SimCity 5 - Launch Discussion

[SirRobin]

But EA said they can't

Queue Jedi jazz hands. "You don't need to play offline... These are not the mods you are looking for... Maxis can go about its business... Move along..."

[Vespian]

Queue Jedi jazz hands. "You don't need to play offline... These are not the mods you are looking for... Maxis can go about its business... Move along..."

No Jedi is that powerful, only the weak would succumb to such a large scale scam. < snipped; stop with the attacks. >

I'm sorry, that was a joke I should have made among friends :P

[Deleted]

Right now I no longer have any trust that the game can't be run offline. It can, and there's proof:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...not-necessary/
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...emains-silent/

Someone commented around there that when hackers and pirates make your game better then it is, you have a problem, and I agree.

EA really has to start working on controlling this crisis and the only way to do it, would be to go beyond what their critics expect. This includes bringing that offline mode and fixing all these AI issues they have. They need to admit they lied.

EA simply does not understand that "Hey, have a free game with your Sim City" is not the same as fixing the mess that this game is.

A company will never admit they lied! At best they will say something like "what we said was misunderstood by the people doing the articles/the readers, we meant this: ... "

Though the idea with the free game was genius. You'd be surprised how many people will forget about the Sim City problems since they got another free game.

[Deleted]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21802508

Its even on the BBC news site now. This really is not great press for EA....

[Sephiracle]

Right now I no longer have any trust that the game can't be run offline. It can, and there's proof:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...not-necessary/
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...emains-silent/

I feel like this game has been a giant scam now if people within Maxis are stating that the game can be ran without the servers. I wonder if it's possible to get a refund at this point.

[Dezerte]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21802508

Its even on the BBC news site now. This really is not great press for EA....

I'm glad that this actually gets the media attention it deserves, for far too long has these kind of anti-consumer practices gone unnoticed.

[SirRobin]

Though the idea with the free game was genius. You'd be surprised how many people will forget about the Sim City problems since they got another free game.

Meh... Its EA. I can't think of any game they could offer which one, I don't already have, or two, I would actually want. Its a dumbed down reboot so lazily made, that they didn't even bother trying to hide the lying. GetFudgedPopulation... Seriously? You couldn't even be bothered to give it a different fucking name?

Came from EA Lucy and company spent the last few years "phoning it in" and, like Gearbox with ACM, the finished product itself is the most damning evidence of it. Possibly the saddest part of this fiasco is how limited the community backlash has actually been. We should be demanding a parental test, because this baby of the city building game looks more like its daddy is Zynga, not Maxis.

Does Redwood know about Emeryville's "love shack" in San Francisco?

---------- Post added 2013-03-15 at 10:15 AM ----------

Latest link roundup:

SimCity – review
SimCity review: One week later, time doesn’t heal all wounds
VIDEO GAME REVIEW: A tale of two SimCities
SimCity hacking threads deleted from official forums, EA asks users to 'continue dialogue' elsewhere
SimCity review

Ouch, looks like I'm not the only one figuring out how shallow and dumbed down this reboot is.

[procne]

Bleh, the dozens of pages of empty discussion with rhorle when it was enough to wait few days for this

[Vespian]

SimCity – review
SimCity review: One week later, time doesn’t heal all wounds
VIDEO GAME REVIEW: A tale of two SimCities
SimCity hacking threads deleted from official forums, EA asks users to 'continue dialogue' elsewhere
SimCity review

Ouch, looks like I'm not the only one figuring out how shallow and dumbed down this reboot is.

Wow... those reviews trash the game.

[rhorle]

I feel like this game has been a giant scam now if people within Maxis are stating that the game can be ran without the servers. I wonder if it's possible to get a refund at this point.

Do you have an article or statement from Maxis that says 100% of the game is online? Otherwise it isn't a scam because the game does require the server because of Region play as even the EA source states.

[SirRobin]

Bleh, the dozens of pages of empty discussion with rhorle when it was enough to wait few days for this

Now I love to play devil's advocate at times too, but I usually prefer to have more to back it up with. When you are so lazy that you actually make a GetFudgedPopulation? Well, you are kind of taking a bat to your own credibility's knee caps. They only have themselves to blame for this fiasco and its only been a week. Imagine what the modders, hackers, and "real" pirates are going to find once they've had weeks, to dig into this dumbed down shallow reboot.

Wouldn't be surprised at all if SimCity, like Spore, actually ends up encouraging piracy instead of combating it.

---------- Post added 2013-03-15 at 03:04 PM ----------

Wow... those reviews trash the game.

Well from everything I've seen, SimCity is a very "cute" game. The problem is that that is pretty much all that it is. I've read people saying that if it had had a smooth launch then none of this would have come up. I don't agree with that assumption because of all the other issues with SimCity. I know plenty of folks who like to look under the hood with games. Most of them loved the previous SimCity games. An AI as simplistic as "shortest distance" and an actual "GetFudgedPopulation" is and would drive them insane all on its one. Javascript? Debug Griefing? There is plenty to piss the community off besides EA Maxis choosing not to prepare properly enough for a requirement they decided to mandate.

And, again, this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

[Sephiracle]

Do you have an article or statement from Maxis that says 100% of the game is online? Otherwise it isn't a scam because the game does require the server because of Region play as even the EA source states.

"Feel like" and "is" are two completely different things. I bought the game thinking it would be a vast improvement over the past games and was very complex due to 'requiring' the servers.

Finding that the game isn't that makes it feel like a scam to me.

[SirRobin]

Oh, forgot to mention, Stone saying that...

On that note I wanted to take a moment to address a question that’s been coming up: the persistence of our Sims. The Sims in the game are persistent in many respects. They go from a home to a workplace or to a shop and back each day. Their happiness, money, sickness, education level, etc. are also persistent and are carried around the city with each Sim as the simulation unfolds. But many aspects of the Sims are not persistent. They don’t own a particular house or have permanent employment. We also don’t track their names, their clothing, gender, or skin color. We did this as in attempt to increase performance so that we could have more Sims in the city. Ultimately we didn’t feel that the cost of adding in that extra layer of micro detail made the macro game play richer. Game design is filled with tradeoffs and compromises like this and we are constantly evaluating these (and many other) decisions.

1. Their happiness, money, etc, etc... are persistent but not where they live? If that was actually "true," wouldn't the happiness levels of the buildings swing wildly since where those "sim's" homes are can vary wildly from night to night? I'm sensing another function in this game, and studio, with the word "Fudged" in the middle of it.
   
   
2. Didn't track a whole bunch of other stuff so you could have more sims? Then why did you put in GetFudgedPopulation?
   
   
3. Your game didn't need that extra layer of "micro detail?" That "micro detail" is what makes SimCity "cute" and is about the only strength your dumbed down shallow reboot has.

Possibly punching further holes in his dubious claims. I've seen in the videos where smilies hang over the buildings. I have yet to see a video showing smilies hang over the sims. Now there are some vids showing sims with indicators, criminal if I recall correctly, over them but that's it. So are they just lying again or is nothing, sims-wise, actually tracked and statuses maybe just randomly assigned when they are drawn coming out of a building?

---------- Post added 2013-03-15 at 04:16 PM ----------

Oh and there is a new blog from Lucy. They chose to title it, "SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy." Unfortunately, even a light read shows that, apparently, Maxis has a different definition for the word "straight." Well, its not like they have any credibility left anyway. Probably in full "save my job" mode now.

[Sephiracle]

Their happiness, money, etc, etc... are persistent but not where they live? If that was actually "true," wouldn't the happiness levels of the buildings swing wildly since where those "sim's" homes are can vary wildly from night to night? I'm sensing another function in this game, and studio, with the word "Fudged" in the middle of it.

If a sim(individual) doesn't actually persist then there's nothing dictating their existence past getting from point A to B. The game takes random sprite and gives them high intellect and high wealth, and sends them to high tech industrial or to high wealth house, which one it doesn't matter, just that they go to one of them.

I feel like what really happened is that Maxis had this grand plan, couldn't do it in time, EA forced the game out, and Maxis cut a lot of corners to make deadlines.

And them underestimating how important micro is in a simulation is appalling. Simulations are meant to mimic reality, ignoring details like that, especially when it's so far reaching it fails to support any sort of AI is nothing short of amazing.

[xxf2dxx]

They made an online game with SimCity features instead of a SimCity game with online features. They tried to develop around this terrible DRM system and that's what's caused all this. It's not the first time they've screwed up an entire game with retarded DRM. The saddest part about this entire fiasco is that they still wont learn. Hell, they can't even understand how to build adequate servers to handle games based off something as simple as preorders. Someone should look up her responses to the Spore launch and see if she made excuses back then too.

[kivipää]

Modder Runs SimCity Offline, Maxis Remains Silent

Nice. We all know this would be easy to make, but there's an additional detail; he has managed to ignore city limits. That completely eliminates the biggest obstacle for making a properly functional offline mode; if one city can hold everything it needs, there's no need for city interaction nor great works. Region play ceases to be a nigh mandatory part of the game. Now offline mode is literally just a local saving away

[Zangeiti]

ahh i dont have money to buy the game. i just bought a diffrent one that is 1 year older :c

[kivipää]

ahh i dont have money to buy the game. i just bought a diffrent one that is 1 year older :c

FYI, it was propably better too. Once all the DRM bullshit is dealt with, you'd still ahve to deal with the fact that the "advanced simulation ai" is a dysfunctional mess.

[rhorle]

Possibly punching further holes in his dubious claims. I've seen in the videos where smilies hang over the buildings. I have yet to see a video showing smilies hang over the sims. Now there are some vids showing sims with indicators, criminal if I recall correctly, over them but that's it. So are they just lying again or is nothing, sims-wise, actually tracked and statuses maybe just randomly assigned when they are drawn coming out of a building?

Think of sims like Delivery trucks. They contain things like wealth, happiness, crime, health etc. Residential, Commercial, and Industrial are the storage containers and that is where the "agents" pick up and store their information. You can click on an individual Sim and see an indicator for their happiness (or wealth if they are heading to a store). You can also jump to where they came from.

You don't need persistent appearances, names, skin tone, homes, or work places to still have complex and decent AI. They track the things that matter like wealth and happiness. By doing this and the method of job and home placement it ensures that you won't get stuck with one building being highly happy with everything else being supremely poor. It distributes the wealth and happiness evenly within the three class brackets. And any buildings that are unhappy will likely only contain the sims carrying the "unhappy data". Which is why somethings can persist in a unhappy state.

Sim City isn't about simulating the life of each individual sim but about simulating the life of each class. You can just follow/track an individual Sim within that bracket.

[Vespian]

The Sims in the game are persistent in many respects. They go from a home to a workplace or to a shop and back each day. Their happiness, money, sickness, education level, etc. are also persistent and are carried around the city with each Sim as the simulation unfolds

What does he even say here? Let's face it. A home is a random. If you call the variable that is involved in that specific random a persistent element, then the sims in sim city screwing up on their pathing, is a persistent element of the game, which would definitely make the game worse and they just admitted it.

What does he mean by "and are carried around the city with each sim as the simulation unfolds". It doesn't sound like each sim is a unique value or contains a unique ID for sickness or happiness etc. It sounds more like <total> happiness is divided by <count> of sims over interval <time> and it's able to carry a part of that <total> around as if it's part of that sim for a <time>. In other words, they're trying to downplay the level of stupidity that the sims have, by formulating sentences that are half-truths. The way they describe it, literally taken, is probably true, but they're counting on interpretation of the "stupid", assuming that they will go ahead and fill in the blanks that these excuses have.

It keeps getting worse. EA destroyed all the games from my youth, so far. I can't wait to see what's next. I stopped caring.

And rhorle, take your corporate bullshit elsewhere, please. You were missing for three pages, the three pages where your precious EA/Maxis and Sim City got dissected and exposed for what it really is, but as soon as a statement from EA pops up, you're back defending that statement. People that know games have been through it now, your breath is wasted. You failed to convince this crowd. I hope you have job security.

It isn't all a dysfunctional mess. The only real AI problem is traffic and the rest just does things differently then people want them to behave. That doesn't make them simple or dumb. You don't need to track permanent jobs or homes in order to have advanced AI.

Except for the fact that the sims pathing seems to affect statistics such as 85% of your population being without a job, even though there's plenty of jobs. And yes, I said such as.

I wholeheartedly agree with you that graphical simulations aren't important, but these specific simulations affects DATA. and in a simulation, DATA is the most important part of the equation and they FAILED. Get over it, accept it, deal with it, stop sticking your head in the sand.