SimCity launching more servers

The launch of Maxis's new SimCity has been something of a mess, to put it mildly, with players facing long queues to even launch what is chiefly a single-player game. Good job, always-online DRM. Maxis has issued a statement saying it's "putting everything we have" towards fixing up the servers and squashing bugs. The city-building sim launches in Europe today, so let's hope that doesn't overload things further.

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The launch of Maxis's new SimCity has been something of a mess, to put it mildly, with players facing long queues to even launch what is chiefly a single-player game. Good job, always-online DRM. Maxis has issued a statement saying it's "putting everything we have" towards fixing up the servers and squashing bugs. The city-building sim launches in Europe today, so let's hope that doesn't overload things further.

"What we are doing is deploying more servers over the coming two days which will alleviate many of the ongoing issues. We are also paying close attention to all the bug reports we are receiving from our fans," Maxis said yesterday. The developer says it's released several updates since launch, and has the live ops team "working 24/7." Poor live ops team.

Here's a big chunk of text:

This has been an exciting and challenging week for the team here at Maxis, the culmination years of planning and development. We have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and enthusiasm from our fans which has made it even more upsetting for us that technical issues have become more prominent in the last 24 hours. We are hitting a number of problems with our server architecture which has seen players encountering bugs and long wait times to enter servers. This is, obviously, not the situation we wanted for our launch week and we want you to know that we are putting everything we have at resolving these issues.

If you're held up by the game stalling at 'Checking for updates', you can at least do something about that. The fix requires you to dig around and delete some files, so follow EA's instructions.

When it comes to fixing everything else wrong with SimCity, though, you're at EA's mercy. It's a shame, really, because our review says a jolly nice game lies beneath that awful DRM.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    March 7, 2013 6:00 AM

    Alice O'Connor posted a new article, SimCity launching more servers.

    The launch of Maxis's new SimCity has been something of a mess, to put it mildly, with players facing long queues to even launch what is chiefly a single-player game. Good job, always-online DRM. Maxis has issued a statement saying it's "putting everything we have" towards fixing up the servers and squashing bugs. The city-building sim launches in Europe today, so let's hope that doesn't overload things further.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 6:03 AM

      (spoilers: it will)

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      March 7, 2013 6:14 AM

      gives me the red ass!! I rather liked Sim City but there is no way in hell I'm supporting this or EA.

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 6:29 AM

        [deleted]

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 6:30 AM

          [deleted]

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          March 7, 2013 7:32 AM

          Install SimCopter while you're at it!

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          March 7, 2013 12:23 PM

          I did that and man has that game aged! I also installed SimCity 4 and it's still pretty good!

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 2:31 PM

            I think people who are (rightfully) disappointed about this new game should try and take comfort in the fact that we still have SimCity 4 and that it has aged very well even though it is now 10 years old.

            • reply
              March 7, 2013 3:07 PM

              Yeah, it still has some weird performance issues when you go to zoom in and whatnot but it's entirely playable and it does everything really well.

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        March 7, 2013 6:44 AM

        ty sir, While I'm wayyyy too weak to pass on a good game im glad some ppl fight the good fight

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 7:02 AM

          It's easy because there are other great titles without this nonsense I'm playing right now :)

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 6:21 AM

      I tried the last two nights to get in the game and it failed. I haven't even done the tutorial yet!

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 7:12 AM

        Don't worry, you'll get it do it about thirty times when you do get in.

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 8:34 AM

        Is this a regional problem? I've had zero issues with this game other than it was like 20mins late to launch, which isn't a huge deal.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 6:27 AM

      Game unlocks here tomorrow, and I've set aside my Friday night for playing it, but I'm not going to be surprised if I don't get to play properly during the weekend.

      I'm not one to believe in the whole "always-online is there only and just for preventing piracy", while it certainly is a factor, no doubt. It makes sense to me that if you're going to make a game and you want it to take advantage of online features, it's a lot of extra work making a version that works offline. It's not as simple as people make it out to be.

      That said, companies have got to figure out how to make these launches smoother, or I believe they'll end up with a lot of lost sales. People tend to buy games on launch day easier than a little later, or at least I do. Patience is a virtue lacked by many, and often enough as the initial excitement dies and the negative opinions start flowing about, people change their mind about purchasing something. If launch days become synonymous with "game not working", well... That easily translates to lost sales in my book.

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        March 7, 2013 7:00 AM

        Its already got 180+ one stars on Amazon. I think that is totally fair given if the game you bought is immediately unplayable or always-on screws you over.

        I really want(ed) this game. Ill wait.

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        March 7, 2013 7:04 AM

        I would have been fine with running a dedicated server

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          March 7, 2013 7:11 AM

          That would be a nice option, but for most players, it would not work. Server admin decides to take down his server, your town is gone. Who would your average gamer accuse? Yeah, EA.

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            March 7, 2013 5:04 PM

            [deleted]

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              March 7, 2013 11:23 PM

              In such a way that EA would have had to implement support for dedicated servers (and then have to worry about hacks, possible microtransaction troubles, etc etc) and most people would still have used the official servers in fear of losing their cities. In other words, more development time for little gain outside of a few "geeks" who would run their own servers.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 6:27 AM

      I'm so very glad that maxis/ea is doing everything they can. It makes me feel better, while i try over and over again to play a game and cant.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 6:36 AM

      It's going to be a pain in the ass to play this game on the weekend.

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        March 7, 2013 6:38 AM

        I wonder how much playing there will be. It's amusing to see EA offering 'refunds' and then turning around and banning anyone who asks for one on their forums.

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 6:52 AM

          If you're basing this on the Reddit thing, it's not exactly accurate. It was some forum moderator who simply provided a link to the page where you can _request_ a refund, he never said you'll get one. Not to say he couldn't have worded it better... Pretty far from any kind of official statement saying that refunds are a sure bet, anyway. Or do you have something else to base this on?

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            March 7, 2013 7:02 AM

            Also, the guy threatened to call his bank and dispute the payment, and that is the reason the guy warned him that this will get his account banned. That's quite an understandable policy, as otherwise I could just buy whatever the hell I pleased and then dispute the payment.

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            March 7, 2013 10:09 AM

            He's actually the "Origin Global Community Manager" and he originally wrote (before editing it yesterday):

            "If you regrettably feel that we let you down, you can of course request a refund for your order at http://help.origin.com/contact-us, though we’re currently still in the process of resolving this issue."

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 6:37 AM

      I have been ridiculously lucky. Played the last two nights with almost no issues outside of the first few minutes on release day. Game is awesome, I can't wait for it to work for other folks.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 6:54 AM

      Chronicle of an announced trainwreck.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 7:57 AM

      Chiefly a single player game? Not from my own experiences, and from nearly every review that has came out. I wish the snark was reserved for editorials, not for news.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 7:59 AM

      Paying for an online-only SP game is hilarious.

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        March 7, 2013 8:36 AM

        It's far from a single-player game though.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 8:00 AM

      EA itself is something of a big mess.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 8:07 AM

      [deleted]

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        March 7, 2013 8:10 AM

        I don't know about "worst", but yeah, it's pretty bad.

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        March 7, 2013 8:12 AM

        wow, apparently it's hosted on EC2. too bad they didn't design it to be more easily scalable (i.e. allow cities to move between servers and not require users to manually pick a server) so they could just fire up more servers to take on the load

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          March 7, 2013 8:14 AM

          Yay we can blame amazone now

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            March 7, 2013 8:33 AM

            it's still on the developer. EC2 is perfectly willing to give them more instances but they aren't able to dynamically shift the load because cities are tied to servers

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              March 7, 2013 8:41 AM

              Why on earth did they put it on EC2 and not have it scale dynamically?

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              March 7, 2013 8:45 AM

              Are the cities tied to the servers? What happens if an instance goes down? That could explain why people are losing progress :(

              Also per above where you mention users choose a server, it's probably (hopefully) picking the availability zone and deployment, not a specific server instance.

              I would be very interested to see what kind of architecture they set up for this, having recently gone through it myself.

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                March 7, 2013 8:58 AM

                you actually choose a specific server. it's not just "NA East" with floating servers, it's "NA East 1", "NA East 2", etc. if they allowed a city created in one region to be executed on any server in that region, there'd be no problem. they could just fire up more instances in each region, redistribute the load, and away we go. but since the cities are tied to specific server instances, all they can do is offer new servers and have people reroll their cities on the new servers. i'm sure they have their reasons but this architecture is exactly why they're having a problem, and nearly entirely negates the benefit of running on EC2

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                  March 7, 2013 9:02 AM

                  I'm still giving them the benefit of doubt and hoping that "NA East 1" and "NA East 2" are clusters of instances around some shared resource like a database. I find it hard to believe they would tie you to a specific instance... that would, like you say, almost entirely negate the benefits of running on EC2.

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                    March 7, 2013 9:06 AM

                    That's more or less what it is....they spin instances up and down dynamically, but I think it's the 'glue' resources that are having the issues.

                    Also, using amazon comes with a bunch of extra hurdles in exchange for the flexibility, like eventual consistency

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                    March 7, 2013 9:09 AM

                    whether it's a cluster or a single instance is an irrelevant technical detail. the problem is their apparent inability to scale the capacity of these individual instance/clusters. there shouldn't be a need for an "NA East 1" and "NA East 2"; they should just be "NA East" and they should scale up as needed. they are opening new instance/clusters rather than expanding the capacity of the existing instance/clusters, and that's the issue. for instance they created "NA West 2" rather than just expanding the capacity of the existing NA West server

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                      March 7, 2013 9:10 AM

                      (i suppose the assumption here is that they're doing this because they have no other option. i suppose it's within the realm of possibility that they DO have the ability to scale the capacity of individual clusters, but are choosing not to. but that would be pretty stupid. so i'm assuming they simply can't do it.)

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                        March 7, 2013 9:59 AM

                        It's very hard to load test an app like this unless you have plenty of time, insight, and/or planning for a test case that approximates the live production environment. Sometimes, you can't build a test of quite that scale, but at least you can try to prep for it.

                        I can only guess, but considering how inflexible a game launch date is, I think things were set in stone several months ago, and the executive team decided to lock down and go for it.

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                    March 7, 2013 10:05 AM

                    If you start on NA East 1, do the tutorial, load a region, and create a city. That region/city is on NA East 1 only. If you start up the launcher again and select NA East 2, you will have to do the tutorial again and your region/city will not be there.

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                      March 7, 2013 10:34 AM

                      If you're in NA East 1 and your friend is NA East 2, you won't see each other.

                  • reply
                    March 7, 2013 1:12 PM

                    Probably availability zones in AWS.

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                  March 7, 2013 9:03 AM

                  Well "storage" isn't tied to an EC2 instance in the physical sense. I think many instances can read from the same EBS volume, so if they had designed it right that shouldn't cause people to reroll.

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                    March 7, 2013 9:07 AM

                    well, only one instance can attach to an EBS volume at a time, but that's not relevant to your point, which i agree with. they could have designed this so that they could scale the server capacity dynamically without requiring users to do anything special. we shouldn't even have to know that they're doing it

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                      March 7, 2013 9:11 AM

                      Exactly. Sounds like they didn't have the proper testing of this autoscaling in the beta.

                      • reply
                        March 7, 2013 9:52 AM

                        Wait, you mean 2 beta periods for a total of ~12 hours of playing when it takes people over half that time to just download the game isn't enough??

              • reply
                March 7, 2013 9:36 AM

                Also a small limit on the number of cities per player.
                "Player will be able to play on multiple servers, with a maximum of 10 regions on each."
                http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9337036.page

                • reply
                  March 7, 2013 10:00 AM

                  That doesn't seem like too big of an issue. A region can have up to 16 cities, so if you stuck to the 10+ city regions, you could easily have up to 160 cities per server. That doesn't sound bad to me.

                  Not trying to defend their other deficiencies, this just doesn't seem like one of them.

                  • reply
                    March 7, 2013 10:27 AM

                    I agree, there are much more significant problems to be pissed off about.

                  • reply
                    March 7, 2013 11:33 AM

                    That's if you play by yourself. I'm wondering of you join someone else's game, if that counts against your region count.
                    Worst case your limited to 10 cities per server.

                    • reply
                      March 7, 2013 11:45 AM

                      That's 10 active servers per server. If you are no longer going to participate in a region you can "abandon" your cities in that region. I haven't tried it out yet but I believe that means you would free up a region on that server.

              • reply
                March 7, 2013 10:06 AM

                The regions are tied to specific servers, so yes, if you change servers your cities won't be there. However, there were also some problems where you could get into a game, start a city, and due to some problem (on the server?) your city would not be saved. There were a bunch of similar problems interacting with regions and cities the first couple days, in fact.

            • reply
              March 7, 2013 8:46 AM

              I already have 1 city on every server, havent been able to stay connect for more than 30m. Even their queue system is retarded, Wait 20m to "try" to connect, thats not a queue sir...

            • reply
              March 7, 2013 8:49 AM

              I honestly think even the concept of region-based servers was a bad one. There's no real point or benefit to it outside of keeping similar languages grouped, but you can hardly communicate with other players in the game anyway outside of the 'region wall' that doesn't work.

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 8:50 AM

            its not amazon's fault they designed the game poorly.

            • reply
              March 7, 2013 8:51 AM

              the more targets we have to throw rocks at the better

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 8:38 AM

          Haha, so it's actually on EC2 and doesn't dynamically spin up instances as they need it? Who was it that called me an idiot the other day for suggesting this? HAHAHA who is the idiot now?

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 11:26 AM

          so neither the client nor server side is scalable? awesome.

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 3:07 PM

            how much time for coding would it take for it to b e scalable? they cant afford to let this last more than a few days

            • reply
              March 7, 2013 5:05 PM

              it's not something you can just hack in there. it has to be designed for it from the get-go

              • reply
                March 7, 2013 5:05 PM

                and by "it" i mean the entire server infrastructure has to be designed for it. every piece of the server story has to be designed with dynamic scalability in mind

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 8:11 AM

      Once I heard it was always online I decided to save my money, let those idiots see poor sales with zero piracy and scratch their heads wondering...who do we blame now?

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 8:41 AM

        I hope they see that, but looks like too many people buying at anyway

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        March 7, 2013 10:15 AM

        lol, zero piracy. There is already a crack out.

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 12:13 PM

          don't spread mis-information. The game is unavailable for pirates right now, any version YOU see is a fake.

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 3:33 PM

            You speak with a little too much authority on this subject.

            • reply
              March 7, 2013 5:46 PM

              It's simple, the goober above is saying a bold lie, Simcity is NOT out for pirates, any version you see is a fake, knowledge is my authority and I use it against stupidity.

              • reply
                March 7, 2013 9:01 PM

                Wasn't a lie. It was merely an observation from a few simple searches. So GFY.

          • reply
            March 8, 2013 12:08 AM

            if he's wrong, it's only because you aren't thinking four dimensionally ;) In a couple weeks he'll be right. Of course that's all EA really wants. 2 weeks is when the bulk of the sales will happen, before any potential negative word of mouth. Those initial weeks are crucial for making the sure impatient fall on the side of paying for it.

            I still don't think it's worth the ill will in the long run though

          • reply
            March 8, 2013 4:02 AM

            [deleted]

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 11:40 AM

        [deleted]

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 9:09 AM

      I don't hate EA for making the online-only requirement, but it certainly meant I choose not to get it for launch day. I'll wait until it is cheaper/server issues are worked out.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 9:13 AM

      have they started offering refunds yet?

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 9:29 AM

      So, instead of being proactive based on pre-orders they are just reacting to bad press. Sounds about right.

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 9:40 AM

        If EA marketing runs everything, then any press is good press.

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 9:41 AM

          That's what one former employee said recently. Not the 'any press' part, but the at EA marketing runs everything part.

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 9:50 AM

            No no no...they "challenge everything!"

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 6:25 PM

            Total bullshit as a general statement. Speaking from current experience here.

            • reply
              March 7, 2013 7:20 PM

              No, it's not. It's a direct quote from someone that worked directly with upper management at EA.

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 1:15 PM

          That's not true at all, the "any press" part.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 10:10 AM

      I still have yet to be able to play, I guess I need to give it more of a buffer between release and purchase. :( That sixty dollar hole in my wallet sure feels empty right now.

      What's the fucking excuse I wonder? No preload, no estimation of pre-order numbers, no concept of sales prior to launch.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 10:15 AM

      I think I'm done with EA. Mass Effect 3 locked me out from continuing my saved single-player campaign. New Status: EA Games - Not even for $10

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 10:16 AM

        it worked for me

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 1:39 PM

          I tried to boot again, and told the game: "It worked for EvilDolemite" :) Same result, though...

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 10:24 AM

      I love that there are so many great games nowadays, and so many kickstarters for the types of games we've been longing for and missing. It means that I don't even look twice anymore as soon as I see the words always-online, or, for that matter, EA. Most of what EA does is wrong and illogical, and their brands of generic games with lowest-common-denominator gameplay offer no appeal.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 11:24 AM

      they didnt learn shit from their stress tests

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 1:15 PM

        They learned a lot about shit, have you seen how they model the flow of poop through the sewers? To say they haven't learned shit is just simply not true!

        Finally after years of waiting we have an accurate poop simulator.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 12:24 PM

      A little too late. Amazon just stopped selling it: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007VTVRFA?ie=UTF8&force-full-site=1&ref_=aw_bottom_links

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 12:36 PM

        ^^^

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 12:51 PM

        * S I M C A N C L E ' D *

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        March 7, 2013 12:54 PM

        [deleted]

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 1:13 PM

        lol at 872 reviews for a 1 star average.

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 2:07 PM

          Reviewed by 919 customers. Played by 12.

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 1:24 PM

        Hahaha, awesome.

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 1:50 PM

        [deleted]

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 1:58 PM

          ^^ this. It never ceases to amaze me about how entitled gamers are.

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 2:01 PM

            [deleted]

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 2:04 PM

            [deleted]

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 2:05 PM

            Yeah, WTF, expecting something they paid for to not be badly broken? Terrible. Imagine if people applied that standard to cars! Or TVs! Or chairs!

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 2:26 PM

            Yeah, seriously.

            I bought a car the other day, and it broke and i couldn't drive it so i sucked it up and walked to work like a normal american!

            :: waits for the BUT CARS ARE IMPORTANT, ITS NOT THE SAME THING dumbass argument thats going to follow ::

            • reply
              March 7, 2013 2:32 PM

              Nah its more like i bought a car theres a defect on it and you have to wait for the garage to fix it

              • reply
                March 7, 2013 2:46 PM

                Yep cars get recalled all the time. Shit breaks

                • reply
                  March 7, 2013 2:57 PM

                  So you'd be OK if the new car you just bought had to sit in a mechanic's garage for several days immediately after you bought it.

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 2:46 PM

            If its still broken in a week, I'll eat my words. Pretty much any big online game is broken for the first few days. Not that it should be, but the endless amount of bitching gets old and I'm sure EA (or any other company in the same situation) is working around the clock to make it right.

            • reply
              March 7, 2013 2:49 PM

              SimCity is by far and away the most broken of any online-only game I've ever played. Diablo 3 was a smooth launch by comparison. At least I could PLAY it. It seriously sets a new standard in what not to do.

              It's perfectly reasonable to expect problems on the first day, but not like this.

              • reply
                March 7, 2013 3:01 PM

                World of Warcraft might have been worse, but "it's not as bad as the WoW launch" is faint praise indeed.

            • reply
              March 7, 2013 2:59 PM

              Out of curiosity, did you buy the game or you're just trolling for the lols?

            • reply
              March 7, 2013 4:14 PM

              If you sell a broken product you deserve to be bitched at. In fact, you deserve to be sued. It wouldn't stand in most industries, but games are a special breed.

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 2:57 PM

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2NTxSyb_uQ

            Yes it's the guy that does the Francis videos, but he has a good point. You should watch it.

            • reply
              March 7, 2013 3:19 PM

              It's funny how he's ok with it having problems if it is labeled a MMO. I guess I don't need a label to realize that.

              • reply
                March 7, 2013 3:26 PM

                We've been trained with certain expectations with MMOs, which brings us to http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/07/simcity-vs-the-people-why-apologies-arent-enough/

                The point of all this: consumers are entitled to what they paid for. The relatively recent mindset of entitlement being "bad" is completely anti-consumer and exactly the way corporations like EA would want you to think. It shifts power away from consumers, and things which should be straightforward, like wanting a refund for a product you're not satisfied with, are shunned.

                • reply
                  March 7, 2013 3:42 PM

                  I agree, but I think there is some ridiculousness to what is going on. The game won't be broken forever, and I highly doubt people that rated it 1 star will go back and re-review it even if they put in 100s of hours.

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 3:11 PM

            More like good business sense. People buying it, being unable to play it, and returning the game. Doesn't that sound obvious? They'll probably wait and see how it turns out before dealing with this shit.

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 3:31 PM

            [deleted]

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 7:22 PM

            LOLOLOL. Wanting to play a game you bought = entitled?

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 3:24 PM

        I don't get it. How can it be the winner of 26 pc game awards when it just came out?

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 5:21 PM

        "Available Now." I guess that EA had a little chat with Amazon.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 1:17 PM

      Unless people return the game for a refund, this hoo-ha will change absoloutely nothing. As long as the game becomes profitable, EA (and most publishers) couldn't fucking care less.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 2:05 PM

      Remember how EA listed a bunch of reasons why the game being online was a good thing for gamers? Things like leaderboards and achievements?

      Yeah, those are now being disabled in an attempt to make the game work.

      http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/7/4075120/simcity-servers-update-maxis-disabling-features

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 2:18 PM

        Dont give a fuck about leaderboard/ achievements but removing cheetah speed is fuckin ridiculous

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 3:28 PM

          I wasn't too upset with the servers. I know launches like this are always sketchy at the start, and when I am in game, I have an absolute blast.

          But temporarily removing cheetah speed? That crosses a line, man.

    • reply
      March 7, 2013 2:50 PM

      Still unplayable for me. I wish I had bought Tomb Raider instead. This is by far the worst online game launch I have ever been a part of.

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 2:54 PM

        Same. I think this is actually worse than Diablo 3 launch re: server unavailability. What a fantastic clusterfuck.

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 2:57 PM

          I was there for the launch of Diablo 2 and 3. Both were clusterfucks, but they don't compare to this at all. Going to try to get a refund from Amazon for my retail copy and buy Tomb Raider.

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 3:12 PM

            I can only get a 50% refund, so I guess I'll hang on to it. The only thing worse than giving EA $60 for a broken game would be giving them $30 for free. Fuck.

            • reply
              March 7, 2013 3:16 PM

              lol wat? Is this their new policy? Earlier they were just arbitrarily giving some people refunds and not others.

              • reply
                March 7, 2013 3:18 PM

                Also, more people are having luck getting refunds by calling 866-543-5435 .

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 3:34 PM

            Diablo 2 at least had singleplayer.

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 3:00 PM

          never had this much difficulty getting into d3. and at least diablo had a proper queue system, ea's queue/server full busy or available all seems to be the same cunty mess

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 3:08 PM

            hey atleast you can install it, mine has been "processing a large file" for 5 hours.

          • reply
            March 7, 2013 3:08 PM

            hey atleast you can install it, mine has been "processing a large file" for 5 hours.

            • reply
              March 7, 2013 3:40 PM

              That's the download. Origin downloads like a 230MB installer which then grabs the rest.

        • reply
          March 7, 2013 3:36 PM

          I never had issue with the Diablo 3 servers even at launch. Because the damn game wouldn't install for the first week, finally I found the right ritual of uninstalls and regedits and the fucker went.

      • reply
        March 7, 2013 6:01 PM

        Anyone remember the Star Wars Galaxy launch? I'm pretty sure that was worse, but this certainly ranks up there.

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      March 7, 2013 3:48 PM

      yeah let us all blame EA and maxis and NOT thepiratebay

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        March 7, 2013 3:49 PM

        because pirate bay invented pirating games!

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          March 7, 2013 3:49 PM

          you know exaclty what I mean. GTFO

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            March 7, 2013 3:52 PM

            Are those the only two options in your world, it's either EA's always-connected DRM or Piracy?
            I kinda like Steam. It includes an off-line mode.
            I like Dishonored and Skyrim, those games seem just fine without always-connected DRM.

            You know what, I'll go play some SimCity 2000 on GOG.

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            March 7, 2013 7:11 PM

            I hope you don't get perma'd

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        March 7, 2013 3:54 PM

        The Pirate Bay is not responsible for legitimate purchasers being unable to get into this game.

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        March 8, 2013 3:55 AM

        [deleted]

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      March 7, 2013 3:49 PM

      How can you put so much money into developing and promoting a game and then shit the bed with server capacity on launch?

      This happens everytime. You'd think at a certain point they'd just figure what they need to succefuly launch, and just double it. It's gotta be way less costly to do that and then scale it back then it is to take the massive bad pr, word of mouth and customer experience hit in the most critical few weeks of a games sales

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        March 7, 2013 3:50 PM

        how can you pirate games for years and years and then get pissed when companies start cracking down and have to do this kind of stuff so you actually pay for peoples har dearned work?

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          March 7, 2013 3:53 PM

          You are making an equivalence that does not exist.

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          March 7, 2013 3:54 PM

          You might have a point if 6 of the top 15 best selling PC games title's didn't have the word "SIM" in it.

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          March 7, 2013 3:56 PM

          You're just pissed you can't pirate the game yet.

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          March 7, 2013 3:56 PM

          well ninjase? waiting for an explanation here!

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          March 7, 2013 4:41 PM

          You're a special snowflake gently floating along in the shitstorm that is The Chatty.

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            March 7, 2013 5:06 PM

            oh nice, i bet you feel real big using people with mental handicaps as a form of insult.

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              March 7, 2013 5:12 PM

              You could reply to my point above.

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              March 7, 2013 5:18 PM

              As someone WITH Asperger's Syndrome, I approve of this SPERGCON 2 declaration.

              Publishers didn't HAVE to shift all of their games server-side; they chose to do it, while other publishers chose to shrug off piracy, and be nice to their paying customers. Advocating server-side SimCity is a knee-jerk reaction that was obviously not architected out rigorously enough to be a robust solution. This was merely EA executives panicking and swaying with a trend, while ignoring actual customer needs and concerns.

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          March 7, 2013 5:37 PM

          Jumping on this 'Huh?' shackpile.

          Not quite seeing the connection there, buddy.

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          March 7, 2013 5:38 PM

          ninjase's post which you replied to isn't so much calling out always on DRM as it is calling out always on DRM with insufficient hardware to handle the load. Your response in this subthread is a non sequiter

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          March 7, 2013 5:46 PM

          so are you just some EA shill who created an account here to try and justify this clusterfuck?

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          March 7, 2013 7:18 PM

          What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with pirating and everything to do with being woefully underprepared to serve your paying customers in the most critical period of time for your product that will largely determine if it fails or succeeds.

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          March 8, 2013 6:42 AM

          you're the worst

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        March 7, 2013 5:55 PM

        Even if this was on EC2, EA's attitude toward infrastructure is to have as little of it as possible. This is why every January, they shut down all of the online infrastructure for games that have less than 1% of their total online participation. With that mentality, they probably walked into the launch with an attitude of, "Let's launch with this conservative population forecast, and hope that the app stays stable enough to handle what we tested."

        Now, they have egg on face, and it's only 3 months to E3, where if they decide to announce another title that's "server-side", they're going to get questions of, "Oh, you mean something like SimCity that fell on its face back when it launched in March?"

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      March 7, 2013 5:10 PM

      What I don't get is if the game does computations on their servers requiring always online, why does it still run fine for a while when the server goes down? Aren't the computations local then?

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        March 7, 2013 5:35 PM

        if the computations are server side, would that mean that the city size is due to server limitations, not client hardware limitations?

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          March 7, 2013 8:24 PM

          somebody answer my question dammit

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          March 7, 2013 8:27 PM

          I'm pretty sure the city computations are primarily client-side. It's probably the regional computations that are server-side.

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        March 7, 2013 6:20 PM

        [deleted]

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        March 7, 2013 10:47 PM

        It's probably just synching the game state every x amount of minutes of in-game time.

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      March 7, 2013 5:29 PM

      EU West 3 just went up. Seemed fast(?) to me. Will play on it tomorrow.

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        March 7, 2013 5:45 PM

        I just bought, downloaded and was able to play in about an hour. Seems fast for me as well.

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      March 7, 2013 6:00 PM

      More servers are not going to fix code.

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        March 7, 2013 7:18 PM

        My experience tonight is identical to the previous two nights. Unable to do anything

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        March 7, 2013 7:21 PM

        What if you teach them how to program??

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          March 7, 2013 8:31 PM

          yeah well maybe if you didn't pirate everything we wouldn't have this problem in the first place!

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      March 8, 2013 6:18 AM

      http://www.p4rgaming.com/?p=1473

      "EA Hires Hundreds of Chinese Spammers to Post Positively About SimCity’s Always Online Requirement"


      BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH xD even if it's a smear job, it's absolutely hilarious xD

      • reply
        March 8, 2013 10:11 AM

        Wow, this reads like The Onion.

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