If EA believes their own propaganda, someone should get a raise for making a game that was so much fun that EA just couldn't possibly estimate the demand.

No one's going to get fired over this that will make a difference. Online Only CEO-person will still be in charge tomorrow and the next day because in the end the game probably still makes a fraction of the money to be had from the next Madden game.

Before that tweet, there was this tweet:

https://twitter.com/simcity/status/310497022157406209

I know that she and the rest of the Maxis team have to be under incredible pressure. But if this fiasco is due to EA not providing the resources then no one on the team should get fired. Unless EA decides to throw someone under the bus, which is entirely possible.

Some people are really soaking up the schadenfreude on this fiasco, but I'm just sad. Lucy Bradshaw recently explained the situation and outlined what Maxis is doing to fix it, and you can tell she's just incredibly frustrated with the whole thing. She lead the development of The Sims 2, and regularly held chats with the community about features in the game. There was so much enthusiasm back then, and it culminated in the launch of a game I would say is the best game I have ever played. To see the issues with SimCity falling on her shoulders is pretty heartbreaking.

The same goes for Ocean Quigley. He seems like such a genuine guy, and I loved all the video features he did for SimCity. Now he's just having vitriol spewed on him on Twitter and other forums. I totally believe the Maxis team put their hearts into SimCity, and the reviews from beta testers and journalists prove that there is an awesome game under all this mess. I'm hoping they can sort this out soon, get some rest, and come back with fun ways to improve and expand the game.

Exactly, except for the massive issue that is people not being able to log on the only real problems I have with game are fairly minor. Like I miss my terrain tools and I think the map sizes should be a bit larger (but after turning off visible borders in the options menu I've noticed I tend to play on less of the map anyways, up until the inevitable crunch that is 100k pop forces me to start looking for solutions that don't easily fit inside the nominal city borders. And cooperative play? That's interesting. It wouldn't have been enough for me to have bought it for cooperative play, but it's enough different that I've found I actually prefer it to the navel gazing that is solo play.

My boyfriend will be getting this in a few weeks, enough so the dust clears and the server issues are less severe. If anybody read what happened what happened with Diablo, they wouldn't be shocked about it. Not that it matters, it sucks that people can't play a game they paid so much money for. I will be buying it...eventually XD Hoping somebody will gift it to me, who knows? XD

But you said it yourself- what all the people asking for an offline mode seem to keep forgetting they made this game multi-player by design. You're defending EA one second and acting like a rational human being the next lol.

As a matter of fact they didn't make it mandatorily multiplayer as I have heard you can create a private region and play alone so other players you just met don't ruin everything. You just have to have an uninterrupted internet connection to do that and hope the EA server gods smile upon you and don't cause their servers to go down.

The reason so many people are frustrated about the online-only aspect of the game is because it's unnecessary (it could have been designed so that the single player mode was offline), and was hyped up by EA as something that would enrich the experience for everyone (even people playing by themselves according to Maxis SVP Lucy Bradshaw) instead of presented honestly as a form of DRM. And now that the game has come out, EA can't even deliver the features it advertised the game as having (online play with many parts of the simulation done server side by EA's servers, let alone the ability to play AT ALL for most people).

The EULA most likely says something like "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE... IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR HOLDERS INCLUDED IN THIS NOTICE BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE... WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE." (That section was taken from Google Drive's EULA but most EULAs are similar).

I understand that the people who accepted the EULA are bound by it, and it's their own fault they spent money on a license for a game they're probably not even able to play, and personally I think they should have considered that before spending $80 or so on it. I'm not as sympathetic towards them as I am towards people who WANTED to like this game and then let out an apathetic sigh as EA did what it usually does and punished paying customers with terrible DRM. This game COULD have been amazing, and that's what is so frustrating.

The developers did a Q&A on reddit, but most of the "questions" were people saying they wouldn't be buying this game because they disagreed with the DRM or asking when the DRM would be removed. One of the posters flew frequently and would have had to pay for in-flight wifi to play the game- even if he wanted to play singleplayer. Another lived on an offshore oil rig where there wasn't internet (he was posting from somewhere else, obviously), and plenty of others didn't have steady internet connections so they didn't feel like taking a risk and spending money on the game). At this point it seems like EA is TRYING to make people not buy their products for the lulz. And speaking of people not buying their products, this game will be cracked. The online-only DRM will be disabled, and I have a feeling even people who bought the game will be using that crack so they don't have to worry about their internet going out resulting in them losing their progress. I'm not endorsing a pro-piracy attitude here, I'm just pointing out that the form of DRM in Simcity harms the paying customer more than the pirates, to the point where someone who bought the game would benefit from downloading a hacked version. If I ever buy the game, it will be when a patch (whether official or third-party) is released that enables offline play. And when I suspect EA might have learned not to pull something like this again.

Another thing is that EA gives the impression that a connection their server is necessary (or at least useful to the point where they would make it required to play the game) because of the ton of calculations performed in-game (in SC4 a factory would not actually produce goods it would just simulate the production. In this game the goods are actually produced and transported by trucks which requires more computing power). I think that if it's necessary to alleviate the burden on the user's PC by getting a server to do calculations for them (in a single player game), that burden shouldn't exist in the first place. Meaning that if the calculations performed are as terribly complex and numerous as EA says they are (for example tracking "up to 100k individual sims in a city"), maybe the game shouldn't have been designed to include them in the first place.

This blog post by Lucy Bradshaw was used as a source for some quotes and info.

You misunderstood me. I wasn't defending EA, I was only stating the facts. Yes, I would jump for joy if they did make it possible to play offline single payer. But I also realize that this would require some reprogramming of the game as it currently exists, since it is designed for MP. Which is why I don't believe they will be doing it any time soon, if ever. It's not just the DRM issue, although that is a major part of it, it's also because it contradicts EA's current business model.

So far I have been playing this game alone in a private region. I still have to be online when I play it. There is no other option.
Edit - if you play alone you will also find that you'll need to create additional cities in your region or else you will reach a point where you can't advance. I haven't gotten to a large enough population yet, but your city will likely self-destruct without other cities supporting yours.

I will try it with other players eventually, after they resolve the server issues and all the bugs. But I don't plan on investing any additional money than what I've already spent on the purchase price, and I don't think it will have the longevity for me that TS3 has had.

As a person that fully abandoned the Diablo franchise after the D3 fiasco, I feel really really horrible that the great people at Maxis are being dragged into EA's marketing fiasco rubbish. I've always had a soft spot for the Maxis team and their amazing games, and they are just the people that built the game. EA came up with what DRM they wanted to use. EA came up with the marketing, the hyping, everything. They're the PR and legal departments of this thing.

I'm waiting until the situation cools off before calling my decision one way or another on this game, however.

Mkay, so I kind of solved my traffic problem---






^ Some pictures I took. The game is really beautiful, but the terrible pathing AI really cripples the enjoyment. It was fun, but not worth $60 imo. There wasn't much else to do after balancing out your resources and upgrading to max density.
(I had bought anno2070 while waiting in anticipation for this game, and I had more fun playing anno instead )

I'm not entirely sure what the issue is, but I think one of the traffic issues (like real life) that screws up some of my towns is that bottlenecks don't just happen in one place, once you establish a bottleneck somewhere it starts domino effects of bottlenecks radiating around it. The "try these multilevel maps!" with just room for two roads connecting the parts of the town up top to the bottom have nightmare issues that I don't see how anyone resolves except by keeping the places entirely separate - maybe only connecting the two parts of the town with rail?

I think part of the issue, no joke, is that <100k population the game just might feel significantly different/have different issues/reactions to issues. Before that 100k kick the game can be fairly sedate, but after that it can quickly turn into crisis whack-a-mole.

The guys at Ars Technica did an article where a couple of old hands at the simcity franchise and product testing went over things. So far from what I am hearing every issue anyone has come up with is one they have covered. They really did a rather through investigation it seems. If they had been this through in the beta testing over at Maxis/EA they probably would not have the problems they have now.

Your problem could be that most of vertically going streets are dead ends, unconnected to horizontal streets (they should be joined into a crossroad, not end with that rounded edge). This way all traffic concentrates to other streets that are fully functional, and it creates traffic jams.

Aside from traffic issues, the major letdown is I can't make an agriculture centric towns... :C

Wonder how many people out there are like me and absolutely refuse to buy a game that requires a constant connection? And what were they thinking making it multiplayer? Sims/SC players generally don't want that and you know there will be troll types who will go around trying to ruin the game for others. Are they going to pull that crap for Sims 4? I didn't buy Sims 3 because it looked so bad, but if Sims 4 is anything like this it will be a lot worse.

Honestly? I'm not sure that people who refuse to buy games based on things that it appears the vast majority of gamers (significant subset of people who buy then complain included) seem to disregard as not a compelling reason to not buy buy a game matter whatsoever. At some point they're the folks who refused to ride in cars because they were dirty and noisy and you couldn't put them out to pasture so they fed themselves for free. That's not a statement against the validity of the stance, but a statement as I see the market responding to those people. The overall market isn't complaining, therefore fringe customers who admit they've not bought similar products for years aren't actually customers, they're the market equivalent of old guys yelling at the young folks to get off their lawn.


That bothers me too, given that they've got such a weird thing about the water table vanishing in just a few years for some cities. You'd think those would go hand in hand.

So you don't think people (such as me) who have been playing Sim City for over 20 years have a right to complain that they are changing the game in a way that ruins it? (it was never played online since it came out in 1989.) And you really don't think a game company cares about the people who have played that long or anyone at all who won't play games that require an online connection but would if it didn't require so even if that means millions of people? Not caring about the bottom line is not at all good for business. If you are some dumb kid that doesn't care that's one thing but those of us who have played the game for a very long time are a different story - we don't want EAxis's bells and whistles, just a game that works without going through crap.

Oh! I forgot to post here. My opinion on SimCity is that although it has some fun parts, it has a lot of issues that are still being fixed and was overhyped. My only hope is that it is still selling copies next year because incredible preorder and launch month sales+virtually no sales after a year or so post-launch=servers going down prematurely.

--Ocram

I personally hope it's an epic fail and shuts down soon. If you buy a game that requires a constant online connection, you are part of the problem and deserve what you get. Better to refuse to buy - if the loss of sales is way more than what they'd potentially lose to piracy they won't do such things.

It's an absolutely valid stance, and the internet is making it a huge deal--it's just easy to forget that the people who actually start conversations on the internet are a small but vocal minority. I also imagine that the majority of the people who are vocally angry about this are people like me--i.e., we bought this dumb thing in the hopes that all of the hype around Glassbox and EA's polished inter-region play (with the option to at least ignore inter-region play if we wanted to play by ourselves) would outweigh the whole DRM problem. It turns out that Glassbox is a bit of a sham, and the game is broken in ways that you wouldn't expect out of a $60 price tag. The DRM--and the fact that EA lied about why the game needs it--is a pretty significant issue, but right now it's just one of many problems. Believe me, I'm furious about all of this. I've been following all of the outrage around this game with a weird amount of glee, and I agree that forcing it to be an online game in singleplayer mode is nonsense. But while I would love an offline version of this game, what I would really love is a version of this game that works like a SimCity game should work.



Meh. Between the game's forcibly small city size and its fixation on MAXIMIZING ALL ZONING ALWAYS FOREVER, I can't say that I'm terribly shocked about the lack of farming.

The water table itself is what bothers me about this. I have it on good authority (by which I mean an illustrated Magic School Bus book about the water cycle that I had when I was little) that water is actually a renewable resource that doesn't just disappear forever. Doesn't it rain in this game...? Where is this rain coming from? Where does it go? Is it all poo rain that just goes directly back into our sewers???

ETA: Crud, I also forgot to add my opinion. It's a pretty game that's fun to watch, but as it stands right now it's frustratingly broken and doesn't feel like an especially in-depth simulation. I think the option for online multiplayer is neat in theory, but there is no way to form a compelling argument for making the game require an internet connection for solo play.

Again, didn't EA see what happened with Cities XL? It's almost exactly how this release went and it was an epic fail. Unless EA is actually trying to go out of business its business model is terrible. How they are pissing those of us who play games off is bad enough, but what they are doing to their stockholders is way worse. Doing everything you can to anger/turn off most or all of your potential customers makes no sense at all. They are literally costing their stockholders millions of dollars.

I'm not terribly shocked, but it's still kind of strange. I've watched and watched the industrial zones and demand from industrial zones and I just don't have a handle on that... probably because it's got some magic math that doesn't add up, but still.



That's the other thing - I've seen that the water structures report on how much water's down there... like "99 months of water" and such, but there's no actual months in the game? Without cheetah speed the nights sometimes feel like they take forever anyways, but months? Is there even a way to get a report on how old your city is?


The only compelling argument I've found is that every city I've made that doesn't implode somewhere post 100K pop from excess shit, garbage, and lack of water has relied on a dense, cooperative game play and active region members.

^^^^

You can have an infinite water supply if you place the pumps next to a water source, or next to a sewage treatment plant (which supposedly pumps water back into the ground around it).

I was having problems with my water supply as well until I read this tip on a forum. It seemed to work for one of my towns so far, although the city is still relatively new.

Ah, right. The industrial zones are broken. They produce freight and complain about needing places to ship it, but it turns out that the freight is irrelevant. Commercial zones originally relied on freight shipments to operate successfully, but Maxis didn't like the dependencies that it caused and just... turned that feature off. Commercial businesses produce things to sell out of thin air. On a related note, this presumably means that recycling centers generate their resources out of thin air, which explains how I was able to have a successful processor manufacturing plant in a region with no mining or oil refineries.



Yeah, I have no idea. I believe one day in the game also represents one month, which is a little confusing. I'm basing this off of my monthly transaction reports from my oil and processor cities, which switch to a new month when midnight hits. That being said, one of my oil wells has had a "2 month supply" sitting beneath it for well over two in-game years, so I don't think the game actually knows how months work either.



Fair enough, but this feels less like a compelling feature and more like a lack of foresight from Maxis (or maybe a kind of cynical overabundance of foresight to ensure that everyone is forced to play together). I have this sort of sinking feeling that cities are meant to be more disposable than they were in past games: build them up, invite your friends, run out of resources, move on. I'd also counter your argument by saying that this could probably be mitigated with larger city plots or an offline mode with cities that "cooperate" the same way SC4 cities do.

I'm thinking of buying it. Now that I have downloaded a mod that can let you play it offline.

EDIT: Just bought it. Had $187 worth of trade value when I traded in my unused Xbox 360 and DS games