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SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

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Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#51

Post by pixl97 »

endianswap wrote: post #33
NoPiece wrote: post #15

EA should clean house on their PR team. What disastrous responses. To starting this post with, "I hate to disturb you when you’re playing SimCity," is so gross, self congratulatory, and not contrite. That plus doubling down on the dishonesty instead of really offering straight answers is just going to fuel the fires.

There's a subtle piece here that a lot of folks are missing: it's not just EA, but also Maxis, independently responding to the community. Maxis being the developer, EA being the publisher. That's why part of this is a shitstorm, Maxis and EA are sharing contrary words with the community, so the community sees double-speak and stops trusting anything from EA or Maxis.

There is no Maxis, only EA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxis#Acquisition_by_EA

Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#52

Post by darkarmani »

itafroma wrote: post #32
fuuuuuuuuuuu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they charged you $15 per month, they'd have to refund you for the fact it's been down a significant portion of the month; I mean, can you imagine the shitshow if WoW were down for a week and Blizzard just kept charging people (and gave no credit)? This way they can pretend they aren't just taking your money and completely failing to deliver a viable product on the timing promised.

Funny you should mention WoW: its launch was arguably much worse than SimCity's, lasting far longer (it took a good month or two to settle down). If you do a search for "wow launch disaster" or "wow launch 2004", you'll find a number of message boards with the same type of anger and frustration demonstrated with the SimCity launch. And they did that not only charging full retail price, but a $15/month subscription fe…

You are going to compare a launch 9 years ago to what is acceptable today? Besides, the whole point of WoW was that it wasn't going to be single-player. Sims could avoid the server meltdowns by having a single player mode.

Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#53

Post by moe »

milkshakes wrote: post #36

> I hate to disturb you when you’re playing SimCity, All 12 of you who can actually play > but I’d like to offer some straight answers on the topic: Always-Connected and why SimCity is not an offline experience. I'm going to spend exactly one word answering this question. > Always-Connected is a big change from SimCities of the past. We at Maxis used to care about our customers, games, and integrity > It didn’t come…

You should slap this into a nicely formatted HTML page and put it up on "honestmaxis.com" (or something less susceptible to a lawsuit).

In the best case someone at Maxis reads it and gets a clue (sadly unlikely). In the worst case it puts a smile on the face of every Sim City player who stumbles over it.

Either way, thanks from me, I enjoyed this translation.

Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#54

Post by DannyBee »

simonsarris wrote: post #5

This was dreadful and embarrassing to read through. Zero new information, no apologies, just dodging. > You can pop from work to home, play the game and have your cities available to you anywhere. "Anywhere" there's an internet connection, "anytime" their servers are up. You want to claim its an MMO? You want to claim game-as-a-service? Fine. But sell it as that, charge me $15 a month for an ephemeral product. Not $6…

I actually don't understand why they would release a statement like this. It does nothing but stoke the flames.

Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#56

Post by milkshakes »

xymostech wrote: post #48
milkshakes wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What some people may not realize is that the cities in this new game are pitifully small (probably so that a computer can handle trying to update 20k sims at a time), so in order to actually do anything of significance, you usually have to draw from surrounding cities for materials, people, etc. This is the part of the game that requires online-only, because unless you want to be simulating all of the cities in you…

>But if they are, it leads one to question what exactly their vision was focused on. I think it's pretty clear that their vision is focused on the "social" aspects, and with that comes the idea of having all of your friends build a single small city in your region, and you all interact with each other and stuff. I've seen some examples of this happening, it looks pretty fun. I'm sure people would like the option to b…

Do you honestly believe that the primary motivation for this evolution to SimCityVille has anything to do with how much fun the new version is?

Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#57

Post by DrJ »

milkshakes wrote: post #36

> I hate to disturb you when you’re playing SimCity, All 12 of you who can actually play > but I’d like to offer some straight answers on the topic: Always-Connected and why SimCity is not an offline experience. I'm going to spend exactly one word answering this question. > Always-Connected is a big change from SimCities of the past. We at Maxis used to care about our customers, games, and integrity > It didn’t come…

>> From the ground up, we designed this game with multiplayer in mind – using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in; a global, ever-changing, social world. >We took a look at Zynga, and they seemed to be making money at the time.

Sounds so true that I almost spat out my drink.

Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#58

Post by itafroma »

darkarmani wrote: post #52
itafroma wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you should mention WoW: its launch was arguably much worse than SimCity's, lasting far longer (it took a good month or two to settle down). If you do a search for "wow launch disaster" or "wow launch 2004", you'll find a number of message boards with the same type of anger and frustration demonstrated with the SimCity launch. And they did that not only charging full retail price, but a $15/month subscription fe…

You are going to compare a launch 9 years ago to what is acceptable today? Besides, the whole point of WoW was that it wasn't going to be single-player. Sims could avoid the server meltdowns by having a single player mode.

Where did I comment on or compare the acceptability of either? GGP mentioned the hypothetical outrage that would occur if WoW was unavailable for a week: well, surprise, it actually did fail, repeatedly, and not just for a week—but for weeks on end—during its launch. And just like SimCity, there was a large amount of justified outrage. It's simply historical context: we don't need to imagine the so-called "shitshow" because it actually happened.

Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#59

Post by ijk »

DrJ wrote: post #57
milkshakes wrote: post #36

> I hate to disturb you when you’re playing SimCity, All 12 of you who can actually play > but I’d like to offer some straight answers on the topic: Always-Connected and why SimCity is not an offline experience. I'm going to spend exactly one word answering this question. > Always-Connected is a big change from SimCities of the past. We at Maxis used to care about our customers, games, and integrity > It didn’t come…

>> From the ground up, we designed this game with multiplayer in mind – using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in; a global, ever-changing, social world. >We took a look at Zynga, and they seemed to be making money at the time. Sounds so true that I almost spat out my drink.

The sad thing is, Zynga knows how to run a game as a service. They have the engineering down to a science, and a launch like this would never happen for them. For starters, they would have done continuous internal beta testing, had a soft launch that would have caught these issues, and have actually engineered their cloud servers to scale, rather than act like individual WOW shards. Actual WOW shards are run across on multiple scalable servers, I should add. Blizzard also knows what they are doing.

Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#60

Post by ijk »

milkshakes wrote: post #36

> I hate to disturb you when you’re playing SimCity, All 12 of you who can actually play > but I’d like to offer some straight answers on the topic: Always-Connected and why SimCity is not an offline experience. I'm going to spend exactly one word answering this question. > Always-Connected is a big change from SimCities of the past. We at Maxis used to care about our customers, games, and integrity > It didn’t come…

> We thought of calling it SimCityVille, but that just didn't have the same ring to it.

Amusingly, EA also has SimCity Social, a Facebook game, launched last June. It doesn't have server problems.

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