Viridian Dreams Forum

I feel like this has become a disaster of such epic proportions that it deserves its own thread. I think we might've actually managed to see a release worse than Diablo III's.

Also, this:

http://www.destructoid.com/ea-simcity-s ... 8186.phtml

*Sarcastic slow clap*

Are people demanding refunds? Really, given that consumers seem incapable of refusing to buy games with always on DRM (sigh), the only way I could see a signal being sent would be if you had massive requests for refunds.

Actually, that seems to be an issue. You can get a refund for the physical copy of the game, but if you downloaded it digitally they won't let you have a refund.

That's...pretty awful, actually. How is that at all defensible? We sold you this thing that doesn't work, but we won't give you your money back because internet. Lordy.

No no Witt. If they did it because internet that would just be ridiculous.



They did it because they're EA.

But seriously, I did see something where some guy was going to try to force a refund through his bank, an apparently legitimate means, because the EA rep he threatened it with took it serious enough to say that, if he did so, his Origin account would be disabled and he'd get the ban-hammer.

That's a bummer. On paper the whole Always-on DRM thing sounds good, but in practice it's bugged out to hell. You'd think they'd anticipate this problem and made sure they were ready for it, since it clearly already happened before.

Well, most games with an always online component tend to present problems at launch. That part is not surprising. What astonishes me is the magnitude of the issues in this case and the fact that EA just seems incapable of so much as sneezing without causing another PR blunder.

I think the game will be fine once most of the issues are resolved, but in the meantime things will be very rough. That’s particularly sad in the case of Maxis, from what I have seen of the game, it seems they really put a lot of effort into crafting a great product.

I remember a management seminar I once took were the professor explained that, sometimes in order to get rid of “undesirable people” who could damage the business, companies end up taking actions that directly inconvenience the customers and if they take things too far, they might actually end causing more harm to their business than whatever thing the “undesirables” might have done. That’s more or less the issue with always online DRM. All the problems with games like SimCity would have been averted if they have got rid of the always online DRM component. I understand piracy in PC is ridiculously rampant, but honestly I don’t think inconveniencing customers who did pay legally for the game is the solution. Many companies have tried it already and it never works as expected.

Of course, as long as people blindly go and keep buying things with this kind of elements in them, companies like EA would never see a reason to change their business practices, given that they only care about the money. But I want to believe there is a limit as to how much abuse customers can take and how much negative publicity a company can receive before the business collapses.

Now, I honestly don’t hate EA (at this point in my life, I think is really dumb to hate a videogame company, any videogame company), but I hope the backlash they have received from this incident (including Amazon pulling the game from sale) makes them reflect about their approach and change some of their practices.

Edit: Reading a bit more about the issue is not only a matter of DRM as I thought, but of the game design. Many tasks are apparently directly handled by the server. This mean someone didn’t calculate properly the capacity they required or they decided to be cheap about it. In any case, this is a major screw up for EA and Maxis.

Hilariously fun update: SimCity Server not necessary.

Turns out Kotaku managed to run the game offline for 19 minutes before the game realized it wasn't connected to servers.

Well, so much for cloud technology leveraging a major game.

Honestly, they should have allowed the possibility to play off-line since the beginning, or at the very least admit it was a DRM issue. But as I was saying, it’s astonishing how EA seems incapable of so much as sneezing without causing a PR blunder these days.

Honestly it shouldn't be terribly hard to build in a few possibilities:
1: You are on the internet. It checks your login with their servers. If you "own" a copy of the game, no problems. If not, the game should refuse to run.
2: You are occasionally on the internet. It checks your login with their servers when available. To enable offline mode you must be online and login to their servers for the same check. If you fail the check, the game should refuse to run. On their end they should check how many different computers you have "offlined" for their game. If you hit some arbitrary maximum the game should refuse to run.
(Thus getting around "I've installed it on 5 computers at home and told it to be offline for them all!")

This is what Steam does, last I checked. It shouldn't be that hard. As for game developers requiring "always online" for a video game, while I can understand that internet availability is becoming rampant, shackling someone to their internet and running up their bandwidth is a horrible idea in the long run. Heck, the move to "must be on the server" is the single reason most of my friends who play Starcraft uninstalled SC2 and refuse to buy another Blizzard game - ever. (Several of them do live in areas where the internet connections are terrible, so it is mostly a lag issue.)

And on the heels of that, users have discovered that the game apparently fudges the population count with "phantom" sims.

Ahaha. Is there anything at all that could save the reputation of this version of the game at this point?

Reading about it, that is not the only problem with the engine.

Now, while this is definitely the worst launch in recent history, it’s not the first time that a game has had so many problems out of the gate. This article details some of the worst pc game launches, and some of those games managed to recover and become very successful eventually. Of course, the key word here is eventually.

I wouldn’t touch SimCity with a ten-foot pole in the meantime though.

The fun continues as someone managed to mod some of their files to enable debug mode and disable the sync/save timer. Downside is that it sounds like EA pushed a patch since then that may have altered the files used or their properties to block people from doing this.

They just keep digging... and then they wonder why they're hemorrhaging cash.