This was dreadful and embarrassing to read through. Zero new information, no apologies, just dodging.
> You can pop from work to home, play the game and have your cities available to you anywhere.
"Anywhere" there's an internet connection, "anytime" their servers are up.
You want to claim its an MMO? You want to claim game-as-a-service? Fine. But sell it as that, charge me $15 a month for an ephemeral product. Not $60 for something I can't even use on my own time.
edit: The point of the last statement isn't to compare it to an MMO, the point is that EA are not upfront about the odds of the game itself being very ephemeral. I'm not sad I can't buy it for $15. I'm sad that its quite possible in just 2 years time that no one can.
Guild Wars 2 sells an actual MMO as a one-time fee, and they're doing just swell. I've heard most people claim that as one of its benefits, not a downside. Not sure what that means, just wanted to point out that people often do enjoy single-fee game-as-a-services.
Also, when you say "$60 for something I can't even use on my own time" are you claiming that the game doesn't even work, as all of the hyped up gaming articles are claiming? I've been watching someone stream the game for the past week and a half, and he's been doing just fine, playing consistently for about 8 hours a day, each day since the release. So, sure, there are some problems with it, but it's not like the game is so horribly broken that you can't use it.
Guild Wars 2 is a game that was designed from the beginning to be a cooperative, online experience, though. SimCity is an iteration on a previously offline design, with no marketing or design data shared with those looking to buy the game to indicate that it's an entirely different game (to justify online-only) than the previous SimCity games. There's also a big difference between a game where all of the computation takes place on the gameservers and a game where you simply replicate your state up to the server. I think that we're at a point in technology where the public, at least core gamers, understand the difference and can make judgment about this themselves without relying on marketing material or other-party commentary.
Edit: For example, there is similar drama* regarding Diablo 2 to Diablo 3 and StarCraft to StarCraft 2 given the former games had offline+LAN support and the latter require a persistent online connection. Guild Wars required a persistent online connection, so Guild Wars 2 requiring the same thing was practically a given.
I'll agree that EA did a terrible job of explaining to people why the new game was different than the old ones (i.e. why it might require always-online). I think the key point comes from this (taken from the OP):
> Players who want to reach the peak of each specialization can count on surrounding cities to provide services or resources, even workers. As other players build, your city can draw on their resources.
What some people may not realize is that the cities in this new game are pitifully small (probably so that a computer can handle trying to update 20k sims at a time), so in order to actually do anything of significance, you usually have to draw from surrounding cities for materials, people, etc. This is the part of the game that requires online-only, because unless you want to be simulating all of the cities in your region (which I'm assuming you don't, but I don't really know whether the computation costs would be that high), you need some sort of server to handle that for you.
People claim that they came out with an "offline patch" that allows you to play offline, and while that is true, you then miss out on all the city-sharing features, and thus your cities end up crappy, because it is impossible to manage all the resources within a single city.
I'm not saying that what EA/Maxis is doing is necessary, but people seem to be missing that this is the main reason that the cities are always online, not just for the city saving features or anything.
Also, I do know about the StarCraft to StarCraft 2 drama, and from what I can tell, people don't really care any more, and people have gotten over the fact that they need internet to play their game. Sure, sometimes the internet drops in the middle of a tournament, and people get riled up about it again, but it seems to have died down very much since the launch.
> What some people may not realize is that the cities in this new game are pitifully small (probably so that a computer can handle trying to update 20k sims at a time), so in order to actually do anything of significance, you usually have to draw from surrounding cities for materials, people, etc. This is the part of the game that requires online-only, because unless you want to be simulating all of the cities in your region (which I'm assuming you don't, but I don't really know whether the computation costs would be that high), you need some sort of server to handle that for you.
I don't think anyone is debating this. What people are upset about is that Maxis seems to be making the argument that introducing such a mechanic was done for the "vision" of the game. Perhaps they are genuine. But if they are, it leads one to question what exactly their vision was focused on.
>But if they are, it leads one to question what exactly their vision was focused on.
I think it's pretty clear that their vision is focused on the "social" aspects, and with that comes the idea of having all of your friends build a single small city in your region, and you all interact with each other and stuff. I've seen some examples of this happening, it looks pretty fun. I'm sure people would like the option to build single huge cities, but Sim City 3 still works just fine for that.
> I don't think anyone is debating this.
Have you been reading the same news that I have? I hear a lot of people complaining that the servers are basically doing nothing but saving cities to the cloud, so everything should be able to be run client side, and either don't realize or refuse to acknowledge that the servers might be doing other things/useful. I dunno. Maybe things will clear up in the next week or so, when server issues will hopefully get better, and we can stop having front page posts about a company who doesn't know how to scale an online game.
dye44 on twitch.tv has a map of 1.1 Million sims on a res only map. It seems likely he can go much higher then that.
He also has a map that has a 'taxi-splosion' one taxi spawns hundreds of taxi's until all the streets are deadlocked with taxi's. He has to log off and back on for the map to work again.
Lastly are the insane, inane, and wacky workarounds he does to have a playable game. EA got too ambitious and couldn't manage all the WTF's they have made with the new engine.
"It works for this one guy I know" is not really data.
I think the real problem, though, is that EA has been treating this as a boxed product launch, not a service, and then acting shocked when they have service-type problems. If they had really treated it as a service, internally, they would have done things that might have prevented this, like doing a soft-launch, actual beta stress testing, having transparently scalable servers, etc.
I think it is data. People are claiming that the game _does not work_, so if it's working for somebody, then the servers must be doing something. People are claiming that the servers have literally been down for the past week and a half, when this is simply not true. I'll agree that it hasn't been the smoothest of gameplay all the time, but it's not as extreme as some people are claiming it is.
Well if "it works for this one guy" counts as data I'll add "it simply doesn't work for this guy." Well, didn't anyways.
For about a week, the game simply wouldn't connect to varying degrees. The really frustrating thing was "connecting" happens like 5 times before you actually get to game play which means you can fail at the launch screen, the play button in the second launch screen, or the "claim city" button in create a city mode. It also just might die mid game or your city might be "corrupted" and become unplayed (happened to me). If you're unfortunate enough to have this happen and need to switch "servers" you not only lose your city (it's tied to the other server) but you also have to play or at least start and exit the tutorial. Which btw, introduces a few other points of "unable to connect" possibilities.
I've spent more time trying to get past each of these connection barriers than I have playing the game.
It is data, you're right. It's anecdotal evidence, and should only be used as a burden of proof if there is no other substantial evidence.
Tell me, If I go to the SimCity forums will I see hundreds of people complaining about a game that doesn't work? If I go to YouTube will I see videos of buggy behavior and reviewers irate about the state of the game?
That too, is anecdotal evidence. But, since you're only worried about data, I guess the larger amount wins out. So, clearly, the data indicates the game has issues.
Again, I'm not saying "the game is working fine", I'm saying "I know that the servers are not completely shut down because there is at least one person who is able to play consistently". I agree, the game has issues (of which some have been sorta resolved), just not as serious as some people are claiming.
It's worth noting that GW2 has a substantial amount of non-trivial in-game purchases to subsidize the persistent costs of maintaining the servers in lieu of an online fee, and some game design is specifically tailored to provide incentives for players to make these purchases.
That is a good point. I've avoided it, so I forgot that it can be a large part of the game.
However, one could argue that Maxis will likely be releasing DLC/Expansion packs for Sim City (seeing as they've done this for every other Sim game they've made) so those can be a substitute for the online fee as well. I guess time will tell.
They were planning to (there's already lots of stuff in the Collector's Edition that's also available as DLC). But they were planning to do that with Spore too, and that didn't turn out so well.
Yeah that doesn't make much sense, because most MMO's are going to run you at least $50 initially, and then you pay the monthly fee in addition. I highly doubt that's what anyone would want at least with the game in its current form -- it'd need regular content updates, which I'm not even sure if they could add anything else of substantive value to a game like SimCity.
If they charged you $15 per month, they'd have to refund you for the fact it's been down a significant portion of the month; I mean, can you imagine the shitshow if WoW were down for a week and Blizzard just kept charging people (and gave no credit)?
This way they can pretend they aren't just taking your money and completely failing to deliver a viable product on the timing promised.
Funny you should mention WoW: its launch was arguably much worse than SimCity's, lasting far longer (it took a good month or two to settle down). If you do a search for "wow launch disaster" or "wow launch 2004", you'll find a number of message boards with the same type of anger and frustration demonstrated with the SimCity launch.
And they did that not only charging full retail price, but a $15/month subscription fee. Of course, "first month free" is the standard practice in the MMORPG market, allowing for some leeway, but they did give a few days credit here and there.
Blizzard, however, did have a fair amount of social capital that EA may not have and got through it moving into 2005. Social media wasn't anything near it is today, either: no Reddit, no Hacker News, no Twitter, and Facebook was just getting off the ground being open to colleges only.
You are going to compare a launch 9 years ago to what is acceptable today? Besides, the whole point of WoW was that it wasn't going to be single-player. Sims could avoid the server meltdowns by having a single player mode.
Where did I comment on or compare the acceptability of either? GGP mentioned the hypothetical outrage that would occur if WoW was unavailable for a week: well, surprise, it actually did fail, repeatedly, and not just for a week—but for weeks on end—during its launch. And just like SimCity, there was a large amount of justified outrage. It's simply historical context: we don't need to imagine the so-called "shitshow" because it actually happened.
> You can pop from work to home, play the game and have your cities available to you anywhere.
"Anywhere" there's an internet connection, "anytime" their servers are up.
You want to claim its an MMO? You want to claim game-as-a-service? Fine. But sell it as that, charge me $15 a month for an ephemeral product. Not $60 for something I can't even use on my own time.
edit: The point of the last statement isn't to compare it to an MMO, the point is that EA are not upfront about the odds of the game itself being very ephemeral. I'm not sad I can't buy it for $15. I'm sad that its quite possible in just 2 years time that no one can.