MadBrahms

Originally posted by: soltangris Heeeeeeeeeey, so the PO is over, and we're again expecting the unexpected. And because I see some more speculation taking place again, I would like to remind you folks that MC hasn't promised anything definite in terms of release date for CXL 2011 (despite a recent comment in another thread, which was immediately disproved by an MC representative), and they haven't specified any new features in the game, apart of: - The implementation of the trade system from the PO, converted, of course, into a single player variant. They've mentioned something about a 'Planet trading system', but it's as yet unclear what exactly this means. The only thing that's sure is that we'll be able to trade between or cities. quote> Your optomism is admirable, and I say this sincerely; I am even more embittered now that the solo update has come out. Weren't we supposed to get the converted trade system already, before 2011, so that solo play was more dynamic? I may have misread this, but buying and selling to madoff is a drag and a half. What exactly HAVE they been doing the last two months? The patch doesn't seem to add a single thing to the game other than bringing some of the features that have existed in multi for months into the solo game. It's a good thing PO is over, because at that rate of content production, it would've continued to be a disaster - the promises of monthly updates were greatly, greatly exaggerated.

Originally posted by: Chiverito Customization tool so you can name Transportation networks and districts in your city... MC please don't charge me for every form of mass transit...quote> I actually think this should be a priority idea, because it makes city journalling more interesting and also adds an extra feeling of personalization to the city. It also strikes me as something that might not be terribly hard to program, as opposed to (say) adding extra mass transit systems, which have a million different dynamics to calibrate. I'd really like to see more kinds of highway interchanges, especially road/avenue - highway junctions that don't take up so much darn space. The bottom line for me at this point, though (as I've pointed out in the end of PO thread), is that what I'll be most looking for are fixes to existing bugs / frustrations. These include: - Memory leaks. Plug them all! - Trade notifications. Even if the trade is only between one's own cities, simply saying "An offer has been cancelled" is maddeningly unhelpful. Tell us what offer, of how much, and from who! - The highway bridge issue, in which bridges can't be built except between intersections (making crossing bodies of water an expensive chore) - The plaza issue. MC actually deserves partial credit on this one since they patched it so that user-placed plazas have an environmental effect. Unfortunetely, the ones placed by the audo-zone tool do NOT, for some bizarre reason. - Radii of effect for various city services. Education is particularly well done now, so it could be a model. Healthcare is ridiculously easy; you only need a single hospital for an entire city to be fully satisfied. Police and fire are absolutely maddening; if you place a police headquarters right next to a high crime zone, there is no guarantee it will have any effect whatsoever. Furthermore, there are places where no end of police stations will satisfy, but a multipurpose center will, which is just... odd. -Persistent map layers. It's quite frustrating to lose sight of whatever metric you're trying to following every time you switch to the build tool. - Road laying issues with the auto-zone tool. Often times when zoning irregularly shaped areas, plots will pop up in the middle without any road connection (but with the room necessary for that conneciton, weird!). There's also an issue in which roads sometimes get laid on top of one another and don't actually intersect, and it's often hard to notice, though this is less of a big deal. - The price of highway connections. This isn't really a "bug" but I'm including here anyway because it seems so inoordinately high, especially in comparison to ports / airports and given the proportional effect of highways. In a single-player only model where profit from goods is necessarily limited this may become a much bigger issue. - Bus lines: allow us to edit them! Nothing says frustration like a "broken bus line" message that leaves no alternative but deletion, and these messages often appear with little obvious reason behind them. There's probably many more, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head.

Originally posted by: mentarman Originally posted by: Stef42 Originally posted by: Gregory_C As mentionned it before: at this point there is no set date for Cities XL 2011. It might be next year or it might be this year. And there is no set price yet. We would like it to be free for current PO subscribers, but can't guarantee that right now. What is sure is that on march 8th the current version of the game becomes solo only and will include Buses. What happens beyond march 8th hasn't been set in stone yet, we will tell you more as soon as we can.quote> So, if Cities XL 2011, comes out in 2011 (for us the worst case), no extra content will be put in the game for a almost complete year.. quote> Not necessarily. Maybe there will be updates or GEMs still or add-on packs in the short term. Who knows? That's the point of his statement that beyond March 8 nothing is decided yet. We as a community seem to be having a hard time accepting that they don't know (or can't tell us right now) what will happen for sure... But in a way we asked for this. One way to make sure you fulfill your promises is to just not make many promises... quote> We can be pretty sure on content, though, given that MC's own FAQ states that "until Cities XL 2011 is released no new content or patches will be published either for the current online game or solo game." I don't see Gregory's statement as superseding that, given that he's primarily addressing the CXL 2011 release. In respect to Soltangris' previous comment (which I am having trouble finding to quote, must be losing my eyesight!) regarding the content previewed on German fansites, I'm actually rather optimistic that it will see the light of day, and I'm probably getting a reputation for being a naysayer in general. It's likely, though, that at least some of the content - especially landmarks - will be released in the paid add-on packs rather than the main game, which is understandable given that they would have originally been released as to PO subscribers. I'm somewhat more worried, actually, that MC may not fix some of the nagging bugs and inconveniences but rather simply focus on things that are flashy in an attempt to lure more of us back in. I'll totally fall for it, myself, because I'm addicted to the core game, but my experience with CXLso far is that things like medieval buildings and new landmarks were released without fixing issues such as pre-filled plaza effects, public service effect radii, highway bridges, trade notifications (which are still incredibly opaque), and of course the infamous memory leak. Hopefully if we carp about these enough in the meantime they won't forget to fix them!

Originally posted by: mrdazza_460 Originally posted by: ACEH mrdazza_460, all you mentioned is already in the game - the free zoning tool. With the Advanced Zoning Options mod you can even choose a type of roads for the free zone.quote> that’s not what I meant, your sill only placing squares lots, but it doesn't matterr quote> I don't see this ever being updated in CXL, and I don't think it's realistic of us to expect it. It would be a major change in some of the underlying game mechanics, I think. I also doubt we'll see any sort of rail mass-transit in 2011, though we might get intercity freight or passenger rail, since it seems there's already a layer in game that shows you possible rail connections (NOTE TO MC QUALITY CONTROL: Take out exasperating teasing fatures like this!)

Out of curiosity, does anyone know if the higher level city halls actually do anything for you? I've always upgraded because they look pretty, but they also suck down cash faster.

Originally posted by: Kevin Ar18 Originally posted by: MadBrahms Voting exploit on the stacking - it's clearly cheating. The second example, though, just seems clever. I'll have to try it out, especially in those pesky areas around the edges where I end up juuuust short of the minimum necessary.quote> The second example relies on the building being in the green area -- the rest can be anywhere.quote> This actually correlates well to an observation of mine about a particularly annoying aspect of farming: silo / fertilizer proximity. It seems that in order for a farm to get the benefit of silos (which have a practical radius MUCH smaller than it appears) is to have the actual building within the greenest zone of silo coverage. This is frustratingly tedious to zone for; mayble they'll fix this in CXL 2011.

Originally posted by: dedgren Liv- I'm not trying to stir the pot here. I am just so incredibly frustrated that it is seemingly impossible to get a straight answer from Monte Cristo on anything. The current situation continues a track record that dates back now almost two years, and if you believe the conspiracy theorists among us, even further than that. It strikes me as funny that EA's method of communicating with the SC4 fan base, which is to not communicate at all, seems somehow preferable to being serially misinformed. MC would appear to be in a terrible situation. Without a revenue stream, there is no new content developed by MC for the game. Without interest in the game, there is no revenue stream. Without new content, there is no interest. The only way out of that circle- actually a spiral of decline- would be for MC to do something that it is demonstrably not good at, and that is to think outside the box. This community, imho, is the only possible potential source of rescue out there, and that would only be possible if MC was to take SP CXL and open it completely to us. An active contingent of MODders and BATters making worthwhile content and changes to the game would create the buzz that MC so apparently can't. On the other hand, MC likely feels it can't do that, because every BAT and MOD release competes (and, in truth, with a totally unfair advantage- it's free!) for the dollars that MC needs to earn selling the same thing. The company would have to take the very long view that, if it put CXL's fate in the hands of this community, we could be trusted to do the right thing. I don't know how anyone who has followed this situation since the Cities Unlimited days, as many of the commenters on this thread have, could possibly see things any different. Trusting MC to live up to any "promise" at this point concerning this game is just misguided, in that MC has no track record whatsoever of honoring commitments to the many who were the game's potential purchasers and to the unfortunate few who actually bought CXL. My prediction- CXL 2011 will be a kludge of whatever stuff MC has sitting around on the shelf today. Not a single new development dollar (or Euro, I guess) will be spent. A year from now, CXL will have the same size following as SimCity: Societies, and all the rest of us will be enjoying all the new stuff that's been developed in the meantime for SC4. Davidquote> I think you really hit something on the head here with the "straight answer" part. Most of us don't expect games to be prfect, and many of us (I include myself here) are sympathetic to the plight of developers and acknowledge that making a game is a complicated, time-consuming product. As a community, however, we DO expect that companies which promise transparency actually deliver on that end. What we seem to have seen from MC is a near-endless stream of euphamisms, redirections, maybes, and "coming soon" notices that never seem to actually come soon. The CitiesXL twitter is a classic example of a tool that could have been used to give us insight into the development process and team priorities but instead went almost unused or simply parroted back what the website already told us. It's hard to be sympathetic when the process is such a black box, especially when there's a history of shoving products out the door (and I'm not just talking about CityLife here; if one looks up reviews on MC's other games outside the genre, similar conclusions can be drawn). Indeed, reading the PO closing statement, I'm repeatedly struck by just how vague and non-committal it is, which frankly points towards the worst rather than the best scenario. MC can still potentially redeem itself on this end if they start straight-talking now. Nothing engenders more ill-will, however, than leaving the door open for hope (i.e. thoughts that CXL 2011 will have massive content additions, or that it will open up to custom content) by wavering about and making nonspecific statement and then simply smashing that hope to bits later.

Voting exploit on the stacking - it's clearly cheating. The second example, though, just seems clever. I'll have to try it out, especially in those pesky areas around the edges where I end up juuuust short of the minimum necessary.

A quick question about config.bmp files: did they disappear off of the exchange? I distinctly remember downloading a number of maps in the past that had the configs pre-made, but now when I've gone back to get them (the Montreal, QC map comes to mind) the configs have disappeared and only the JPG is available. Where'd they go? I'm going to go back into Landscape Designer and do it by hand for now; I'm just curious, mostly.

You know, for all of my complaining about MC's customer service, I DID just go and buy the last month of PO. I think I am having trouble letting go of my cities, and the game can be quite crack-like at times. I am, however, preparing to reinstall SC4. The one thing I liked about CXL was the extra-large map sizes, which enabled you to build huge, self-contained (if not self-reliant) cities. Region play is fine, but I like to see my whole megalopolis at once, which is harder with SC4.

RE: Community suggestions versus central design - that they didn't take up specific suggestions in the design phase could be written off as not wanting to muck up a game plan by throwing in the kitchen sink. (This strikes me as a bit false, though, because most of the "community" suggestions here were just plain common sense rather than frivolity.) What's much more disconcerting is the way they roundly ignored users AFTER the launch of the game when things were quite obviously broken. More than half of Bountytaker's critiques relate to legitimate post-game issues - the bugs, the lack of content releases, the failure to delete unused cities, and the total lack of transparency. Every ticket I submitted (and my experience is hardly unique) was met with the same form e-mail that didn't even acknowledge that my reports were legitimate, and I even wrote one in French just to see if I'd get better feedback (non). Originally posted by: morriswalters I really must go back to school to polish my language skills. I've had trouble this whole week making myself clear. The point was not to talk about what you are doing until you have something as feature complete as you can get it. The danger is that you will promise things that you think you can deliver and then find that you can't. Teams always have a leader, always. This is true at MC. The only person responsible for Monte Cristo's demise if indeed it happens is Monte Cristo, and that is as it should be. The either benefit from it's sucess or suffer from it's failure. quote> This, actually, strikes me as being really close to on-the-money; the disappointment was greater because we were promised so much. Again, though, "team lead" can be a misleading title in many companies, and MC's organizational structure could be much more complex. We just don't know how isolated the programmers were form the ones actually looking at finance numbers and the ones in charge of PR, and I am almost always inclined to give the actual code and art staff the benefit of the doubt. This is why I feel sort of conlifcted just outright dumping on MC, because I have a feeling that there were some people on staff with vision and that they got screwed as much as the community did.

What did surprise me about this is that the single player game will continue; I was under the impression that they had gambled their solvency on making the PO work, and that the end of the PO would be the end of MC too; I would love to be a fly on the wall over there... perhaps they got a new round of financing? The picture from the rushed release and the PO blitz was that the money was running out, so I'm really curious as to how they plan to move forward with more development on the single player game. I suppose we will have to continue to wait and see. Although... quote> I think you were right the firrst time. Reading between the lines, MC's promise to "continue work" on 1P is a pretty empty one. They won't even be patching any bugs or adding online-exclusive content until March, at which point features they already have will be transitioned in. And CXL2011 could well just be the completion of features taken out since the beta (rail, maybe) and a few new buildings, ala CityLife 2008. MC makes other games besides CXL, so there's no necessary indication that they'll even be keeping the whole team around, or that they got fresh financing - this seems like a way of transitioning out of the product, much like the discontinuation of the 3 month offer was of transitioning out of the PO.

Originally posted by: dedgren I guess I just don't buy into all the happy smiley. MC was told that it was selling tickets to a train wreck well over a year ago. Everyone here was told that MC was selling tickets to a train wreck well over a year ago. What is the purpose in trying to sound understanding now that the train wreck has happened? Davidquote> I agree and disagree. Diasgree first: I think it's important that we understand that the factors that cause the disconnect between developer promises and their marketing strategies rather than blaming the entire company, just to be fair to the people who did indeed pour effort into making the game, even if it wasn't enough. Agreement, though, on the smile parade. The boundless optomism in this thread understandable but perplexing. This is not an example of MC "seeing the light" or "coming to reason". This is an example of the company running out of cash after repeated bad calls and neglect of the user base resulted in the failure of their product. I realize that a lot of people wanted more robust SP / SP only to begin with, and so this feels like "good" news, but read the fine print: no bug patches and no updates until buses are added until march. The wording of the FAQ also makes CXL 2011 sound like a different (albeit not much) product from the March bus addition, too, so I'm not holding my breath that it's forthcoming. And the fact that CXL has fallen so flat as to preclude any updates until then does NOT indicate a company that is in proper health / has the proper priorities to deliver on future promises any more than they did on the original CXL promise - it indicates a company that is just as deaf to / incapable of responding to our concerns as ever. I do hope to be proved wrong, but let's not set ourselves up for disappointment by betting on a crippled horse.

Originally posted by: zero7 Hopefully, with all efforts being concentrated on the solo game we'll end up with a good solo city builder that will capture the imagination of the community and it can then evolve into a worthy successor to SC4. A lot will now depend on how the transition from Cities XL to Cities XL 2011 is managed. quote> The main sticking points here are timeframe, content, and pricing. On the timeframe issue, I honestly don't have a ton of hope; if the company is desperate for money, chances are they aren't going to be bringing on extra stafff to get CXL 2011 out in a hurry. Content-wise, too, it seems unlikely that there will be much coming out of the developers before the summer of this year, again given the money / staffing issues; on the upside, if they really *do* open it up to the community and the back-end ends up being robust enough, we could see some cool new maps and buildings coming out (though sadly probably no new infrastructure, as I doubt that's as esy to mod in). Pricing may actually be one of the more hopeful points. CityLife owners got CItyLife 2008 for free, after all, so MC does have a history of releasing this sort of upgrade at little or no cost.

Originally posted by: Mastaflex Originally posted by: FatalCheese But I'm calling foul on the part of the FAQ that states there will be no more fixes for the game. I still paid $50 for this game. It's 4 months old. There are some major bugs in it, unrelated to the PO. Reputable game companies don't drop support for a game when they decide they're making a new one. I'm sure alot of poeple are happy that the next version will not be subscription based - but don't let that euphoria absolve them of thier responsibilty to the investment we've already made.quote> quote> This actually captures the reason why the PO may not have taken off so much in the first place. I don't mark it up to developer apathy or to malice, like some, but rather to the product being rushed to shelves and the marketing department being out of sync with the developers, who have shown that given resources and time, they can produce a good product (i.e. the buses). In the months since release, we have had less than one patch every 30 days, and major bugs - including some memory leaks - still remain in game. Additionally, while the bus system is pretty darn neat (inability to edit placed routes aside), it was a feature that was promised on launch - if I recall correctly, promised even to single-player gamers - so I hardly consider it a PO "bonus". What the PO did deliver was a set of medieval buildings, which looked nice but added little in terms of playabilty, and garish holiday graphics. Again, I mark this up to too few programmers / too little money in design and too much in marketing. Even though I don't consider it a great value and can understand why it failed to take off, I personally will still miss the PO. The ability to trade with other players - and with oneself, importantly! - is really what makes the game work for me. I can't imagine going back to single-player and having to deal solely with OmniCorp rather than using my own support cities and other players.Plus there are some genuinely nice players in game who are nice to chat with - I suppose I'll have to come on here more often. EDIT: Originally posted by: Jeiman2008 I hope MC fired whoever it was that talked them into this Planet Offer idea in the first place. Honestly guys when did it become more about the money than about producing a quality product? To MC's developers I'd like to say please don't forget why people play games or what it is that makes a game good. It seems to me the game that could have been so great was lost somewhere along the way in advertising and hype. It's fine with us if you get paid for your work, it's not fine when you release a product that is nowhere near a release state, and then try to market it like it's the next WoW. We were hopeful, but not fooled. Best of luck in the future MC.quote> Quoting for agreement. It's hard to tell what the internal financials looked like at MC prior to launch, but I have a sneaking suspicion that as a small company with dwindling funds they may have looked at PO as a way to recoup the losses of a long development cycle, then rushed the product out hte door to get money faster, severely miscalculating the amount of polish required to retain subscribers.