EA Readies Big SimCity Patch
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
- Start date
Staggered server updates, apparently EA hasn't fucking heard of them. It isn't rocket surgery, here let me explain:
-Take half servers offline, update them while the other half allow players to play.
-Put new servers online, take other half offline, downtime of perhaps 5 minutes.
-Update other half, put those online.
It's like, fucking logical or something. Unless EA only has one server.. Frankly that wouldn't even surprise me, since they don't seem to invest their piles of cash INTO anything judging by the quality of their games anymore.
-Take half servers offline, update them while the other half allow players to play.
-Put new servers online, take other half offline, downtime of perhaps 5 minutes.
-Update other half, put those online.
It's like, fucking logical or something. Unless EA only has one server.. Frankly that wouldn't even surprise me, since they don't seem to invest their piles of cash INTO anything judging by the quality of their games anymore.
Yep! The glories of always on DRM (no it's not an MMO) in a nutshell. We honor our side of the agreement of having a constant(ish) internet connection while those who impose said agreements are omitted. Vitriol aside, this is one of the times it is kind of alright for the system to be down, for the sake of fixing something. I'm not saying that releasing a game for $60+ in the state it was is alright, but it's better than letting it rot.RatherDull said:
MMO's go offline for large updates and maintenance all the time, but hey - you never want to miss an opportunity to ***** and moan about EA no matter what the situation right? Classy stuff.
Especially glad to see they're tweaking tourism and casinos. Just felt like transportation from other cities wasn't bringing anyone in no matter how many tourist attractions I put in.
Especially glad to see they're tweaking tourism and casinos. Just felt like transportation from other cities wasn't bringing anyone in no matter how many tourist attractions I put in.
Seems we posted at the same time. I'm curious to know why you feel it doesn't count as an MMO. Granted if we want to go in on technicality you're not playing with MASSIVE amounts of people at the same time, but it's still a "Multiplayer Online" game.Akexi said:
I am eagerly awaiting the 'two hours of downtime' to extand to two days of downtime, when the fixes they implement actually make the game worse and cause it crash repeatedly, as well open a ton of new exploits that have to be sealed before EA and Maxis let anyone play their.. ahem.. your game.
Definitely feeling glass half empty today.
Definitely feeling glass half empty today.
I find it odd that you're surprised by this. Several of the writers on this website have made this point.Karathos said:
So, yeah, it's clearly not "massive" since 16 is not massive. It's only barely "multiplayer". The example someone gave is that SimCity is like 16 people playing their own games of solataire and occasionally getting up from the table to trade a card with another player.
People don't have a problem with the existence of the multiplayer aspects, but that you are forced into that mode. EA/Maxis have consistently claimed that the game was intended to be an "MMO" or focus heavily on multiplayer, but hacks have shown that the game works fine in single player.
Tons of people are trying to play it like a single player game by just creating a few cities in a private region
:cough:. There's not reason they should not be able to play because EA's servers die or EA is issuing a patch. Do you really think the "Global Market" somehow makes it an MMO? You really find the experience of SimCity to be comparable to WoW or Guild Wars 2 as an MMO?I'd be interested in hearing a good argument that SimCity is an MMO. I haven't heard anything to really ever back up that claim.
Except it's only an online game in the very loosest sense of the term. In a typical MMO, the vast majority of the world simulation is server-side. In SimCity, the only things that are server-side are the world economy and cloud save syncing. This is only marginally more online than a single player game with an online high score list. From a technical standpoint, they absolutely could've kept the game up for players, but for some occasional connection checks that don't actually affect the game in any meaningful way.Karathos said:
P.S. Thanks
SimCity's core game engine runs 100% clientside. Traffic, population, EVERYTHING is run on the user's machine and not on a central server.Karathos said:
The client has a script in it that tells the game to close back to the main menu if it doesn't get a response from the server within 3 minutes. That's not MMO, that's DRM, and the fact that you can easily comment it out and not miss a beat with any old Java editor says a lot about how poorly made the game is.
The only part that's "online", is the cloud save game system, and it's online-only because EA cut the local-save feature out of the game (no really, it apparently was local save during beta testing as there are pieces of it left over in the client).
For reference, Steam does Cloud Saves based on my local data; letting me use both out of convenience, so really this is just more enforcement for their DRM and not indicative of it being an MMO.
The multiplayer function is bare-bones and completely inconsequential, since only one mayor can work on one city in a region at a time, it's functionally identical to having one region hosting a series of single-player sessions, since the players don't actually interact with each other.
But oh! You can send money and resources to their cities!...which is about as "MMO" as your average Facebook game.
SimCity, by its own design is not an MMO; it's just always-online DRM, and even that is bare-bones.
In brief: EA lies like a rug and claims SimCity is an MMO because they think we're fucking stupid.
It seems they just don't quite get it.
The only patch that can fix SimCity is an Offline mode patch.
This is such ridiculous bullshit. You updating your servers should have NO effect on my ability to play. You see my PC is running this thing, your servers literally do nothing, NOTHING, but introduce lag issues between my various cities. Why not just reduce it to what it really is EA? Your online server is nothing more than a punch clock.
I am playing it offline anyway with the little hack your players discovered in the first week after it was released. Well playing it is an overstatement, it's sort of sitting on my hard drive unused, seeing as the depth this game has is that of a kiddie pool, without any water in it.
Not to mention that these fixes here, whilst far from including everything still don't fix the automated mess that your city turns into. For example instead of continually annoying us with the HORRENDOUS public transit system you have why not instead allow US to draw the bus lines? You see both your garbage, power, water, worker, police, firefighters, ambulance and even the shit in the sewers is governed by such retarded AI that it will ALWAYS run at a sub-optimal pace. FUCK the AI is SO bad that it would still fail to optimize itself on a STRAIGHT FUCKING ROAD! Yes that is right instead of moving on to the next house garbage trucks will form a fucking conga line trying to pick up garbage from the same house!
Just to repeat it the AI is so basic, so stupid, so badly tested that it will fuck up collecting garbage along a STRAIGHT ROAD, no branching paths, no intersections. Just a straight road is to much for this game.
Not that I even need to bother with transport vehicles because I basically figured out how to create cities that are zoned in such a way that almost everyone walks to work. Yeah, that's right probably should have tested that when you designed the game. But if it was actually tested I don't think a system so retarded as the Resource-Sink would have existed in the first place. The Sims in the city basically take on a new job and a new family every single day of their miserable existence.
The only patch that can fix SimCity is an Offline mode patch.
This is such ridiculous bullshit. You updating your servers should have NO effect on my ability to play. You see my PC is running this thing, your servers literally do nothing, NOTHING, but introduce lag issues between my various cities. Why not just reduce it to what it really is EA? Your online server is nothing more than a punch clock.
I am playing it offline anyway with the little hack your players discovered in the first week after it was released. Well playing it is an overstatement, it's sort of sitting on my hard drive unused, seeing as the depth this game has is that of a kiddie pool, without any water in it.
Not to mention that these fixes here, whilst far from including everything still don't fix the automated mess that your city turns into. For example instead of continually annoying us with the HORRENDOUS public transit system you have why not instead allow US to draw the bus lines? You see both your garbage, power, water, worker, police, firefighters, ambulance and even the shit in the sewers is governed by such retarded AI that it will ALWAYS run at a sub-optimal pace. FUCK the AI is SO bad that it would still fail to optimize itself on a STRAIGHT FUCKING ROAD! Yes that is right instead of moving on to the next house garbage trucks will form a fucking conga line trying to pick up garbage from the same house!
Just to repeat it the AI is so basic, so stupid, so badly tested that it will fuck up collecting garbage along a STRAIGHT ROAD, no branching paths, no intersections. Just a straight road is to much for this game.
Not that I even need to bother with transport vehicles because I basically figured out how to create cities that are zoned in such a way that almost everyone walks to work. Yeah, that's right probably should have tested that when you designed the game. But if it was actually tested I don't think a system so retarded as the Resource-Sink would have existed in the first place. The Sims in the city basically take on a new job and a new family every single day of their miserable existence.
So wait you need to take a game that requires you to be online all the time offline in order to patch the thing? EA at this point just patch out the online requirement and you might just be able to save it, otherwise I fully expect a story in a years time saying the servers for Sim City are being shut down.
EA, you can patch, patch and patch 'til the end of times, but while SimCity are in your hands, It will never reach mine.