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Sim City
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Slutmonkey57b wrote: »I loaded up sim city 4, and immediately remembered why I haven't played it since the first time I bought it.
Stupidly small city maps spread out over a nebulous "region". :-)
Back to sc3k it is!
Did you accidentally confuse Sim City 4 and Sim City 2013?
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If you read over the replies from Bradshaw it's actually quite clear that, rather than lying, she just never answered the question she was asked. In a bunch of interviews she was clearly asked about the online requirement for people wishing to play completely solo yet when she answered, she just went off on one about needing the servers for inter-region play. I'm actually amazed no one took her to task over this despite the countless times it came up and the hammering most publications have given them since launch.
Of course, it does raise a rather interesting follow up question. If you removed the server / always online requirement and, as a result, the inter-region play, would Sim City 2013 be a better game? I mean yea, it'd be nice to be able to play properly solo on the go etc... but if you were sitting at home and had the choice of how to play it, would you go online (optionally) or would you just stay offline and play how you used to in previous games? From what I've reading, it seems most people would do the former if they weren't being constantly hit with server issues, whether that's the server down or their city stuck on a full server?
EDIT:
Actually that came up in one of the pre-release videos by the Gameplay Lead about 10 months ago.Yeah but even with the sims the fact that they dont return to the same jobs or houses? WTF is the point of even having them in the game if they are just running to the first thing they can find, its no wonder once you getto a certain pop traffic becomes completely unmanageable, this is nowhere near how we were told they would behave
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Actually that came up in one of the pre-release videos by the Gameplay Lead about 10 months ago.
Cant watch it in work unfortunately, but i remember them saying once people got home at the end of the day they were effectively delted and a new one created, never that they go for the first thing available be it a job or home, like a poor person can go home to a wealthy house simply because its the closest option0 -
I genuinely don't think they deliberately under-estimated the demand required for launch. I mean, they increased server capacity by 120% and there are still issues, no one could have been that short-sighted without a mistake being made somewhere. As was brought up on the Reddit thread too, it's not even a case of the number of servers required but an issue with their individual capacity, all of which screams an engineering error rather than anything more insidious.All the more reason why the always online requirement is so damning. If they knew that there was going to be server issues (Believe me someone did) would it not be fraudulent to release a game that is going to fall down ,and not have the option for offline play , whether it was intentional or not(This is why QA and scalability testing is necessary). Surely ignoring the option for offline play is counter-innovative for the sake of a business decision. Of course there are advantages to multiplayer play but these are not necessary for the core game-play features of the game unlike a MMO. The game still works offline.
As for how that effects the customer, well that's far more straight-forward. You offer them a refund, no ifs or buts. You offered a product (or licence to play a product) and it does not work as expected due to an error outside the control of the user, they should have stood by the statement made by their Global Community Manager and just done it. I also reject the idea that people should somehow expect launch day issues and not complain. Fair enough you can have teething issues with such launches but this wasn't a teething issue, this was a catastrophic failure on EA/Maxis' behalf.
Well from what I gather it works as follows. At dawn the factory wakes up and broadcasts a need for workers. The sims then go out and find the nearest factory that requires workers for the day. The next day they may end up in a different factory. It's fair enough to be honest, I can't image the engineering nightmare that would occur if the hundreds of thousands of sims required unique state information to be saved.Cant watch it in work unfortunately, but i remember them saying once people got home at the end of the day they were effectively delted and a new one created, never that they go for the first thing available be it a job or home, like a poor person can go home to a wealthy house simply because its the closest option
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youreadthat wrote: »
Did you accidentally confuse Sim City 4 and Sim City 2013?
Nope. Sim City 4 has regions and city plots just like 2013. Compared to 3k however the plots seem very crowded, the terraforming options are worse than 2k (no rivers), and apparently you need a mod pack to get traffic working.0 -
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