EA Readies Big SimCity Patch
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
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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.
I know you didn't address me specifically but: MMO's are not meant to be played singly. They have a world of content that is geared towards working in groups or the biggest most bad ass things done in MMO's are group activities such as large team raids and team vs team battlegrounds. But, SimCity is, at best only meant to be played with a small number of people. Just like you wouldn't consider CoD games to be MMO's, you couldn't really consider this game to be an MMO. Also, there is the compulsory nature of the online in this game. If you want to not play with anyone else (something the game is totally made to be able to do), you still must be online. If the game did not have a mode that let you play by yourself, it would be one thing. Then you could argue that the always online is to support this functionality, but then they would have limited their sales base drastically. There is also the fact that you can change the games config file and play offline without any change or shortcomings. The game functions completely right never having connected to the server, so that makes downtime due to server maintenance unreasonable and unnecessary. That also means it's also not an MMO by design because the servers don't do anything except exchange information. In an MMO, the lions share of the processing such as drop rates and enemy spawn, even world functionality, is handled by the server and only mimicked on the end users system. Essentially, what I'm saying is, while they call it an MMO, it is not an MMO in anything but name alone.Karathos said:
Do you mind posting up the games you are thinking of. I am not "having a go" I am curious how a game with only a few people playing it can be seen as an MMO.Aeshi said:
OT: The reason I have not bought this game is because of the lack of promised "mod-ability". All that fantastic user created content (that would be great for a single player game) floating about in genuinely creative minds around the world, being stomped into the ground so that EA can sell "skin packs" and players can send each other vans full of money and unlocked buildings. Woooo the multi-player possibilities are endless......
I would be interested to know what these games are. I'm not trying to be a dick, I just don't know the games your talking about. Also, the only reason anyone would ever consider this an MMO is because the developer came out and said it was an MMO, despite all evidence otherwise. And I don't really personally approve of the idea that because the entire industry has not come together and defined what an MMO is, that the idea is really open to interpretation. People have a concept of what an MMO is, and that usually comes from the first games that labeled themselves as an MMO.Aeshi said: