Maxis Developer Denies Need For Single-Player SimCity Servers

[Atmos Duality]

Actually, people have done network snooping on what kind of info the game sends back and forth between the server and yyour computer, all those algorithms for the hive mind are run locally, the only thing the server does is a connection check about every 5 minutes to make sure the game is legit, and depending on speed it will dump a save and city connections onto the server.

Yep, thats all, DRM and telling other cities nearby what you are importing and exporting from your lil town.

Wow. That is...impressively lazy.
Not only did they use the worst algorithms for the job (which would make sense if you were trying to save processing on the server-side), they exaggerated the necessity of their cloud system (and thus, the DRM).

Every time I learn some new fact about SimCity, the worse it gets.

 

[Strazdas]

Well, at least some calculations must be done on the server service because otherwise a pirated version would be out already, and its not. Heck, they cracked AC2 on day1, and that one used online checkups. there certainly are some calculations that they still need to clone, and possibly cant because the servers are down

I'm reminded of Hanlon's Razor- Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, but I have a hard time believing it with EA's track record. Maybe Bradshaw is simply misinformed and I've noticed a lot of her quotes that I've read sound kind of strange but I can't quite put my finger on it.

when you lack knowledge, always attribute it to malice. thats how our brain works, and thats what allowed us to survive. thinking its malice and finding out stupidity has far less consequences than thinking its stupidity and finding out its malice.

 

[Snowblindblitz]

Had it been offline single player in would have been worth,/b> their most expensive edition. But you really shouldn't pre-order, especially from EA.

Yeah I stopped preordering games a few months ago. I just wait for them to go down now. I don't respect developers that don't respect me .

Saves me on cash too.

Me too. I wait till games are out now. A:CM and now Simcity are like consumer trainers, teaching you the folly and the short sightedness of pre-ordering.

 

[Chaos Marine]

EA are the one of the biggest cancers in gaming after Ubisoft and Activision.

 

[Combustion Kevin]

I always wonder just how much of these kinda chenanigans are because of the publisher and how much the developer, and exactly what their agreement is when everything goes tits up.

Still can't stop imagining Maxis employees with explosive collars on, though.

 

[Strazdas]

Well, at least some calculations must be done on the server service because otherwise a pirated version would be out already, and its not. Heck, they cracked AC2 on day1, and that one used online checkups. there certainly are some calculations that they still need to clone, and possibly cant because the servers are down

I am far from an expert at such things but if I had to hazard a guess the real thing holding up the crack would be trying to redirect the save location and to get cities owned by you in your own region to talk to one another without the EA server there.

They didnt have much problem redirecting save files from online in games like GTA4, so unelss this saves games in some strange way (like copying whole city and keeping it alive in the server like a MMO client that never shuts down) this should not be much problem. the biggest problem with such cracking is to make your computer sumulate the calculations that are done server-sided as the client doesn ot have them and there is no basis for creating new calculations that work the same. of course the simplest way is to ahck into the servers and take a look, something that Ubisoft had to deal with (whole Ubisoft serverside was copied at one point, though that is long outdated now) but it is very likely EA wont allow a all-in hackers here. so we are left with the hardest part, trying to force the game to ask the server for enough information to be able to simulate the result accurately (or accurately enough, like i saw some formulas in MMOs that players determined from thousands of trials and they would be around 0,1% incorrect with developer formulas, but that was good enough for players to plan their actions). however if the servers are crashing as it is, you can spam the server by asking it to perform same operation 100000 times, especially of the server is smart enough to realize its a request spam and ignore all but 1 request.

 

[Strazdas]

Holy god man, paragraphs!

sorry, train of thought, interrupted by a boss twice, so yeah

yeah this sniffing does seem to indicate that. which makes it quote odd, as that would mean that high profile crackers are taking a moral stand by not making a version of it available yet. That is not to be expected of them though. Unless it really is some strange machinarium thing that they finally managed to make just enough online service to make it hard to crack. then again the servers may be crashing due to some crackers trying to find some algorithm overloading it, we never know. not like EA would tell us you know.

 

[Epic Fail 1977]

I have a hard time imagining a major game publisher - yes, even Electronic Arts - flat-out lying about this sort of thing.

Are you serious? Have you ever actually been in the real world? It's standard business practice to take advantage of the "black box" nature of software in this way. Source: more than a decade in software development for blue chip companies.

 

[ksn0va]

Countdown to crisis.....



Seriously... people will make it their mission to produce a hack thats lets you play off line.

That's what I find funny about this ordeal, EA did the whole online DRM to stop piracy, but its just encouraged people to crack it so they can actually play the game they payed for.

And the worst part is: They refuse to learn from the recent successes and failures of PC gaming.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Well, then, I guess we can expect to hear about the cracked, single-player pirate version within the week.

ADDENDUM: Don't buy it, and don't pirate it.

Agreed, Jim would not approve.

 

[Sansha]

If your players want it, there's a need for it.

End of discussion.

 

[CorvusFerreum]

I hope people do not pirate it, it does not discourage EA. In fact it does the opposite, instead of wringing their hands asking "how have we failed, what did we do wrong?" the suits at EA will think "look see there is demand for our game after all, now all we need to do is find a way to make sure people pay for the game instead of pirating it!"

Piracy shows demand for the products, publishers then get desperate to make people pay instead of fixing the shit that caused the piracy.

Well, it's a lose-lose situation. If the game sells well AND isn't pirated that much EA will see its route confirmed. If it sells and is pirated a lot it will see its route confirmed but aim to make the DRM more draconian to better prevent piracy. If it doesn't sell and isn't all that much pirated EA instead of blaming its DRM it will just claim that there is no demand for SimCity and will kill off the franchise. Or blame pirates anyway. And if it doesn't sell but is pirated a lot EA will blame the pirates for the lost sales and crank up the DRM. Or kill the franchise. Or both.

I don't even think EA would consider itself at fault here if people would stand on their doorstep and cry that they would buy the game if they could play it offline.

Sometimes I think that removing you higher brain functions with a spoon is a requirement to get to a high profile executive job in this buisness. Or any buisness in our wonderfull economy for that matter. But that is a rant for another day.

OT:
Yeah, I'm not really surprised. Reddit covered this days ago. It's a sad testament to the current state of the industry that publishers flat-out lying (or at least misinforming) their costumers is to be expected these days. Respect for the consumer seems to be an alien concept to some in this buisness.
The sad thing is that I would actually love to try SimCity at some point. I used to play the Hell out of 2000 and 3000 and would love to get into the franchise again. But not under these circumstences. I want to chose wether I build a city from scratch or use cheats to build a megapolis just to check how it runs. I want to chose wether I play multiplayer or not. And most importantly: I want to chose when I play the game. Especially if I want to play it for myself.
Great, now my mood hit a new low it will presumly keep for the day. And it isn't even lunchtime here. Thanks for that ANDY (jk).

Edit: Jeez, I should proofread before hitting post. So many small errors. Any errors remaining may be kept or send via FedEx to
EA Corporate Office Headquarters
Electronic Arts Inc.
209 Redwood Shores Parkway
Redwood City, CA 94065 USA

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

The idea of playing this online multiplayer is fine. But it also needs an offline single player so you can make your own city without being dependent on other people. Especially if that friend decides to trash there own city for fun which impacts on yours. The fun of the previous simcity games were to create your own city.

 

[Nazulu]

I never will believe this crap from EA, and even then it's a patheitc excuse because if they wanted to add in single player, then they could do it no problem before adding in this cloud thing. Make games that everyone can get into with no hassle you bloody idiots!

Also, don't they store back ups of the game or anything like that? You know, before making so it works with multiplayer only.

 

[Ruley]

to state the obvious here: did anyone's game FREEZE when it says in the top left "simcity servers are down, attempting to reconnect"? Mine didn't. kept playing smoothly, updated my roads, added buildings, etc, etc... Things that you might expect to require 'recalculation' for the purposes of the simulation such as new traffic flows or whatever. but no, my game carried on fine.

All that's really being sent in my opinion is a constant stream of data for the sake of regional play and cloud saves. i have to admit i'm impressed by how infrequent i have to sync my city before i quit, implying constant update of my cloud saves.

I think this is evidence against the rubbish of "you need our servers to play the game" Everyone go google "PANDA CERN" - that's the sort of thing you would need to handle what they're talking about. (ok, not AS big as PANDA, but you get the idea, a MASSIVE server farm).

And, this would imply the speed of your game is linked to the speed of your internet, heading towards bigger cities. The lag that i can get when playing, say, Call of Duty whilst at the same time downloading a steam game doesn't seem to happen with simcity when i update my steam library.

And finally, as others have said, 10 years down the line when they turn off the servers, that would make the game unplayable and would warrant refunds? a product you have paid for stops working, if its not addressed in any terms and conditions, that's false sales of a product, yes? This hints to me their is a hotfix for offline play otherwise it breaks the law somewhere down the line, right? Which implies to me that EA and Maxis are sticking to their guns as to not appear weak and lose the one thing game companies currently have as a true challenge to piracy. They want to make always online DRM work because they haven't got anything else to take its place.

 

[Retardinator]

Wait, they said that?

That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. The servers can't handle logins and data transfers from users, let alone *a major portion of the game's calculations*.
Anybody who's ever learned to press the power button on a PC should know that sending, receiving and processing *a significant amount of calculations* from hundreds of thousands of users at any given time requires unbelievable amounts of processing power.
If they actually engineered the game like this it wouldn't even be able to start. Matter of fact is that doing that requires breaking the laws of physics, or getting technology from the next millennium. And since EA doesn't even seem competent of launching a game properly, I seriously doubt that to be the case.

Bottom line is, such a thing is not physically possible (or even feasible) to do and won't be for a very very long time. Also, EA's pants aren't on fire. They exploded.

EDIT: Just to drive this point home, let me do a bit of very rudimentary and primitive math. The minimum system requirements for the game are stated as (taken from Wikipedia):
-Dual core 2.0 GHz
-2 Gigs of RAM

Say you have 100 000 users logged into the server and each of them is sending 50% of the game's calculations over the net. That means you'd need 100 000 GB of RAM and 200 000 GHz total processing speed. It might not all be used for calculation, but it would still turn out as ridiculously high numbers.
In other words, completely impossible.