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Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

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Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#131

Post by tsunamifury »

amitparikh wrote: post #70
kevinalexbrown wrote: post #42

I feel bad for the game devs who got to see their hard work turn into something they don't intend. I suppose this is a great advertising technique for small firms, startups, indie shops, etc. "Don't want this[ http://amazon-pulls-sim-city ] to happen? Work for our small team. We won't destroy your work." I know it's standard to say "you get a part in the decisionmaking process!" That's part of it. But a lot of people…

Isn't this just a technical error (bug) that is a game dev's (or infrastructure engineer's) responsibility? I understand the frustration at the DRM concept, but you can't blame this on the larger entity as a whole when it was likely just a bug in some code or a small oversight. Things were clearly working when it was in beta.

The point is that its a highly failure prone requirement with dire consequences. Imagine if you were designing a car and the Business Analyst told you that this car needed a constant internet connection at all times or else the engine would immediately cease injecting gas.

While you could blame the engineers for all the cars that died in the middle of highways, it'd be far more realistic to blame the Business Analyst for demanding such an arduous and failure prone requirement.

Engineers can only make things work to a point and after that some real world limitations need to be taken into account.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#132

Post by Bockit »

cnlwsu wrote: post #115
mortenjorck wrote: post #37

EA needs to pivot this game, fast. Even in the best case scenario, where the servers all get fixed this evening and the game works flawlessly for everyone for a month straight, the damage to the game's name has been done. The meme is hatched: SimCity 2013 has a highly brittle dependency on poorly-planned cloud infrastructure. There's a private region mode in the game (that you nonetheless can't use offline in the cur…

Diablo 3 was pretty horrible at first too for the same reason. I don't know if you will call that a success or failure though.

Anecdotally, I still have people dismiss Diablo 3 over the connectivity issues at launch, and make error 37 comments. Even from people who played through the issues and stuck around for a bit, it's the thing that stands out most for them.

Success or failure depends on your definition of success here. Successful game, sure. Successful sequel to Diablo 2, it doesn't seem to have the same popularity, and I think the connection issues at launch framed a lot of people's opinions about the game.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#133

Post by gambiting »

vyrotek wrote: post #71
ececconi wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of D3's processing is done offloaded? Are there any articles online that I could read about this?

Originally they told us quite a bit of logic was done on their servers. But then they announced that Diablo 3 would be playable offline on the PlayStation 4. Now I don't know what to believe. Could it be it was all just talk to stop us from trying?

No, item drops are actually done on a server, to guarantee fair drops for everyone(you can sell them for real money, so you would rather make sure nobody just adds an item worth $$$ to their inventory). PS4 won't be connected to the Auction House, so most likely it will include just its own, internal version of the server that will generate item drops.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#134

Post by eswangren »

amitparikh wrote: post #70
kevinalexbrown wrote: post #42

I feel bad for the game devs who got to see their hard work turn into something they don't intend. I suppose this is a great advertising technique for small firms, startups, indie shops, etc. "Don't want this[ http://amazon-pulls-sim-city ] to happen? Work for our small team. We won't destroy your work." I know it's standard to say "you get a part in the decisionmaking process!" That's part of it. But a lot of people…

Isn't this just a technical error (bug) that is a game dev's (or infrastructure engineer's) responsibility? I understand the frustration at the DRM concept, but you can't blame this on the larger entity as a whole when it was likely just a bug in some code or a small oversight. Things were clearly working when it was in beta.

Of course you can; the decision to use an "online always" DRM scheme is made at the top. It's bullshit, the same garbage blizzard used with DIII. It makes no sense for games that can be played single player. Online should be an option, not a prerequisite.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#135

Post by deoxxa »

nwh wrote: post #65
deoxxa wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of started poking around at the backend protocol this morning. It's all websockets over HTTPS (very trendy stuff) and is hosted on EC2. I'm yet to dig much further than "let's see what this looks like in wireshark", but the behaviour and some of the errors I've observed in-game point to some kind of sync-every-now-and-then architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if it was really easy to do up a custom server for…

The "hidden" servers are probably due to the game not being released in Europe yet. I'm assuming they are reserved capacity for when hundreds of thousands of new users join.

That makes a lot of sense, I hadn't thought about that.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#136

Post by gambiting »

cnlwsu wrote: post #115
mortenjorck wrote: post #37

EA needs to pivot this game, fast. Even in the best case scenario, where the servers all get fixed this evening and the game works flawlessly for everyone for a month straight, the damage to the game's name has been done. The meme is hatched: SimCity 2013 has a highly brittle dependency on poorly-planned cloud infrastructure. There's a private region mode in the game (that you nonetheless can't use offline in the cur…

Diablo 3 was pretty horrible at first too for the same reason. I don't know if you will call that a success or failure though.

I've had Diablo 3 since day one and played successfully to level 60 with two characters, never had any problems with connection. And SimCity doesn't work sometimes - it just doesn't work at all.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#138

Post by talmand »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #60
talmand wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the box art says SimCity with no "V". The promotional materials on the EA site says SimCity with no "V". If it actually is named SimCity V then it's easy to understand the confusion. Although I wouldn't call it a reboot necessarily since every version is more or less a reboot, so to speak.

It's actually the sixth SimCity game, not the fifth. The fifth game was SimCity Societies. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity#Personal_computer_versi... .

Ah, I had forgotten about that one.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#139

Post by scarlson »

gambiting wrote: post #136
cnlwsu wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diablo 3 was pretty horrible at first too for the same reason. I don't know if you will call that a success or failure though.

I've had Diablo 3 since day one and played successfully to level 60 with two characters, never had any problems with connection. And SimCity doesn't work sometimes - it just doesn't work at all.

You weren't playing Diablo 3 at release then.

Give EA time and Sim City will stabilize as well as D3 has, either because they've expanded hardware, or shrunk their user base.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#140

Post by [deleted] »

DannoHung wrote: post #107
baddox wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The meme is hatched: SimCity 2013 has a highly brittle dependency on poorly-planned cloud infrastructure. To the tech-literate crowd, this will be the meme. But for the average gamer, the meme is different, and I might argue worse: Sim City simply doesn't work.

The meme I see tends to be: EA ruins everything.

[deleted]
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