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A SimCity Update

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Re: A SimCity Update

#41

Post by FireBeyond »

DannyBee wrote: post #32
tfe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can this be allowed by their merchant agreements with the card companies?

Whether it is or isn't, threats go a long way. Like the signs you see in parking lots that say "not responsible for lost or stolen items" or "not responsible for damage to your car". They often are, it just says that to cut down on lawsuits. (This used to be universally true, though it's become less true over time that they are responsible)

"Keep back 500 feet, not responsible for damage" on trucks carrying gravel or other debris / detritus.

Absolutely not the case, and non-enforceable. You just have to be ready to show that the civil balance of probabilities is that the truck ahead of you on the road did damage to your vehicle by way of an unsecured load.

Re: A SimCity Update

#42

Post by tlear »

jmspring wrote: post #12

Can someone explain the following - People are upset with the game -- sounds like it is unplayable Most of those people paid with credit card. I understand the desire to want to play the game, but if EA is being a sh*t, why not go the charge dispute route?

The best route is to not buy EA games. This is the route I been on for a few years now

Re: A SimCity Update

#43

Post by wnight »

jaggederest wrote: post #17
jmspring wrote: post #12

Can someone explain the following - People are upset with the game -- sounds like it is unplayable Most of those people paid with credit card. I understand the desire to want to play the game, but if EA is being a sh*t, why not go the charge dispute route?

EA will ban your Origin account. So if you own any other games, you lose them. Parenthetically, this move by them also ensures that everyone who purchased it will lose two games if they charge back the purchase...

And ensures that they'll immediately get more chargebacks. Good luck with that.

Re: A SimCity Update

#44

Post by junkilo »

citricsquid wrote: post #18

The faux candor is cute. The upside is that these troubles will hopefully provide a good case study for future games of this sort. The reviews of Sim City are extremely positive about the gameplay, if the value the server based experience provides to Sim City can be utilised in other games without the issues that Sim City has had the future could be very promising.

Unfortunately webscale and load testing skills can only be passed tribally.

Re: A SimCity Update

#45

Post by Kiro »

Why are you guys so upset? Serious question. EA screws up, admits it and gives a nice compensation. What more do you expect?

Re: A SimCity Update

#46

Post by Kiro »

ihsw wrote: post #34
jorts wrote: post #5

This is a great opportunity for them to turn a shitty situation into one that will awe their customers. They should go overboard in terms of making their existing and potential new customers happy. While this is a good gesture, I don't think it's enough.

The really depressing bit about the situation is if their servers had handled the load well then nobody would have complained.

What's depressing about that?

Re: A SimCity Update

#47

Post by algorias »

deminature wrote: post #29
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sometimes happens: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/05/the-witcher-2-patch-re...

Assuming you agree with CD Projekt's approach to gathering piracy statistics, the community rewarded them by pirating the game in extraordinarily large numbers, despite the gesture of good faith http://gamespot.com/news/the-witcher-2-pirated-45-million-ti...

First of all, what is this monolithic "community" you're talking about? Secondly, the question is not if more people will pirate without DRM, but if the company can increase their revenues - in the long term - by making that move.

Re: A SimCity Update

#48

Post by baddox »

tfe wrote: post #33
kefs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam does it too. Status quo.

I'm aware. Question still stands.

Well what exactly does the question mean? I can't think of an answer to how that would satisfy you. They simply agree on the terms.

Re: A SimCity Update

#49

Post by pilif »

I wonder. In a previous post here on HN, somebody said in a comment, that the Sim City infrastructure runs in Amazon's infrastructure.

Isn't one of the big advantages of cloud computing the ability to scale your hardware with demand? Why only scale up by 130% when there's still people having problems? Why not scale until everybody has a good experience?

I don't even think it's going to cost all that much: after the initial onrush, the number of concurrent sessions is likely going to drop rapidly, at which point, they can easily scale down the infrastructure (maybe forcing regions to be consolidated, but as a player I'd rather suddenly have a new neighbor city than a ghost town because my neighbor stopped playing).

If you can scale up by 130% in one week, you can also scale up by 500%. Or however much it takes.

Them not doing this, leads to twoconclusions: 1) they don't care about the current ire among gamers. If the game is good, the rocky start will be forgiven when in two weeks time load normalizes and it will be forgotten within a month. And 2) having overloaded servers due to "unanticipated demand" is in the long run good news to give, increasing the perceived value and quality of the game.

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