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SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

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Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#61

Post by mynameisvlad »

b3b0p wrote: post #49

If they had called this Sim City Online and marketed as not the next Sim City, but more of an MMO like Ever Quest, Guild Wars, and Star Wars Galaxies would be people be complaining as much if they knew they had to be online to play it. Sim City 4, 2000, and the original still run perfect and are extremely fun to play. Sim City 4 is on Steam even making it easy to get right now. I'm tempted to pick that up since I hav…

So what would make it different from a regular SimCity game? The fact that it has the word online after it? That's a weak argument at best. They from the start called it a new game, not a sequel, and its been known for a long time that it would have the always-on component.

The game was never meant to be a sequel. That's why it's calls SimCity and not SimCity 5. People just decide to interpret it as such even if its not.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#62

Post by Irregardless »

outworlder wrote: post #46
Irregardless wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Server woes are a necessary evil with MMOs, and people buy the game knowing they'll have to deal with some amount of downtime due to maintenance, overcrowding or just plain growing pains. Try telling FPS players that their game will be unavailable every Tuesday morning for 6-12 hours and they'll probably riot -- that's standard downtime in the MMO world though.

No, that's actually standard WOW downtime. Check out Eve Online. They've been gradually decreasing downtime. Last time I played, it was like 30 minutes every day, with 15 minutes just for the cluster to reboot (the client has a nice server status, with a countdown and ETA). Their goal was to reduce it to zero (it was 1 hour when I first started playing).

WoW has similarly minor downtime most weeks, but the point still stands: MMO players are willing to tolerate significantly longer and more frequent interruptions due to the nature of the games and the architecture necessary to support them.

I don't know how much simulation is being done server-side or how resource intensive it is, but if the Sim City of 10+ years ago was possible without it, I'm pretty sure EA could've done this one without it as well. Smells like an excuse to me.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#63

Post by cabalamat »

danielweber wrote: post #33
Irregardless wrote: post #28

> There's also the question of preserving gaming history. As we saw with THQ last month, publishers aren't immortal. They can die, and had THQ implemented always-online DRM in Darksiders II, all copies of that game might've died with it when the rights to the series weren't bought up by another publisher. That's the part that concerns me the most. I still install (and play) lots of old games on every computer I own -…

but piracy seems to be our only guaranteed method of preserving them You aren't going to pirate Sim City 5. This is the future of gaming. Companies are just going to avoid all the grief of piracy and weird DRM by either moving to locked-down platforms (iOS and consoles) or into games that have essential online components. It's a classic prisoner's dilemma. I'd love to by a game and install it on my PC without it taki…

> This is the future of gaming

It's a future, but not the only one. There could be crowdfunded open source games, for example.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#64

Post by pc86 »

sbov wrote: post #58
Irregardless wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You aren't going to pirate Sim City 5. I'm tempted to believe that due to the simulation grunt work being done server-side. But people also said the same thing about WoW and Starcraft II, yet you can easily play either of those for free with fully functioning multiplayer (just not on Battle.net).

This is wrong. The simulation is not serverside. If you disconnect from the servers you can play your city all you want. The only serverside aspect is saves and social (including region play), which would be relatively easier to recreate.

The only serverside aspect is saves and social

Am I misunderstanding what you mean by saves? That seems pretty important to me.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#65

Post by DocG »

kyrra wrote: post #3

Having played simcity as much as the servers have allowed since launch, there are definitely a number of online tie-ins. I'm sure they could have done it with player run servers or LAN type connectivity, but it removes the social aspect of the game. I rather line being able to look at the leader board, then load the cities listed there to see what they look like. Playing with a few friends in a region is a pretty coo…

All your city is managed in your local PC. Everything runs fine, only saving is cloud. Proof is that people have played though server crashes without noticing, up to 40 minutes.

But, region management is server side.

So basically, if one manages to skip log in and makes save-s local then one can play single city offline.

This is as much information as I have at the moment.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#67

Post by DocG »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #56
danielweber wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parts of the game logic are run on the server. I don't expect more game companies to stay away from this; I expect them to do this a lot more for PC gaming. Probably not explicitly, but as much as people in /r/technology insists piracy doesn't matter, the companies continue to care. With online games, the need to worry about that largely evaporates. Instead, I expect companies to put in proper rate limiting, fallback…

"Parts of the game logic are run on the server." By which they mean: storage of save-games, and resource trading with your city-neighbors. That is ALL.

You are right.

People have managed to play trough server crashes without noticing. Only after they quit to region, it disconnects.

City is managed locally. Only region management save files are server side.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#68

Post by ChrisLTD »

potatolicious wrote: post #29
mikeash wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this actually the case? I've seen a lot of people say it, but then I've also seen some people say that they were able to keep playing for considerable periods of time even while the servers were offline. It sounds like one of those things where marketing-speak got misinterpreted as a technical design that isn't actually how it's built, but I really haven't investigated besides reading comments.

It's tricky because of the lack of concrete information. IMO the claim is substantiated by the fact that they turned off the highest simulation speed in an effort to increase server capacity - so clearly the server is tied into the basic simulation to some degree. How deep the ties go is hard to tell. If this was purely a DRM maneuver I highly doubt server capacity would be in any way tied to game speed.

My theory is that the game speed was reduced because at regular intervals your PC needs to check in with the server to: a) transfer resources between cities in a region, b) update leader boards, c) save your city.

The slower the game, the less often they have these hits to their servers.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#69

Post by jlgreco »

pc86 wrote: post #64
sbov wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. The simulation is not serverside. If you disconnect from the servers you can play your city all you want. The only serverside aspect is saves and social (including region play), which would be relatively easier to recreate.

The only serverside aspect is saves and social Am I misunderstanding what you mean by saves? That seems pretty important to me.

Important yes, but also presumably fairly simple to reverse engineer.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#70

Post by svachalek »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #61
b3b0p wrote: post #49

If they had called this Sim City Online and marketed as not the next Sim City, but more of an MMO like Ever Quest, Guild Wars, and Star Wars Galaxies would be people be complaining as much if they knew they had to be online to play it. Sim City 4, 2000, and the original still run perfect and are extremely fun to play. Sim City 4 is on Steam even making it easy to get right now. I'm tempted to pick that up since I hav…

So what would make it different from a regular SimCity game? The fact that it has the word online after it? That's a weak argument at best. They from the start called it a new game, not a sequel, and its been known for a long time that it would have the always-on component. The game was never meant to be a sequel. That's why it's calls SimCity and not SimCity 5. People just decide to interpret it as such even if its…

So you are arguing that "SimCity Online" does not sound different than a regular SimCity game, but "SimCity" does?

Does not compute.

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