Sim City

Grumpypants

_Puma_ wrote: »

Are you intentionally ignoring the point that it doesn't need to be online? Game works fine if it is not online for 20 mins..they just implemented the always online component as an artificial reason to justify the always online DRM, and some social aspects like leaderboards and cloud saves. Game is designed as a city building simulation, not an exercise in Social Engineering and playing online.

Does the planes engines shut down automatically if I lose my ticket and cant produce it in 20 minutes?

Ah I think I get it now, what you are saying is the game works fine offline thus proving that the game has always online DRM. Because the way always online DRM works is it doesn't actually require the player to be you know "always online".

Surely if it was some anti piracy measure that forced you to be online all the time the game simply would not work offline ever and surely would have been more difficult to turn off the server sync timer.

I thought it was just online so me and my buddy could build next to each other and our cities could interact. But according to you this can be done offline?

So EA have said lets incur the massive long terms costs that are associated with maintaining an online game, for a small boost in short term sales that would be lost to pirates.

Grumpypants

Overheal wrote: »

No...... this has been covered extensively. The game does not require an online connection to be played. Even people within EA have confirmed this. The only thing that prevents the game from being played offline is the fact that your save file is stored online, and it tries to perform a sync every 20 minutes. It can just as easily be stored on a local drive. Try again.

How does my city interact with the other online cities when I am in offline mode?

It is not like COD where you have a single player campaign and a multiplayer mode, it is like MAG which has only an online mode.

AlmightyCushion

Grumpypants wrote: »

Ah I think I get it now, what you are saying is the game works fine offline thus proving that the game has always online DRM. Because the way always online DRM works is it doesn't actually require the player to be you know "always online".

Surely if it was some anti piracy measure that forced you to be online all the time the game simply would not work offline ever and surely would have been more difficult to turn off the server sync timer.

I thought it was just online so me and my buddy could build next to each other and our cities could interact. But according to you this can be done offline?

So EA have said lets incur the massive long terms costs that are associated with maintaining an online game, for a small boost in short term sales that would be lost to pirates.

It seems like it's a bit of both. EA or Maxis said that there was no way to do an off line single player option because the servers did a lot of heavy computational work that a computer just couldn't do. This has since been found out as a lie. Obviously, if you want to play with friends in a region you will need internet access but it isn't needed for an off line option like they said it was.

Overheal

Grumpypants wrote: »

How does my city interact with the other online cities when I am in offline mode?

It is not like COD where you have a single player campaign and a multiplayer mode, it is like MAG which has only an online mode.

Im sorry, but why isnt it? The franchise was doing just fine for the last TWENTY YEARS without multiplayer. Multiplayer which is basically "WOW MOM My friend Colin agreed to take my cities trash if I give him water! Squeeeeee!"

Ah I think I get it now, what you are saying is the game works fine offline thus proving that the game has always online DRM. Because the way always online DRM works is it doesn't actually require the player to be you know "always online".

Surely if it was some anti piracy measure that forced you to be online all the time the game simply would not work offline ever and surely would have been more difficult to turn off the server sync timer.

You don't even read what you type, do you.

They chose to make it 20 minutes for whatever damned reason. Probably to soften the blow of Realtime DRM requirements, Im sure. Steam does this itself. In fact, it still does it with its online games. If steam's connection goes down, I can still play TF2 if I still have internet. That happens. What ends up happening is, oh no, I can't change my class loadouts. I can still connect to servers, and play the game. If I launch Skyrim and lose my internet, it won't kick me out after 20 minutes. It wont kick me out at all.

But more importantly, Im hung up on this idea that you're defending the fact that this game doesn't have a single-player mode. Well ****, I might as well go play Cities XL then, which, coincidentally:

The game allowed players to play online and interact with others on massive persistent planets, and to work together by trading resources or building blueprints in order to satisfy the needs of city inhabitants. However, on March 8, 2010 the online service was closed and the game became single-player only.

Boom.

Azza

Kirby wrote:

Your analogy falls down when you realise there isn't an alternative to going to the airpot that is easier, faster and free.

If there was a luxurious plane that flew to your home, was faster than the airport one and dropped you wherever you wanted....for free.......people might complain more about the airport.

Queueing up and going through security is the only option. When you are the only game in town, you can do what you like.

Where as unscrupulous people can play games for free, without jumping through the hoops that the paying customer does.

So if you own an airport in your scenario, you either change you ticket policy or you lose your business.

I'd agree with that, its how the world works. The service/product that is the best value for money wins out. Having said that though its rather hard to compete with free

Kirby wrote:

It's simple. Companies can bitch and moan about piracy all they want but situations like Spore, Diablo and Sim City just give people the excuse they need to do it.

I'll again point out that piracy existed before DRM. DRM was a reaction to it.
Spore had a different type of DRM, it was limited to 3 installs, later increased to 5 and after that a revoke tool was released some time later. It affected far few users than the SimCity DRM. I think it was less than 1% of users ran attempted more than 3 installs.

SimCity have not been pirated yet. I believe only in the last little while has a cracked version of Diablo 3 worked online and with reduced functionality.

If you think a lack of DRM will decrease piracy you can look at The Witcher 2's massive piracy rate to quickly disprove that notion. Its a quality game that sold well but is estimated to have a 80% piracy rate.

If people are made feel like pariah's for doing it, they wont. When it suddenly becomes "socially acceptable" then you have a problem. It's one of the reasons piracy on the DS was so damned high. It was seen as "okay" by the masses.

True and PC piracy is already considered socially acceptable, even more so than the DS. The scale is staggering.

Kirby wrote:

If you have the moral and legal high ground and are in the right......why work so hard to give it away? You can't police piracy with brute force. Stop trying. You make it so the customer has the better experience by paying for the product. Piracy will reduce naturally on it's own when people realise they will have more fun by paying. At the moment, it's the reverse. The pirate gets his product without all the hassle that the legit customer has.

In SimCity's case the customer is getting a better experience than the pirate who can't play it at all. It would be more correct to say the end user is getting an inferior experience compared to other games be they sourced legitimately or not. Its possible your statement would of been true for other forms of DRM but not in this case. Your last two sentences do not hold up. Piracy was massively high before DRM and DRM free games still suffer massive piracy now. The pirate gets his product hassle free from older forms of DRM. His product was superior in the case of Spore (even though it affected very few people and there was solutions to the genuine issues users had with that). But he doesn't get hassle free products in the case of Diablo 3 or SimCity. Waiting several months to eventually get a cracked copy is not hassle free.

The goal of DRM as stated by some of its manufacturers is not to eliminate piracy in its entirety. They know it can't be done, but its to throw up barriers to casual pirates, to counter day zero and month 1 piracy in particular. Anything after that is just gravy to them. SimCity's DRM has probably already achieved much of its goal. EA would of probably got away with it by now if they hadn't F***ed up the launch so bad. The question for them now is whether the gains it made countering piracy are going be worthwhile in the long run, after all this bad press.

Grumpypants

Overheal wrote: »

Im sorry, but why isnt it? The franchise was doing just fine for the last TWENTY YEARS without multiplayer. Multiplayer which is basically "WOW MOM My friend Colin agreed to take my cities trash if I give him water! Squeeeeee!"You don't even read what you type, do you.

They chose to make it 20 minutes for whatever damned reason. Probably to soften the blow of Realtime DRM requirements, Im sure. Steam does this itself. In fact, it still does it with its online games. If steam's connection goes down, I can still play TF2 if I still have internet. That happens. What ends up happening is, oh no, I can't change my class loadouts. I can still connect to servers, and play the game. If I launch Skyrim and lose my internet, it won't kick me out after 20 minutes. It wont kick me out at all.

But more importantly, Im hung up on this idea that you're defending the fact that this game doesn't have a single-player mode. Well ****, I might as well go play Cities XL then, which, coincidentally:

Boom.

I'm not defending that it has no single player mode i'm just stating the simple fact that it doesn't have a single player mode. If the game started and you clicked single player or multiplayer mode, then I would be saying why do I need to be online to play in the single player mode? But it doesn't, it just has an online mode.

Now they could have avoided any confusion by just calling it Simcity online with the tag line "the online multiplayer city building experience that requires you to be online so your city can interact with your neighbours cities who are also online". But they didn't, probably because it is not very catchy.

I've no idea what all the TF2 and Skyrim stuff was about. Can you play TF2 against other people without going online or connecting to some kind of network? I don't think so. Is this because of always on DRM? No, it is because you need to play online games online.

Whether the game was offline for 20 years, or whether some people only want to play offline is irrelevant. The game does not have an offline mode. I don't know how to make that any clearer.

Jonny7

Grumpypants wrote: »

So EA have said lets incur the massive long terms costs that are associated with maintaining an online game, for a small boost in short term sales that would be lost to pirates.

Diablo 3 sold over 12 million copies last year. Terrible launch, server issues and not a great game to boot.

A tiny percentage of that number sold would easily cover the server costs alone.

Always online DRM makes a lot of financial sense.

Maximilian

Grumpypants wrote: »

This is why banks store all the money in a big pile in the middle of the floor and say only take what is yours we work on a honor system.

Or like when you go on a plane and they check your ticket to make sure you purchased a ticket for the flight? Isn't that scummy they are treating you like someone that sneaks onto planes. What they should do is just open the gates let everyone on that way the legitimate customer will not be treated like potential stowaways.

I think you've lost control of your analogy.

SB2013

Jonny7 wrote: »

Diablo 3 sold over 12 million copies last year. Terrible launch, server issues and not a great game to boot.

A tiny percentage of that number sold would easily cover the server costs alone.

Always online DRM makes a lot of financial sense.

Until you try to sell Diablo 4

Jonny7

SB2013 wrote: »

Until you try to sell Diablo 4

We have short memories, we suck at boycotting things, we love games far too much and we threw about 50 million dollars at EA in the last few weeks for a barely functioning game.

Eoin247

SB2013 wrote: »

Until you try to sell Diablo 4

Amen, while some will forget I'm sure that many would be pissed off enough to not buy it.

ShooterSF

Grumpypants wrote: »

How does my city interact with the other online cities when I am in offline mode?

It is not like COD where you have a single player campaign and a multiplayer mode, it is like MAG which has only an online mode.

Well then why not offer the option of a peer to peer mode played over LAN?

Newaglish

Grumpypants wrote: »

I'm not defending that it has no single player mode i'm just stating the simple fact that it doesn't have a single player mode. If the game started and you clicked single player or multiplayer mode, then I would be saying why do I need to be online to play in the single player mode? But it doesn't, it just has an online mode.

You're getting really close! Tell us, why do you think there is no single player mode?

VinLieger

Grumpypants wrote: »

How does my city interact with the other online cities when I am in offline mode?

It is not like COD where you have a single player campaign and a multiplayer mode, it is like MAG which has only an online mode.

Ahh but several modders/hackers proved this is entirely possible in the debug mode, why not give us the ability o have offline regions? Because our computers cant handle processing and EAs magical servers full of fairy dust are the only ones capable? Thats bull**** and its been proven to be bull**** by the same modders who figured out how to make it work offline

youreadthat

I actually think online only is the least of the games problems.

Overheal

Thing is, EA has killed my desire to play a bunch of otherwise probably half decent games. Like Spore. I was really looking forward to that. But I havent even bothered to torrent it. SecuROM. Sad.

Sephiroth_dude

I uninstalled it this evening and installed bioshock infinite instead,what a waste of a voucher that was,at least I got a free game out of I guess.

Azza

Overheal wrote:

Thing is, EA has killed my desire to play a bunch of otherwise probably half decent games. Like Spore. I was really looking forward to that. But I havent even bothered to torrent it. SecuROM. Sad.

Didn't miss much. Spore bored me to tears. No issues with SecuRom though/

cherryghost

Engineering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytk1agmcXhU

Turtwig

cherryghost wrote: »

Engineering.

<YOUTUBE> ytk1agmcXhU <YOUTUBE>

^ ^ ^
Path the ferry takes from 2:00 onwards!:eek: (Quantum phasing technology or something.)

Eoin247

cherryghost wrote: »

Engineering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytk1agmcXhU

Love it!

At least we know there's no height limit now.

quarryman

I haven't been keeping up with updates on the game since I quit playing about a week back due to the issue with services and gifts not updating in regions.

Has any of this been fixed yet?

cherryghost

The ultimate insult. At the Games Developer conference, Maxis Designer Dan Moskowitz was doing a talk on SimCity's sandbox, and this popped up twice as he launched the game.

"So let's get started here," said Moskowitz, firing up his first slide. And yet… it crashed with an error message. "Unable to connect to the server." Laughter from the room as people caught on, then applause. He then tried to reload the slide, only to have a second error message pop up. Still unable to connect.

"As you all know," Moskowitz said as the chuckles died down, "our game had a bit of a rocky launch, a couple of server and connection issues. My contribution to the game happened after the login screen, after the front end. As a member of the team I apologize to anyone here that experienced frustration. I know it was frustrating to a lot of people, and as fellow game developers, I hope you can understand that the first few weeks after launch were an emotional roller-coaster for the team. We created this game which people really love and were attached to, and were frustrated by the inability to log in by itself. For those of you who have some rotten tomatoes, and anyone who wants to talk about online requirements, I will happily direct you to our PR guy." More light laughter.

While Moskowitz' joke didn't give any insight into what's really going on with SimCity's launch and online requirement, it was a welcome human moment amid the din of an ongoing controversy.

eigenboggle

quarryman wrote: »

I haven't been keeping up with updates on the game since I quit playing about a week back due to the issue with services and gifts not updating in regions.

Has any of this been fixed yet?

I have been back on over the last few days and sending services and gifts in the region has been working fine for me. No noticeable delays at all. I have sent a gift from one city to another and watched in region view as it is sent by truck. Once I saw it arrive I loaded up the other city and after a few seconds the message popped up saying gift received or whatever and I had the extra funds.

Services through the region all seem to be working fine for me.

VinLieger

Until cheetah mode is working again imo this game is broken and ill be happily playing NFS

Turtwig

Yahtzee, finally chimes in.

Grumpypants

Newaglish wrote: »

You're getting really close! Tell us, why do you think there is no single player mode?

Because there is only one play button when you click it the game puts you into an online server with other people. You can choose to not play with them but they are still there.

Sarn

I see it's now down to $40 on Amazon.com.

I finally got a refund on my copy, now that its trip around the central and western US is over. While annoying at the time, I think it worked out well for me in the end. As an avid follower of this thread, I will be postponing my repurchase for a while in the hope that some of the outstanding issues will be addressed.

Drexel

Has there being any improvements on this game at all? Not the servers but the AI? Havent played in 3 weeks. Played SimCity 4 in the mean time!

Grumpypants

jonny666 wrote: »

Has there being any improvements on this game at all? Not the servers but the AI? Havent played in 3 weeks. Played SimCity 4 in the mean time!

Give it a few more days they announced on the forums that there is a patch on its way to fix the city rollbacks and a bunch of other stuff. Guy there hinted it would be the end of this week.