OT: EA botches Sim City Launch

[Benbos]

They're selling games based on reputation. Not because everyone loves the new iteration.

The only reason D3 and even Simcity do so well is because of past games that were successful.

Now tell that to Blizz or EA nd you'll get a different reason/answer.

I keep hearing that argument and I simply think that's false. First a LOT of gamers of this generation don't even remember D2. I think WOW sold MORE copies of D3 than the old D2 (which aged very badly btw). These 100-200K hardcore D2 players are not a big group.

D3 sold 2 million extra copies AFTER its ...6 weeks launching period: 333.000 per month actually up to Christmas.

What I think is that the VAST majority don't care about on line only. Only the players of hacked copies complain.

The fact SimCity stays on top of recent sales says enough; EVERYONE has internet so ... everyone plays on internet, web browser games, I Pad games, and of course PC games.

Also: for the first time EVER I am interested in playing SimCity, now that it is on line and you can show your work to other players. Nice.

Stop being lonely basement dwellers with hacks and mods: that's so old these days. These days I show off my hardcore avatar to others. That's cool.

[korialstraz]

Doesn't seem like the launch is the only thing botched with the game. Turns out there are a whole lot of other issues.

1. Traffic management. It's terrible, and unless you have a very very well planned city layout for optimized traffic, you're city will get killed due to everyone being stuck in traffic. Depending on your layout, this can happen at anywhere from 100-300k population.

2. Population, workers/shoppers/students and available jobs. Seems something here is either WAY out of balance, or seriously bugged. At lower population, things seem to be ok. You get about 2/3 workers of your total population. However this starts changing at around 1k population, and only get worse. People are reporting occurrences of 200k population cities only have 17k workers. In other words as your city grows, there is an ever increasing demand for workers.

3. Distribution of residential, industrial and commercial zones is completely botched (this might tie in with point number 2). If you zone up residential, demand for workers increase, zone up some industry and demand for commercial goes up so the industry can sell their goods. Zone up some commerce, and the demand for workers go up, and it's all a never ending cycle. Here's the dumb part though, commercial district doesn't actually need industry to get their wares. It seems to magically fill up every morning.

4. AI is stupid to the point of almost breaking the game. All this ties into several aspects of the game, including services like ambulance, police, garbage collection, public transportation etc. All of this again ties into the traffic issue I mentioned earlier. The AI will ALWAYS take the shortest route to their destination, regardless of amount of traffic on that road, or even which type of roads lead to their destination. Example, build a half circle of high density streetcar avenue (or whatever the largest one is called), then connect the two ends of the half circle with a dirt road. For best effect, place a tourist attraction or similar at the end, and have that connected to the rest of your city. There will be a massive traffic jam, as everyone is taking the dirt road due to it being shortest, while the 6 pool car lane is completely empty. Other occurrences of stupid AI, in my city I had a house on fire, 2 fire trucks pulled out to the same location. Well only 1 is needed, and in fact only 1 fire truck can put out a fire at any given point (at least for smaller residential areas). Yet both went out, and the kept driving up and down the road past the house in an endless circle until the house burned down. Both btw were also ignoring a second and third fire going on. It wasn't until the first house burned down that they moved out to the different houses, and this time thankfully stopped to actually put out the fire.

There are other issues as well, but you all get the idea. Now that's not to say the game isn't fun. In fact I've enjoyed it a lot! But I really hope to see some patches fix several of these issues, and hopefully we don't have to buy a DLC to get improved public transportation. Knowing EA though, they'll have a DLC for public transportation, and another DLC to increase your choices when building roads. Like having 1 way roads and stuff.

But at least there are some neat things in the game too! For instance if you're population isn't educated enough, it will be a bad idea to build a nuclear power plant. People will still go there to work, but since they don't know what the feck they're doing, it'll end in a nuclear meltdown. XD

[Dacar92]

Thanks Korial for that nice synopsis. Were these items on the official forums or something you put together here? Are these types of things getting any EA attention at the official forums? I haven't visited for several days now. Let's hope they can put this right.

[korialstraz]

No problem Dacar! Most of it I picked up on the official forums, as well as noticing some of the same things while playing. Granted I haven't gotten to those large 200k city stages yet, but I see some weird things happening, which just gets worse as your population increases. Most notably how the figures for workers, shoppers and students don't add up to your total population count and weird AI behaviour.

So far I've not really seen any EA or Maxis employee acknolwedge the issues, although there have been a post regarding a couple issues that they clarified. Wouldn't be surprised that most of this is due to all the server capacity commotion, and hopefully when things get to settle down properly, they'll give out some more information.

[Dacar92]

Server capacity issues don't correlate to bad algorithms in the original design. I don't think you mean that. But the employees are probably busy relaying information to the designers. Bug reports, etc. Like Blizz, they probably don't want to say anything before they have had a chance to test for themselves and then prepare some kind of carefully parsed announcement.

The story made it to the media now. Whats interesting is that the pathfinding issues should have been noticed in Beta. Perhaps they ignored it?

http://news.yahoo.com/simcity-pr-nightmare-escalates-150021213.html

[korialstraz]

Yea I didn't mean that the algorithms had an effect on server capacity, rather that they've been too busy increasing it to communicate outwards. At least that seems a common excuse for a lot of companies, however people working on game design are not the same people dealing with their hardware infrastructure. The should be someone available to keep some communication flowing. Anyway it might be as you say, that they're still processing information, so they can make some posts with actual content in them.

Edit: On the whole media thing, this stuff was up in some Norwegian media even before the game was launched in Europe. One of the reasons I'm glad I waited to pick it up.

[CrazySwede]

People tend to exaggerate about the "evil" of DRM because of the launches. Every game estabilizes after some time, the only problem is the launch week. That is what companies need to learn, to not frustrate their most avid fan base on launch week.

People bought the game knowing it was DRM, so they were "ok" with it. What screws everything up is when you wait so long for a game and then you can't play it. Then DRM becomes an "issue" for people. Even though I was angry at the Diablo 3 launch, I'm ok with DRM.

In the future every game will have online only requirements. No amount of petitions and "refunds" will make companies go back on that. What we need to do is to prepare ourselves and only play such games after the launch fiasco. Then we can all be happy.

Let's be real, companies will not buy extra hardware just for launch weeks. After some time, the number of players drops dramatically and estabilizes and all that hardware would just sit there. They buy based on what was projected as the "average amount" of players.
What companies should do is rent extra hardware until the amount of players estabilizes.

I play on a PC at home with a fast network so I don't see DRM as a problem. I just want companies to be entirely prepared for launch weeks.

Acually ive been lookin forward to D3 for years, but i never bought it becuse it has online drm.

and for me its not about the launch, those problems only meen that there will be no preorder from me.
instead i'd get a used copy.. oh wait, you cant sell used versions with online drm since they are looked to accounts.
and i dont want to sell my account (got other games on it)
this is also bad becouse retailers are loosing out on sales in the used market, if that dissapears then so will gamestop etc.


anyways:
I refuse to pay for a game that i cant play whenever i want were ever i want.
like on the 8hr busride to my hometown or at home a darkwinter weekend when internet is down etc.
if i pay for it i own it, its not a rentalservice i frikkin "buy" games.

and what about if i wanna play this game again after finding the cd's while moving ten years into the future, or 20?
servers are taken down. game unplayable.
acually it will be playable, alli got to do is emulate a server.

so the DRM acually only "punnishes" those that bought it legally. while pirates will crack it anyways
only thing it does is add time too the cracking...

i saw yesterday that i got a "test edition" of D3 for free (playing up to skeleton king)
thought id give it a chance and mabey buy the game, even thu its against all my beliefs.

well put it this way, after getting thrown out of the game 3-4 times,
having to replay from were ever it autosaved last I still dont want to buy it,
witch is sad in a way becouse i really liked the game sofar.

anyways my point is simple, dont buy online drm games, and online drm games will go away.

and dont get me started on starcraft2hots day 1 required 7+gb download update to even be able to play the game.
what, i thought i bought a DVD-disk with the game on the disk.. blizz really knows how to piss customers of...

stuff like this creates pirates.. whitch i imagine is the opposite of what they are trying to accomplish.

[Namik]

https://pay.reddit.com/r/Games/comme...online_forced/

Whelp, this game doesn't need to be connected to the servers apparently.

Also:
"The population displayed on the user interface becomes inflated after the first 500 sims. This is intentional and not a bug, as the function name is "GetFudgedPopulation". A 'million' population city only has 100,000 real agents."

[pulli]

People tend to exaggerate about the "evil" of DRM because of the launches. Every game estabilizes after some time, the only problem is the launch week. That is what companies need to learn, to not frustrate their most avid fan base on launch week.

Sorry but this is very offending.. Can you remove that?

ONLINE ONLY is perverse in every single sense.
- Requires users to pay for internet monthly
- Forces users to no longer be able to actually do something
- prevents users from easy reselling (which is considered a human right btw)
- Increase the traffic over the already strained internet connections around the globe
- Force users to share personal information online
- Creates a higher power consumption (servers have to run & all ISP have to do more work)
- People simply can not play whenever they want, as they are now reliant on 3rd parties
- People can't DO what they want (really I play a game to do what I want, not to do what a company wants me to like).
- No hacking is possible to quickly beat the game if a player wishes to.

That's pretty ****ed up. The decent thing to do would be to release an offline patch and then let players download their characters. Of course, that doesn't make any money.

More on-topic: what bothers me most is that they insist upon lying. We know that online only is for DRM, they know online only is for DRM. Why can't they just say it? It's not that big of a deal and we already know.

Well, when I get tired of D3, it's back to Skyrim, Fallout, D2, and Torchlight 2 for me.

For reasons above the EU has deemed online-only drm (opposed to check-in-monthly drm) to be illegal.

[themeros]

Sorry but this is very offending.. Can you remove that?

ONLINE ONLY is perverse in every single sense.
- Requires users to pay for internet monthly
- Forces users to no longer be able to actually do something
- prevents users from easy reselling (which is considered a human right btw)
- Increase the traffic over the already strained internet connections around the globe
- Force users to share personal information online
- Creates a higher power consumption (servers have to run & all ISP have to do more work)
- People simply can not play whenever they want, as they are now reliant on 3rd parties
- People can't DO what they want (really I play a game to do what I want, not to do what a company wants me to like).
- No hacking is possible to quickly beat the game if a player wishes to.



For reasons above the EU has deemed online-only drm (opposed to check-in-monthly drm) to be illegal.

I agree with you, but I'm realistic and can look at it from the company's angle. If I had to sum my arguments, I'd have one acronym for you: MMOs.

MMOs do EVERYTHING that you deemed "perverse", yet they are acceptable.

Think about it.

Now put yourself on the position of a game company.

Company: I develop games for years, distribute them physically and sell them. I get big money on release then they pirate it, hack it and forget my game.

MMOs (mainly WoW): You have to buy me upfront, pay monthly AND be connected to the internet to play me. I don't need physical distribution. I can be patched and updated quickly from a central server. People give me extra money for digital items from my digital world.

Companies: *jealous* Let's use DRM! DRMs were just single player games that had to be connected to the internet for no reason. Companies failed miserably.

Companies: People didn't accept our DRM. They do accept it all from MMOs though. What do we do? I know, let's make our games more like MMOs!

Phase 2 is what we are seeing now: Starcraft, Diablo 3, Sim City... They are built "as MMOs" so you simply can't throw ANY of those arguments and laws at them. Even though they could have been built as offline. It's a blatant lie, but it'll pass because MMOs are acceptable.

MMOs paved the way to online-only games and there is NO turning back. Just accept it.