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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

#321

Post by lotyrin »

rdw wrote: post #243
aeturnum wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People are upset about the lack of a single player offline mode, which absolutely is about preventing unlicensed copies. There is no technical reason for its absence. I see this sentiment expressed pretty often, but in this case it seems flawed. From what I understand, you can't build a city that does everything, instead you rely on the other cities in your 'region.' The new Simcity is no more single player than Wor…

It's possible to have a single-player experience, where one player controls all of the cities in a private 'region'. It's alluded to here: http://kotaku.com/5988848/tips-for-playing-simcity Ironically, if they hadn't included that feature, arguments such as yours would have a lot more weight, but as it is there is a purely-single-player experience, and you still needlessly connect to a server for it. (I don't own the…

And even if this were lacking, I for one would still be demanding it, and that it would work entirely offline.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#322

Post by mrinterweb »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #216
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…

Is the auth space something a startup could occupy? "Easy DRM/Auth for games that doesn't suck?"

Steam provides DRM and a marketplace.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#323

Post by DigitalSea »

omni wrote: post #317
DigitalSea wrote: post #215

"Guess what? If you'd love to experience the nonstop thrills and excitement of SimCity, then please remove $60 from your bank and promptly pay someone to kick you repeatedly in the friggin' mouth." - Ouch! Once again EA fucks up another great gaming franchise that could have made them a lot of money by implementing DRM that doesn't work. I know Blizzard did this with Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2, but at least their serve…

What was wrong with Starcraft 2?

Nothing. That is my point. Starcraft have always on DRM, but they did it right. You need an internet connection for single play in SC2 as well as Diablo 3 and they did it right at least. There were a few teething problems, but it worked.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#324

Post by DigitalSea »

chongli wrote: post #276
DigitalSea wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A social feature that isn't even relevant in solo play. You shouldn't need a network for single play.

The idea here is to force you to be reliant on the network; to move the processing onto their servers. SimCity isn't a normal game, it's a SaaS game.

This is the problem though. Their always on DRM doesn't work, they obviously didn't have enough servers to handle the load even though they would have had sales figures before the game launched. Maybe if they launched the game with enough infrastructure to cope, there would be no issue here. As pointed out somewhere else, Blizzard have done this with their last few games; Stacraft 2 (both) and Diablo 3 and people don't complain (even though at the start there were a few teething issues).

I understand the SaaS description, it's a very accurate one but the point is customers have paid for something that is essentially an overpriced server status and countdown application. This is not acceptable, it's not like the game was given away for free. People have paid for something they cannot use.

How would you feel if you just bought a new car, drove it out of the dealership and found-out it had some amazing new technological anti-theft GPS immobiliser in your car that always needed to be connected to the monitoring company network and it was preventing you from driving it out of the dealership? The dealership refuse to refund your money even though they knew the car had this issue, but they sold it anyway so you have to wait for a fix... EA sold us a lemon, I feel very ripped off.

Do EA even test their games any more or do they just develop them, throw some really buggy DRM implementation in and sell as many copies as possible? They're already one of the most hated companies in gaming, I guess they can't really lose out any more, they hit rock bottom a while ago. Much like the music industry, they'll eventually start losing copious amounts of cash and blame piracy instead of themselves. So tired of EA's crap.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#325

Post by mctx »

baddox wrote: post #249
gknoy wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to recall that the reason for the cloud based server was to leverage more number crunching power to yield better AI. Running it locally might not help. (Though, it certainly is better than no server, and it'd be interesting if they let people tune the fidelity of the processing so that it could run locally, or on a private server.)

I highly doubt they are providing server resources for every player that are more powerful than the player's desktop or laptop computer. Surely that would be extremely expensive.

I agree - at a very low 100MHz per player that's 25 players to a 2.5GHz Xeon core, 100 per CPU, 200 per server. Assume 100,000 players, that's 500 decently spec'd servers plus redundancy, bandwidth, storage, sysadmins, etc.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#327

Post by jlgreco »

Steko wrote: post #277
Alex3917 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I feel bad for the game devs who got to see their hard work turn into something they don't intend." On the contrary, this is by far the most realistic simulation of working for government that's ever been created.

I love how the anti-government mindset even blames greed based failures of private industry on the government.

I love how the pro-government mindset sees even casual jokes at the expense of governments as "blaming the government".

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#328

Post by serf »

aiwinters wrote: post #305
AlexDanger wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember EA is a business, not an offshoot of Reddit/HN. Imagine you're the SimCity product manager and the choice was between a massive refactor or provisioning a bunch of new servers. Which would you choose? I'd love to agree with you, but I just dont think its plausible.

I agree with you that adding a bunch of servers looks like the simpler (cheaper, in terms of Net Present Value) option. But I worry that however they've set it up is just not horizontally scalable. They say that a large bunch of the simulation runs on their servers. And that each city is connected (via the graph) to every other city. What if they haven't built in clean partitioning? If cities really do interact with…

Everything you said is completely sane. With that said :

EA's SimCity 5 (the newest release) stores towns and character profiles on a per server basis, meaning 'US West 1' and 'US West 2' are different. You must even re complete the forced tutorial if changing servers.

It's unclear what parts of are being offloaded to the servers. Possibly only the 'global economy' stuff, along with other 'social' features. A client can be disconnected for 20-30 minutes and maintain a stable game until the client forces the eventual disconnection "Because a connection to Origin cannot be maintained". Strange for the gameplay to not noticeably change when disconnected from the machines that are supposedly running simulation for you..

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#329

Post by andrewmunsell »

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... .

No one likes thinking about Societies as a SimCity game ;)

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#330

Post by krelian »

spartango wrote: post #81

Can we talk about this more clearly? This isn't strictly "evil DRM" as people are highlighting. Unlike some other games, it's not like SimCity is just phoning home to figure out if it is licensed or not, and preventing unlicensed copies. SimCity depends on EA/Maxis' server infrastructure for a great deal of storage and computation related to the macro-scale components of each game. Not only is city state synced there…

I'll bet good money that the game was designed from scratch to require a constant connection or otherwise the project would not be approved.
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