Not saying what game, a free game, any game, DLC for SimCity, or a game of their choosing. Could be another PR disaster in the making if they get that wrong.
EA seem to be hoping people will jump in and buy SimCity (before the 18th) on the off chance of getting a free unknown game. Knowing full well that offering a free game will mean more people hammering Simcity servers.
Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the money outweigh the needs of the users.
Been at the game all day. Only server issue was that Oceanic 1 was down when I wanted to play. Oh well Oceanic 2 was up, new city. Lets go!
10 hours later (with a lunch break)
Building a sweet city, made bank on some tourist attractions, and looking to get a 2nd city in the region up and going to sort out my services issues (sewage starting to back-up etc.)
If you were to review the game day 1, a 0 would be appropriate, however you would need to revisit the score once server issues stabilized, from there a 9/10 from me, -0.5 for needing to be online (if servers are stable) -0.5 for small city sizes, though specializing is a great idea and after experimenting with it the “game” mechanic of this outweighs a more realistic approach.
For those of you bitching about servers, always on DRM, unable to access, are you actually playing the game or just spouting shit because its the cool thing to do? – Grow up and shut up
I’m really enjoying the game, region play is now a lot more meaningful than in past iterations. It has that classic Sim City feel, to me, but has that new twist of interconnected economies and influences.
The new Sim City is more accessible to all, and that doesn’t mean “dumbed down” it means that from the get go you have more leeway to work and that problems build overtime as opposed to past Sim City games where the start was critical to success. A lot of features of past Sim City games – such as density of zoning are present but require other interaction to access (ie such as adding a planning office to your city hall etc..) So it’s there if you want to take advantage of it, if not, it’s no biggie the game doesn’t punish you for not doing it.
It’s been 10 years since a classic Sim City game and in that time The Sims have been prevalent, I think Sim City has attraction to Sim City fans and also to Sims fans (who have not played a Sim City).
I’m very impressed with Sim City, very unimpressed with the release issues, but with stability being restored the game is starting to shine through.
Tim you hero!
Tim Colwill,
Honestly, I’m so glad to be a part of a community where these crazies who know everything, and try so hard to sound successful and intelligent by pointing out professional journalists ‘failings’, get their arguments quietly and calmly shattered. Every time I see this happen, it makes me happy. It also makes me fist pump.
FYI: Our SimCity review is not far away. It’s probably also going to be a little surprising to many of you. Or not. We’ll see.
well any one with half a brain wouldn’t of bothered to try play for a few days. having played MMORPGs since there conception (UO). i dont think there is a always online game that launches smoothly.
Unfortunatly the unwashed masses cant wait to get into it and will sit there for hours hitting REFRESH while bashing there head on the keyboard , and while i agree you buy a single player game, it should be playable offline.
you either need to be practical and except that always online will “always fail” day 1 Or just dont buy it.
I don’t understand why EA have done this? 95% of the hatred towards them and this game could easily of been avoided by just giving people and option to play in single player mode independent of the EA server. Even always online DRM could have been tolerable if I could just play the game without needing EA to provide a server for me.
If this game was playable independent of an EA server I would have already purchased it and no doubt would have good things to say about it and EA, who else is in this boat?
Update: EA don’t care (from reddit):
http://i.imgur.com/inYVuJ5.jpg
Oh and just in case anyone believes EA shilling is ridiculous paranoia:
http://tinyurl.com/b7dr6hm
@Schrapple
Im certainly in that boat, Sim City is the kind of game I love to play by myself. Take my time and enjoy building whatever is I’m making. Much like Civ5 or even Minecraft builds, I just want to be left alone and build and have the ‘choice’ to go play online when I want… not when the publisher/developer says I should.
Is it just me or is the price for Australians $79 and the price for US is $59 ?
EA up to it’s old regional tricks again.
Add on the DRM issue..
Honestly i hope no one in Australia buys this tripe. Send EA a message to stop being so crap.
g2play, cdkeyshere, cjs, kinguin, ozgameshop. Take your pick.
I cant wait until they fully data mine this game and crack it so its completely offline. not cause im a fan of piracy but more of a fan of FUCK YOU corporations who think they can screw gamers over for our money. its not fair and its time they are made pay for what they have done/ trying to get away with.
I’m going to pirate this game just for the satisfaction of stealing what I actually wanted to pay for until EA went crazy with greed. Please take note EA people want to give you their money but your behavior is preventing this from happening.
^^ Mature …
???. care to elaborate?
schrapple,
The mature choice would be to not play it at all. Pirating a game is only going to make the DRM situation worse in general. Publishers are more stubborn than consumers, pirating won’t make them think “We need to stop DRM”, it’s going to be “We need more DRM”.
Watch out guys, we’ve got a bad ass here.
It’s a pain in the ass, but get over it. These things happen, that’s technology lol I don’t agree with DRM, but doing shit this like this just makes them taking piracy even more seriously…
korbain,
samurai047,
There is some serious confusion going on here about this game (and indeed my position on the situation), DRM is not the major issue, yes always online DRM is a pain in the arse but it isn’t a show stopper. The problem is requiring EA to run a server to play this game. I don’t want to have to steal this game, I wish to purchase it and play it my way, that wouldn’t require additional things from EA it would actually require fewer things than the game currently requires to play it. For me to enjoy the game the way I wish to I would literally have to pirate it, I have no other choice.
What I’m doing is trying to appeal to peoples (and hopefully EA’s) common sense, not providing customers with what they want will cause piracy which was clearly demonstrated years ago when people where illegally downloading music because it was the only way to acquire digital copies of songs, the record companies failed to fill a distribution gap that was opening up before their eyes and instead of filling the gap with electronic distribution and making money they started suing individuals. Let people give you their money, don’t try to force their hand
Mature goes out the window when multi-billion dollar corporations act like 3yr olds who threw their toys out of the pram. Sorry but even Ubisoft caved realising that DRM wasn’t the solution (then made Uplay and pissed off their customers more).
Eventually they will realise that DRM is hurting their sales more than saving them lost sales, which is an oxymoron.
There are a lot of angry people who don’t seem to understand how cloud servers work. More importantly, a lack of raw server power or bandwidth is NOT the current problem, and simply increasing the size of the clusters will NOT solve anything. For now, the quick band-aid solution has been to add more servers, as separate clusters, in order to ease the load on individual servers overall. This indicates that the issue more than likely stems from a core limitation within the individual clusters themselves. Currently all signs point towards the cluster’s master database and excessive user action validation traffic being the culprit.
Each server keeps track of users actions within a region and is responsible for tasks like handling inter-city trading, maintaining the market, leader boards and social elements… for everyone within that region.
In order to do that, the server is constantly validating and synchronising every client side action from every person within that region. Doing this ensures all the clients stay in sync with the current region state and no one is cheating.
EA never tested regions during the beta, which means their entire validation and synchronisation system never got stress tested…. bit of an oversight.
People are angry over the fact that they need to log onto a server at all, a lack of knowledge about cloud servers isn’t the cause of the frustration.
No, but people are failing to accept that SimCity 2013 is more or less a Multilayer game, and has been designed as one from the very beginning. The DRM system isn’t tacked on, it’s part of the core mechanics of the game.
Great, we have another EA employee. People don’t fail to accept things about games, games fail to deliver.
The multiplayer in a game like Simcity is at best the icing on the cake, it should only ever compliment the single player play, but it has now been forced on everyone as the main body of the game.
I wasn’t aware Maxis were obligated to keep making the same game over and over again.
God forbid a game developer wanting to build upon their title, striving to create something new and unique.
Too often publishers push for the quick buck. Rehash the same shit, repackage it with a new label and charge another $100.
At least Maxis is trying.
EDIT: So are you attacking the game now, or the DRM? They are both very different things….
Something new and unique? perhaps you should Google citiesXL.
Ea aren’t obligated to do anything, but when people are angry over the fact that the game isn’t what they would have enjoyed from a title in a series it isn’t because they are failing to accept a game concept, it is because the game has failed to make those people happy with it’s new direction.
If you have doubts about what makes people unhappy about this game you should check out metacritic, I’ll give you a hint, no-one has mentioned that they are upset because they have failed to accept that the game is multiplayer.
darknation,
According to EA, you sell something to another player and it can take 3 minutes for it to update with the server, so not sure about it constantly updating. They also said, that along with the server load, it was Maxis Simcity software database that could not handle large amounts of simulation data. They have also turned off several game features, like cheetah speed, achievements, the leader-board, among other things. Have they turned them back on?
BTW you can disconnect your computer from the internet and play for 10 minutes before the game gives you an error about being offline. Possibly they can tweak the length of time before your computer syncs with the server to lessen the burden on the servers?
People are allowed to dislike games. I’m not sure what point you are trying to make.
There will always be very vocal, negative knee-jerk reaction outcries from fans and the like after the release of a sequel, remake or episodic title.
You are allowed to dislike SimCity… Anyone is…
I don’t, however, understand the sense of entitlement that some people have. People who get genuinely irate that some game wasn’t made exactly the way they thought it should have been, or feel they were “tricked” into buying a game nothing like its predecessors despite countless reviews and possible betas / demos.
I checked out metacritic. There are a large amount of positive reviews from people who thoroughly enjoy the new spin. The game tests pretty positive for those able to play it, as well as with critics who largely avoided the server SNAFU.
The vast majority of negative reviews are because people have been unable to play the game due to the DRM issues. Comparatively only a fairly small number of people who haven’t had server issues, didn’t like the game overall.
Also, arguably, all the people vocally exclaiming that the game should be patched to offline-play, and that towns are also too small, are EXACTLY upset because they have failed to accept that the game is multiplayer. City size limitations are a specific game mechanic meant to encourage regional play. I’m not saying I AGREE with pideon-holing your entire player base into that, I do miss sandboxing, but obviously Maxis wanted to move away from macro and onto more detailed micro elements.
Yes, I shouldn’t have said constant updating, but Its fairly regular.
EA were essentially caught out in a lie, when they stated that constant online connection must be maintained because the server does lots of the simulation calculations of your city as you build it (even in single player/solo), because it was too much for 1 PC to handle. It’s been proven the client handles the calculations on its own, and can survive for several minutes without a connection before being booted. The server has nothing to do with building your city, just the interactive elements during region play.
I mentioned above the server/database issue. It is something they should have tested before launch.