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Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

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Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#21

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

People are complaining as if DRM was the reason they made it like this, EA is evil, yada-yada. It isn't. It's pretty clear they had a vision for this game to be a MMO/social game from day one.

The problem stems more from their failure at scaling than not supporting an offline mode. Diablo was the same crap on launch week.

There's an apparent pressure from publishers to create always-online games, but something tells me the teams are not having the experience/schedule/man-power to create scalable architectures to back it. Massive multiplayer gaming is certainly a hard problem.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#22

Post by meric »

throwaway420 wrote: post #19
wmf wrote: post #3

I'm not sure how fun "a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff" would be, considering how small each city is. A lot of the fun is playing at the region level.

Don't worry. I'm sure Sim City "Megatropolis" DLC is soon coming that doubles the default city size. Only $19.95 or whatever they think people will pay. And don't worry about the traffic jams from bigger cities. Sim City Subway edition will comes out soon after. Only $15.95. (yes I am very cynical and angry about this and making bitter sarcastic comments. This is a game I've wanted for a long time but is so flawed be…

I'll wait till I get the "Gold Edition" or whatever that includes all these expansion packs and the original game for the same price as the game costs now, a year down the road.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#23

Post by tolmasky »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #21

People are complaining as if DRM was the reason they made it like this, EA is evil, yada-yada. It isn't. It's pretty clear they had a vision for this game to be a MMO/social game from day one. The problem stems more from their failure at scaling than not supporting an offline mode. Diablo was the same crap on launch week. There's an apparent pressure from publishers to create always-online games, but something tells…

If their vision was for this game to be an MMO/social game "from day one", then they should have done a way better job sharing that vision and framing the discussion that way.

The social/multiplayer aspects of Diablo, WoW, and SC are obvious to me, which is why Blizzard's move never really concerned me that much. Add on top of that the truly well done matchmaking system and I hardly think about it all. Doing things well goes a long way in convincing naysayers.

However, when I think SimCity, all I can think of is single player. And the vague things I've heard about interacting with others seem really lame. Again, maybe there are some awesome multiplayer aspects, but I have not heard of them and it sounds like most people aren't that interested in them.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#24

Post by andrewfelix »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #21

People are complaining as if DRM was the reason they made it like this, EA is evil, yada-yada. It isn't. It's pretty clear they had a vision for this game to be a MMO/social game from day one. The problem stems more from their failure at scaling than not supporting an offline mode. Diablo was the same crap on launch week. There's an apparent pressure from publishers to create always-online games, but something tells…

If it isn't about DRM and is in fact about the MMO/Social aspects, then why are EA and Maxis at pains to describe it as something else?

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#25

Post by MichaelGG »

larrydavid wrote: post #7

As usual with 'anonymous sources/insiders' it's all complete conjecture. The only people that truly know are EA/Maxis. EDIT: Seems people disagree that this isn't complete guesswork. Yes the game runs for a while without a connection, but that doesn't prove that servers aren't necessary as the headline claims. There is no hard, undeniable evidence. It's the same story that has been rehashed since the game was release…

To get an actual bayesian estimate, you'd need to check the reliability of the site (RPS) with respect to past "leaks" being correct or not. A single incorrect leak does not necessarily completely change the priors.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#26

Post by fennecfoxen »

throwaway420 wrote: post #18
MBCook wrote: post #13

The thing I don't understand about all this is why they were unable to new servers online. After everything hit the fan, they announced they were working on it and had gotten two new servers up the day before. Two servers? It just seems unbelievable to me that the backend was designed in a way that it couldn't be scaled out any faster than that. Since each region is a discrete unit, you'd think they should be able to…

While I don't know for certain, I can't possibly imagine that they've just added two physical machines. Small websites operate with more servers than that, let alone a AAA title from a major studio. I don't think they literally mean two servers - it sounds like they're trying to make the explanation simpler for consumers. What they're probably referring to is a self-contained cluster of machines that runs all of the…

"While I don't know for certain, I can't possibly imagine that they've just added two physical machines."

I can totally imagine that. Be afraid. Be very afraid. :)

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#27

Post by lmkg »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #21

People are complaining as if DRM was the reason they made it like this, EA is evil, yada-yada. It isn't. It's pretty clear they had a vision for this game to be a MMO/social game from day one. The problem stems more from their failure at scaling than not supporting an offline mode. Diablo was the same crap on launch week. There's an apparent pressure from publishers to create always-online games, but something tells…

> People are complaining as if DRM was the reason they made it like this, EA is evil, yada-yada. It isn't. It's pretty clear they had a vision for this game to be a MMO/social game from day one.

These two statements don't contradict each other.

People are complaining because EA changed the fundamental premise of the game from single-player to multi-player, and (people think) that change was driven by business goals and not from design goals. "DMR" is no longer a strictly accurate term, because it's now a design principle rather than a technology, but that's exactly what has people so riled up. They perceive that the principles of DRM are working "up the stack," so to speak, and are now infecting not just the game technology, but the game vision as well, making it a more insidious and existential threat than it was previously.

The decision to shift a fundamentally single-player franchise in a fundamentally multi-player direction is questionable at best. While it may not be so black-and-white as EA handing down a mandate, and I'm certain that business interests at least influenced the decision.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#28

Post by zevyoura »

manmal wrote: post #5
jiggy2011 wrote: post #4

So, if it's not much engineering effort for EA to make the game single player it shouldn't be too much engineering effort for people who are not EA..

I'm pretty sure they reused lots of Sims 1-3 code, and they really have this simulation thingy figured out. Most probably some really good and generic engine, or else they could not pump out Sims extensions every other month. I have quite some respect for this, it certainly took years.

> I'm pretty sure they reused lots of Sims 1-3 code

You made this assertion elsewhere in this thread also. I don't see any reason to believe this is the case, do you have any evidence in favor of this theory? There's a huge amount of PR from them saying this is not the case, and from my minimal experience with game development it makes no sense.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#29

Post by xymostech »

baddox wrote: post #6
wmf wrote: post #3

I'm not sure how fun "a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff" would be, considering how small each city is. A lot of the fun is playing at the region level.

I suspect it would be at least slightly more fun than not being able to play at all.

Considering that about 90% of the gameplay comes from interacting with the other cities in the region, I really don't think this would work out as well as people think it would. The cities are small enough that you can't supply all the power/water/garbage/people/industry out of one town, and it's the EA servers that are maintaining the connections between them.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#30

Post by Afforess »

MBCook wrote: post #13

The thing I don't understand about all this is why they were unable to new servers online. After everything hit the fan, they announced they were working on it and had gotten two new servers up the day before. Two servers? It just seems unbelievable to me that the backend was designed in a way that it couldn't be scaled out any faster than that. Since each region is a discrete unit, you'd think they should be able to…

Each game "Server" for SimCity is actually an Amazon EC2 cluster of servers, with 1 central master DB server. Even when the servers were "full" on game launch, all of the EC2 servers were responding to requests normally - it was the cluster's master DB server that was slow. All of the "servers" are actually in the UK Amazon EC2.

This brings us to the scalability problems and why regions/cities are not shared to all servers. The database is the bottleneck, so sharing regions between servers would only worsen performance.

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