Sim City

cherryghost

SB2013 wrote: »

Anyone who even looks at metacriric as a guide has no business playing games.

As it stands I think the game is playing fine. I was very pissed off on launch and I'm in no way defending the drm or EA but I don't think it's correct to say the game is broken from the ground up.

I think some of the professional reviews reflect an accurate picture. User reviews on metacritic are planned bombardments from 4chan and Something Awful.

ionapaul

SB2013 wrote: »

Anyone who even looks at metacriric as a guide has no business playing games.

Wow, I often check out Metacritic before buying games, and have more positive experiences as a result of doing so than negative. Why would anyone buy a game close to release date / full price without reading as many reviews as possible?

Grumpypants

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

Just because a company asks you to tick a box agreeing to sign away your rights, doesn't mean you can. There are rights you have which cannot be signed away, regardless.

More to the point, I never understand why people agree to roll over and be shafted just because some corporation tells them that they should. What are we, sheep?

What rights are these you speak of? Please don't give the repair, replacement or refund answer. As it is at the companies discretion to either repair, replace or refund the product. This is not a consumer choice and also an EU law not a US law.

If you buy a disk and get home and it has a crack on it, take it back to the shop and they will give you a new disk. They do not have any legal obligation to give you a refund.

People need to act like adults and if they buy a game that requires an online connection and a million odd people all try to log on at once then it is safe to assume that a % of users will experience some issues.

The company has to be given a reasonable amount of time to address this. In this case the log in issues were addressed in a matter of days. 1 week later and there is little or no issue logging in.

Next up they will be looking at the other issues in terms of gameplay addressing the traffic, population, RCI issues etc. Again you have to give them a reasonable amount of time to address this.

Before you come back with the don't release a game until its finished nonsense remember that it is simply impossible to test for everything.

This is an open sand box game where the player is left to randomly create cities, there is literally no way for the developers to sit down and test every single possible outcome. They rely heavily on looking at what issues pop up after launch and retroactively addressing them.

Any reasonable gamer will know this and will just think ah the game is not working now ill try later.

Kirby

joe123 wrote: »

I personally think people are making way to much out of the problems. Ive heard people say 'the highest speed setting isnt working so its virtually unplayable'. No its not virtually unplayable.

Sure there is a lot not wroking right at the minute, but I was pointing out that with that amazon post that wasnt even EAs fault yet they got the blame. They mention amazon give 40 dollars worth yet dont mention the fact ea are giving a free game plus that 15 percent thing.

People losing their **** over the smallest things. Calm down. People should read reviews etc next time before buying a game or wait a couple of days to see if there are issues.

No one held a gun to your head to buy the game. So much moral out rage.

Server instability and deleting and disappearing cities aside, the game has issues. Server stuff can be improved upon and EA are giving out a free game because of the launch problems. Thats fine. Everyone can agree that's a good thing.

But the thing that alot of users have problems with is the game mechanics themselves. I know the point you are making Joe, but these arent "minor" issues. It's a city simulator.....if it doesn't simulate a city, it isn't working well. We both play fifa, so imagine if the ball physics were broken. Imagine if you couldn't score with the shoot button, and had to run the ball into the net every time. Wouldn't you call that a broken game? It's a football game that bears no resemblence to football.

It's not hyperbole, joe. Sim's don't have jobs. They go to a new job everyday and when they drive "Home", they don't go to their home. They go to the nearest house.

10 fire trucks all flood to the same fire while the rest of the city burns.

Traffic has a basic A.I. that means every car tries to take the shortest route, regardless of anything else creating massive jams while a road next to the jam is empty.

The population counter is broken beyond belief. You can have a 100k population city, with one house if you work hard enough. You have imaginary sims that don't exist yet still show up on some graphs, but not others.

Sims just walk around in circles all day, not doing anything. Waiting at bus stop 'A', getting on a bus, getting off at bus stop 'B' and then walking back to 'A' again.....in a cycle.

Sims not commuting between cities like they are supposed to. Disappearing money. Commercial jobs being filled by ghost sims so actual real sims end up unemployed.

A friends system so ridiculous, you have no idea if anybody is online or what server they are on.

Some of this stuff will get fixed over the next few months. Like the traffic and fire engines. But fundamental flaws in the way the engine works will remain, atleast until the next expansion pack. That wont change. And it's disappointing. This game had so much potential. It wouldn't take a huge amount of tinkering prior to release to make it better. But it doesn't really work at the moment the way it should. Which is a shame.

joe123

SB2013 wrote: »

Anyone who even looks at metacriric as a guide has no business playing games.

As it stands I think the game is playing fine. I was very pissed off on launch and I'm in no way defending the drm or EA but I don't think it's correct to say the game is broken from the ground up.

Your first comment regarding metacritic is one of the daftest comments ive read on here. Why shouldnt people use metacritic as a guideline. If you see 40 plus reviews it gives you a good starting point of the general consensus.

Even for those that dont read a single review, they have as much 'business' as the person who reads every review out there. Because you believe that doesnt make you right. Mother of god.

I agree with your second. It is clear tho that the game wasnt ready for launch and should have been delayed.

Turtwig

Wow it seems people have short memory.

People are pissed because EA/Maxis spouted complete BS about server processing. If you recall, they claimed it was necessary to offload some of Glassbox's more intensive computations to the server.
Ten or fifteen years ago you could make that claim with techinical mumbo jumbo and probably have gotten away with it with the masses. Nowadays though you can't give such inaccurate and misleading statements without expecting someone to call you on it and the masses finding out about it.
Now they're claiming they're making an MMO. A server populated by eight players certainly spins the concept of an MMO on its head.

A free game is nice, but it doesn't really excuse the shambles of what actually went on. It's a bit like me buying an e-book on economics that gave me the initial impression it would be up to date and relevant. Only to find the book has text missing frequently, was using blatantly outdated and flawed models and the examples and illustrations were incredibly inaccurate and plagued by schoolboy errors.
And then to rub salt in my wounds the publisher offers me a free book in the crime/thriller fiction genre. Which wasn't what I initially wanted, so why should I be happy or grateful to accept it?

nesf

Grumpypants wrote: »

What rights are these you speak of? Please don't give the repair, replacement or refund answer. As it is at the companies discretion to either repair, replace or refund the product. This is not a consumer choice and also an EU law not a US law.

If you buy a disk and get home and it has a crack on it, take it back to the shop and they will give you a new disk. They do not have any legal obligation to give you a refund.

People need to act like adults and if they buy a game that requires an online connection and a million odd people all try to log on at once then it is safe to assume that a % of users will experience some issues.

The company has to be given a reasonable amount of time to address this. In this case the log in issues were addressed in a matter of days. 1 week later and there is little or no issue logging in.

Next up they will be looking at the other issues in terms of gameplay addressing the traffic, population, RCI issues etc. Again you have to give them a reasonable amount of time to address this.

Before you come back with the don't release a game until its finished nonsense remember that it is simply impossible to test for everything.

This is an open sand box game where the player is left to randomly create cities, there is literally no way for the developers to sit down and test every single possible outcome. They rely heavily on looking at what issues pop up after launch and retroactively addressing them.

Any reasonable gamer will know this and will just think ah the game is not working now ill try later.

Quite a few things can be written off as "sandbox game, we didn't expect people to play that way," fair enough it's an argument for having a proper beta test rather than the thing that they did as an advertising exercise but whatever.

The thing that gets me and many other though is the fundamental modelling doesn't work. Sims take the shortest path from A to B with no attention paid to road density or traffic situations. You notice this in your first game if you're paying attention. All worker sims head for the first free factory job at the start of the day and don't repath until that job has been filled. Again, obvious if you're testing a game. All fire engines responding to the same fire? Same thing. Buses being utterly useless for getting Sims to where they want to go? Same.

Loads of things aren't "you're doing something weird that we didn't expect, sorry" like the whole 100% Residential because parks provide enough happiness and spending potential (and I think jobs) to keep the city ticking over.

There are also more serious problems that aren't bug but were design decisions, like the single pool of students for all education buildings, tech level affecting factory level regardless of whether there is an education infrastructure in the city and thus any workers to go into the factories (this may be a bug).

Some of the stuff yeah was not the kind of thing that was going to be caught without a long beta, but some of the stuff was left deliberately broken on release, so we get to bitch even if we know that stuff gets released unfinished probably more often than finished generally.

Sabre0001

Kirby wrote: »

Imagine if you couldn't score with the shoot button

I can't score with the shoot button

But seriously, they did promote that as the reason for the GlassBox and encouraged people to watch their Sims milling about their day-to-day lives (probably thought that no-one would. EA's next game will be "Watch Paint Dry"). And the fire is a very obvious flaw that has actual implications in-game too.

I wonder when EA set the cut off point for new activations. I installed the game after it was said that they would be giving away a free game...and I got an e-mail to claim the game I want. Did people buy SimCity to get another game free (would certainly help push it towards the 1.1m)?

Grumpypants

Sabre0001 wrote: »

I can't score with the shoot button

But seriously, they did promote that as the reason for the GlassBox and encouraged people to watch their Sims milling about their day-to-day lives (probably thought that no-one would. EA's next game will be "Watch Paint Dry"). And the fire is a very obvious flaw that has actual implications in-game too.

I wonder when EA set the cut off point for new activations. I installed the game after it was said that they would be giving away a free game...and I got an e-mail to claim the game I want. Did people buy SimCity to get another game free (would certainly help push it towards the 1.1m)?

My email says anyone who has "authenticated their copy of SimCity on Origin by 25th March can select a free game through a redemption portal inside the Origin desktop client later this week"

So it is still going even for people who buy it over the next few days. Certainly will drive a few extra sales.

SB2013

ionapaul wrote: »

Wow, I often check out Metacritic before buying games, and have more positive experiences as a result of doing so than negative. Why would anyone buy a game close to release date / full price without reading as many reviews as possible?

I'm not saying don't read reviews, I'm saying don't look at scores.

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

Which means you're not really playing a game, you're making random moves and glassbox is making random, or unconnected, responses.

jonny666 wrote: »

How much of the game have you played? If you take a detailed look at the numbers, none of them add up. Population of 100k. 7K workers!! 50K jobs but 20k filled. The game is broken. The traffic is a joke. The RCI doesnt work. I have a city with residential only. If I hover over a building they are all asking where the shopping is yet no commercial demand in the RCI! Dont even ask about the fire engines all heading to the one fire. Then getting stuck in traffic.

I don't consider it broken though. I consider it overly simplified tot he point of being dumbed down. It's very playable though. I still prefer the previous iteration myself because i like the more complex stuff.

eigenboggle wrote: »

I think I have to search and add you on my end as well. No friend request notifications or anything like that, that I can see anyway. What's your username?

I joined. That's some hive of villainy you have there. Your criminals have already murdered three of my people. You should destroy that gambling house. It makes a massive loss for you.

InTheTrees

I havent seen this posted yet but EA's CEO resigned today.

Poor results? Or is it because of the debacle of the Sim City release?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2013/03/18/ea-ceo-steps-down-citing-financial-results-but-is-simcity-the-real-issue/

eigenboggle

My city is in a transitional stage at the moment

I had thought someone would have built the utilities and safety depts. in another city before my city got too big and ended up having police, fire and sewerage problems. Until that point my gambling house had been turning over a nice profit.

Davexirl

Picked this up today, origin name: Davex2irl if anyone wants to add me.

SB2013

eigenboggle wrote: »

My city is in a transitional stage at the moment

I had thought someone would have built the utilities and safety depts. in another city before my city got too big and ended up having police, fire and sewerage problems. Until that point my gambling house had been turning over a nice profit.

There's one built now

eigenboggle

Davexirl wrote: »

Picked this up today, origin name: Davex2irl if anyone wants to add me.

I can't find you in the friend search for some reason? Add me: Eigenboggle

SB2013 wrote: »

There's one built now

An earthquake just took out all of my city hall departments, so apologies if you were depending on any of them Disaster! Will be a while before I recover. I think I ran before I could walk with this city. I should have sorted the basics before trying for tourism.

Davexirl

eigenboggle wrote: »

I can't find you in the friend search for some reason? Add me: Eigenboggle



An earthquake just took out all of my city hall departments, so apologies if you were depending on any of them Disaster! Will be a while before I recover. I think I ran before I could walk with this city. I should have sorted the basics before trying for tourism.

Yeah it won't find you either. I still haven't got in to a region where I can claim a city.

eigenboggle

Davexirl wrote: »

Yeah it won't find you either. I still haven't got in to a region where I can claim a city.

SB2013 and myself are playing on the West Europe 6 server and the region is Shelbyville if you want to give that a go. I found it very hard to find a region I could claim a city in as well.

I wonder is the sim city friend search possibly region dependent?

Logical_Bear

Jernal wrote: »

Now they're claiming they're making an MMO. A server populated by eight players certainly spins the concept of an MMO on its head.

the first M stands minmal

Slutmonkey57b

Grumpypants wrote: »

What rights are these you speak of? Please don't give the repair, replacement or refund answer. As it is at the companies discretion to either repair, replace or refund the product. This is not a consumer choice and also an EU law not a US law.

If you buy a disk and get home and it has a crack on it, take it back to the shop and they will give you a new disk. They do not have any legal obligation to give you a refund.

Either you haven't read or haven't understood my post. If you buy something in the EU, US laws do not apply. EA can dance around their EULA all they like, it does not trump national law and signing it "does not affect your statutory rights" to quote the famous phrase. A "free" game of significantly lower monetary value, and potentially no useful value to the consumer (bejeweled 3) is not a replacement, they are not fixing the game (still lying and claiming it isn't even broken), and they have refused refunds. So, are they meeting their legal obligations? They have delivered a broken product that does not do what they claimed it did when they sold it. Their legal status is shaky at best.

People need to act like adults and if they buy a game that requires an online connection and a million odd people all try to log on at once then it is safe to assume that a % of users will experience some issues.

The company has to be given a reasonable amount of time to address this. In this case the log in issues were addressed in a matter of days. 1 week later and there is little or no issue logging in.

Next up they will be looking at the other issues in terms of gameplay addressing the traffic, population, RCI issues etc. Again you have to give them a reasonable amount of time to address this.

An adult understands that if someone sells a broken product using false claims, then the entity that sold the product is at fault, and has potentially committed a fraud. An adult understands that rolling over and capitulating to suit the entity which has defrauded them, or sold them a lemon, is not a useful position to take in the long run, or the entity will continue to behave in a similar or worse manner due to a lack of incentive to behave otherwise.

The company does not "have" to be given anything. They sold a product, knowing it had an online requirement, to X number of people. They didn't test their online systems to see if X number of people could use the online product. They also didn't test the product to see if it met the claims they made of it. Therefore, the fault is theirs, not the people who bought the product. It is not the consumer's responsibility to verify EA's networking capability or conduct testing of their products. (they do, on a voluntary basis, some of the time, but they are not responsible for it)

Before you come back with the don't release a game until its finished nonsense remember that it is simply impossible to test for everything.

A) it's not nonsense, there are an inherently limited number of scenarios that EA needed to test, given the limited size of the towns.

They didn't even test for the obvious, never mind "everything".

C) Other companies regularly release games of equal or greater complexity without such glaring quality issues.

D) It's their ****ing job to test it. With a better investment of time or money they could easily have done so. They chose not to, or they chose to ignore the results of the tests they did conduct.

By your logic a company that sells cars shouldn't have to test for all the random things that a person could do in a car. Guess what, they do. They don't test "everything" on a quantum scale, but they make sure that they understand the limits and capabilities of what they have built, and then spend enough time testing and retesting until they have ironed out the kinks. Of course, they only do that testing because they are legally forced to.

This is an open sand box game where the player is left to randomly create cities, there is literally no way for the developers to sit down and test every single possible outcome. They rely heavily on looking at what issues pop up after launch and retroactively addressing them.

Any reasonable gamer will know this and will just think ah the game is not working now ill try later.

They haven't even tested "Game has X jobs and Y workers, do we need more jobs?". I don't know where you're getting this apologist nonsense from.

Any reasonable gamer expects that when they shell out €60 for a product, the product works. End of story.

nesf

Oh I saw a new and truly special problem being reported over the weekend:

Step 1: Have a city with a University and a well educated population.

Step 2: Build a nuclear power plant.

Step 3: Build a new residential area beside the power plant and forget to add school bus stops.

Step 4: Watch as the uneducated workers from the new "estate" fill up all the jobs in the nuclear plant before the educated Sims can travel there.

Step 5: Watch nuclear power plant explode.

Grumpypants

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

Any reasonable gamer expects that when they shell out €60 for a product, the product works. End of story.

Exactly and after playing the game for over 60 hours I can confirm it is working.

Goodshape

nesf wrote: »

Oh I saw a new and truly special problem being reported over the weekend:

Sooo.... then it does matter where you put your university / school bus stops.

To be honest, sounds more like bad city planning than a bug. In fact, sounds like it debunks some of the "education is just a statistic" complaints.


I'd have to agree that people are seeing problems where there aren't really any problems with this game. Not that there aren't any problems, mind you.

Turtwig

Goodshape wrote: »

Sooo.... then it does matter where you put your university / school bus stops.

To be honest, sounds more like bad city planning than a bug. In fact, sounds like it debunks some of the "education is just a statistic" complaints.


I'd have to agree that people are seeing problems where there aren't really any problems with this game. Not that there aren't any problems, mind you.

You're being sarcastic right?

Edit : Yes, yes, you are. Phew!

Goodshape

Jernal wrote: »

You're being sarcastic right?

Edit : Yes, yes, you are. Phew!

Um... no, I don't think I was

It's a known game mechanic that "workers" will travel to the nearest available job. Despite all the post-release uproar, this was clearly stated in pre-release videos. Someone posted one in this thread a few pages back. Either way, it's been very well documented since.

And so this guy puts a nuclear power plant in among a lot of uneducated workers and makes out like it's some sort of bug when the plant fills up with those workers. It's not. That's just how the game works.

Next time, put down some school bus stops.

Grumpypants

Goodshape wrote: »

Sooo.... then it does matter where you put your university / school bus stops.

To be honest, sounds more like bad city planning than a bug. In fact, sounds like it debunks some of the "education is just a statistic" complaints.


I'd have to agree that people are seeing problems where there aren't really any problems with this game. Not that there aren't any problems, mind you.

A huge % of complaints stem from people not understanding city planning and it is all too easy to blame the game. That's not to say there are not issues to be addressed but I have seen people stick tiny Fire stations right next to two really busy junctions and complain that it is the games fault the fire trucks are stuck in traffic.

Slutmonkey57b

Grumpypants wrote: »

Exactly and after playing the game for over 60 hours I can confirm it is working.

"I personally cannot see any issues because I'm choosing to ignore them" != "working"

Goodshape

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

"I personally cannot see any issues because I'm choosing to ignore them" != "working"

Likewise, "I didn't plan my city correctly" != "game is broken"

Slutmonkey57b

Grumpypants wrote: »

A huge % of complaints stem from people not understanding city planning and it is all too easy to blame the game. That's not to say there are not issues to be addressed but I have seen people stick tiny Fire stations right next to two really busy junctions and complain that it is the games fault the fire trucks are stuck in traffic.

It's provable that with two burning buildings on a street and two fire engines on the same street, both engines will go to the same fire. That's not bad planning, it's bad coding.

None of the game breaking bugs have anything to do with "learn to play" issues. If anyone needs to learn how to play, it's you, because you seem to be utterly blind to the fundamental ways the game is broken.

Turtwig

Goodshape wrote: »

Um... no, I don't think I was

It's a known game mechanic that "workers" will travel to the nearest available job. Despite all the post-release uproar, this was clearly stated in pre-release videos. Someone posted one in this thread a few pages back. Either way, it's been very well documented since.

And so this guy puts a nuclear power plant in among a lot of uneducated workers and makes out like it's some sort of bug when the plant fills up with those workers. It's not. That's just how the game works.

Next time, put down some school bus stops.

Oh, my apologies.

Tbh, though it isn't a bug, it is a stupid design. The designers have stated that a Sim's education attribute is unique. I can understand why they don't live in the same houses each day, but considering they keep their education surely it would have been possible to put into place code that restricts lower education workers from working on various jobs. At the very least, they could allow the option for the Mayor to enforce this manually.

SB2013

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

"I personally cannot see any issues because I'm choosing to ignore them" != "working"

Of course it has issues but what game doesn't? It's very playable and enjoyable. It's missing some mechanics and there are issues that bug me but again, all games do. The biggest bugs for me are traffic AI and Ai of emergency services but I understand they've just released a patch for those particular issues. And of course I'd prefer if it was more indepth but the challenge of running multiple cities simulatneously is pretty good.