311–320 of 452 posts
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Yep. There were probably tech guys who said you shouldn't do it, but the tech guys that said you can probably got the promotions.
It kills me a little inside to know this is probably 100% correct.
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I agree. I do think the effect of piracy on a company's bottom line is overstated in just about every case. It's easy for us an the HN community (generally pretty intelligent and technically inclined) to forget that downloading a torrent isn't the simplest thing in the world, particularly the lengths you need to go to in order to get some pirated games to even function properly.
Torrents have gotten pretty amazingly simple and are now mainstream . My 65 year old mother figured out how to torrent a TV show (that wasn't available in Canada - she tried to buy it first, but they wouldn't sell it to her) in about 30 minutes, including the time required to download and install µTorrent. I would guess that 90%+ of the computer using population is now comfortable torrenting files. Agreed with you on…
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yeah it. EA shuts down the servers when they are tired of paying for them. Game dies. Sim City get puts on madden schedule.
Or, slightly less cynically, demand is always orders of magnitude higher for the first week or two after release, so it's only a short term investment in servers if they can be merged later.
EA is offering refunds but only in some cases, with a very haphazard criteria: http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18gs2vgs50fjijpg/original.jp...
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No. One thing is to offer a "social mode", even to push it hard in terms of marketing or menu placement or whatever, another to require a connection at all times, even in "sandboxed mode" where you're not going to interact with anyone else -- which is completely preposterous, and it's done only because of DRM. If the problem was "going social", you'd see more p2p and lan-gaming features, rather than "let's all connec…
> to require a connection at all times, even in "sandboxed mode" where you're not going to interact with anyone else -- which is completely preposterous this is not preposterous at all. if all the simulation happens on the server side, its not necessarily trivial to have that run on the client. maybe the server requires unix. maybe the server requires an oracle database.
This could be a very big moment. EA is selling a completely broken product - and I mean that from the perspective of the average consumer, not the nerd who thinks all DRM is broken - and they're doing it for absolutely no reason . If this lasts long enough and gets enough press, it could actually be a turning point against DRM like this. That would be so wonderful.
So there was a big server meltdown during the Diablo 3 launch, is this the same thing? I'm not sure how long the Sim City servers have been down but is this just initial launch problems? I'm surprised Amazon has done this as they didn't do the same for D3. How long have logins been totall down for now? Also I think it would be helpful for reviews like this on Amazon and Spore to restrict the reviews to only verified…
With SC5 its the actual game play servers that seem to be full, and also fairly buggy (saved game corruption, unable to create regions/cities or join, losing hours of work)
"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…
The dev team did an IAMA on Reddit a few months ago, where this was all foreshadowed: http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/14v8er/drama...
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You're saying that the client PCs are so weak, yet EA can offload it into the cloud for cheap? How exactly does that work? My 3-year-old ultralight laptop has as much CPU as an EC2 M1 large. I find it hard to believe the game is so complicated a laptop will struggle, but EA can efficiently load it onto servers? That sounds pretty hard to believe. Even if the target player is using a crappy Netbook, you're talking abo…
SimCity system requirements: Intel players will need, minimally, a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, while our AMD players will need at least a an Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+. Those sound pretty capable of a significant amount of simulation themselves...
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Kind of defeats the purpose of doing an AMA if you're not allowed to answer any of the interesting questions. I sympathise if that was the case, but people should remember what the second 'A' stands for.
The purpose of the AMA was to promote the game, not satisfy readers' questions. This is the case for all political/corporate AMAs.
In a similar fashion, you don't really add information to the discussion when you make an analogous statement about the misuse of an AMA thread.