Hellken

Very GOOD WORK! 

"This is all processed by my client, not by the server. All the server did was tell me ‘X fire trucks available, Y water available, Z power available, from city with the name ABC,’ as a raw list of values. When you log back on, your water levels will be exactly as they were when you last logged off, because EA’s servers were NOT doing any processing, and my client only affects the city I am simulating.” Maxis/EA have a lot of explaining to do. The more I read about this game, the more I feel that the Glassbox was not the revolutionary simulation we were promised. I was so skeptical about Maxis claims that always - online was necessary because the server "needed to do calculations for the game". The evidence that the Glassbox is broken and poorly done is well - documented. It appears that it was just marketing hype and nothing more. Maxis/ and EA have been caught lying to their customers. Their reputation is ruined forever.... Impossible to engineer? Really!? SimCity 4's region play was not a stroke of genius. It was a simple concept and that did not need online connection to work. After watching UKAzzar's video I wonder what these people were thinking... EPIC FAIL.

This picture is fantastic! 

This so true. He could have had fun destroying everyone's cities and have a good laugh but he chose to expose the MAJOR flaws in the game. UKAzzer's posts were deleted by EA on EA's forums but I hope EA get exposed for trying to cover up. Dear EA, This is what I feel after watching this: Regards, Hellken

HORROR FILM OF THE YEAR: SIMCITY (2013): A Tragic Story Where Everything Goes Wrong ---------------- I feel sorry for Ms. Lucy Bradshaw. But it was inevitable. A lot of things Maxis claimed about this game turned out to be false. It was just marketing hype. Nothing more. (1) Always - online connection is necessary for simulation to work. I was skeptical about the necessity of the servers. According to Maxis, the servers are needed to share calculations. They lied about the Glassbox simulation being revolutionary. It is definitely not as powerful as we thought it would be. I am glad I did not rush and buy this game because the evidence that the Glassbox simulation is broken and poor has been documented all over the internet. Glassbox at work by HarvardAce: Online connection was never necessary for it to "work" anyway. Kotaku expoosed this: http://kotaku.com/5990165/my-simcity-city-thrived-offline-for-19-minutes (2): "It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team." This was exposed by UKAzzer: http://pastie.org/6506929 By TheDemonDemonizer: --------------- Maxis/EA have been exposed miserably. They cannot fix the PR (Public Relations) disaster they created. This PR disaster should be used as an example by MBA students on how a project should NOT be handled.

This hacker is a true hero.

Outstanding work. *clap*clap*

|TWEET

I really LOVE all the little details and all the effort you put into this journal. :) 

"Over the past couple of days, “SimCity” has eclipsed “Pope” in global search volume. Electronic Arts has finally created something that has captivated the world with an intoxicating melange of drama, tragedy and sick humor." "There is little doubt that many an MBA program will mine this episode for course material in coming years." This week was so stressful for me. I just go around the internet after all my work just to search for news or something funny about this game to "de - stress" myself. This game's PR failures are my guilty pleasures... Pass the popcorn.

So much was compromised. So many features taken out. I hate "judging a book by its cover" but the video evidence is undeniable at this point. If the growing feedback from players who have played the game is true, then the Glassbox simulation was a marketing gimmick and not something "revolutionary" as we were led to believe. The agent based simulation is a resource sucking simulation which does not add much gameplay - value except for visualizations. This is extremely disappointing. Think of all the stuff that was taken away in the name of Glassbox. My goodness, one of the reasons why this game was always - online was so that the servers could help calculate the agent based simulation. EA, why?

Whether this is fake or real, this is what I think:

Great job EA.... I found this week more entertaining than watching Hollywood disaster movies.

To be fair, I still haven't bought the game and I won't get it until a lot of known problems with the online servers and corrupt saving/city deleted problems are fixed. I want to test this when I get the game, but these videos make me disappointed. The traffic loops and cars turn at intersections randomly until they get to the destination. Path finding seems to be cheap and the shortest route is preferred: ======================================================================================================================= Sim City Pathfinding - shortest path failure This is a post from someone at Reddit: [–]AzzerUK[S] 94 points 10 hours ago * This video is really simple and shows that all traffic follows the SHORTEST route from the source to the destination, regardless of road density, traffic, etc. - all the cars prefers going down a traffic-packed dirt road that is slowing all traffic down, rather than a higher density street that is only SLIGHTLY curved (and so only a couple of dots longer) than the dirt road - and never tries to alter that path. Regardless of if this is early game (and not much computation needed), or late game, the pathing remains at this most basic. A couple more videos, one showing traffic pathing under heavy congestion, and one showing general oddities in the pathing, help demonstrate these issues further; AI Pathing Problems and Traffic Loop It appears to be an extremely simplistic A* pathing system WITH NO WEIGHTINGS for road density or current traffic congestion whatsoever... and weightings would be extremely easy to throw into a standard A* pathing system! A* is practically designed with the ability to add weightings! Road is lower density? Give that road a slightly higher weight (in effect, A* treats it as if it's slightly longer than it really is). Traffic congestion going into the red? (which is data available realtime anyway right now) Give that road a hefty weight addition, again so A* will act as if it's a longer road than it really is, and so a road that is physically longer but is not currently busy will be used instead. It's certainly a cause of many traffic problems in this game. So much for an extremely advanced simulation (the new "glass box" And that's without going into a list of all the bugs found with traffic system so far that causes problems, which so far I've seen; Buildings can get stuck spawning vehicles over and over non-stop until you exit and re-load the city - which if you DON'T do when this happens, floods your entire road network with an instant gridlock very quickly. Can be hard to spot. Any "service" vehicles (from police cars to school buses) can sometimes all go for the same target at once and get stuck - and EVERY vehicle of that service type will try to reach the same point at once and start looping in a conga-line (conga-lines of 20 police cars, or 10 school buses) which cause instant traffic grid-lock spreading out, while ignoring all other issues of that service type (because every vehicle jumped to the same destination). Vehicles can only ever turn right leaving a building, never left, which if you don't plan for with enough intersections can lead people to take so long to each destinations. If you DO build plenty of intersections, these often break down whenever any single car wants to use them, causing your 3 lanes of traffic to act as 1 lane causing gridlocks. If you build an intersection next to the highway exit, the highway single-lanes cause instant traffic backlog both down the highway and into your city, stopping trade trucks getting anywhere. If you DON'T build an intersection next to the highway exit, emergency service vehicles get stuck leaving the city on the highway because they wanted the other side of the road somewhere close to the highway exit. See this image here; Cars can sometimes get stuck at a stop light forever - blocking up all traffic behind them but never moving Another post from another Reddit user: Is Simcity Glassbox engine all bells and whistles with no substance? (self.SimCity) submitted 7 hours ago by Namell Few things people have found out: Traffic uses simple shortest route with no weight for traffic or road type. Firetrucks all go to same fire even if there are multiple [fires] happening. Service vehicles like to drive in a herd. Street cars use random generator to decide whether to turn in intersection. Amount of jobs specialization buildings create depends on you city size. For example mine built in 5000 population city creates x jobs while mine built in 100 000 population city creates 20x jobs. Buildings tend to work at 100% efficiency even when there is not enough people to fill the jobs. Commercial buildings work just fine without any freight. It seems that whenever someone takes some effort to figure out how things work they find out they find out they don't really work and everything is implemented with least possible effort for looks only. ======================================================================= The video evidence is shocking. To add insult to injury, so many features and so many things were compromised just to make way for the Glassbox. This game's launch was an "epic fail" - they wanted the game to be connected onto remote servers that would make calculations on the Glassbox. Everyone knows now that was a terrible idea. Even if the servers and corrupted saving gets fixed, I am beginning to doubt if the new Glassbox simulation was even worth all the pain. I don't like "judging a book by its cover" but after watching these videos and hearing feedback on the Glassbox, I am beginning to have second thoughts about buying this game. EDIT: Please note that this thread is a discussion on Glassbox and not just pathfinding. Discuss any issues you experience with jobs, residents, commercial buildings, service vehicles, etc.

True. They really dug their own graves. Some introspection would have gone a long way. here's another video I found on Garbage. The garbage trucks are confused and just dump the garbage anywhere (Too stupid to find the landfill). With all the hype about the Glassbox and the years of development put into it I expect a higher standard than finding the shortest route. It's shocking that there are no "weights" on the road type/density.

Why South Korean Gamers Are So Pissed about SimCity Brian Ashcraft Upset about the rocky SimCity rollout? Take heart. You are not alone. Gamers in South Korea are also not happy campers. But it's not just due to the inability to play. Here's what happened: When South Korean gamers couldn't connect to servers, the official SimCity Korean Facebook page called out the country for piracy. You know, EA Korea's paying customers. Talk about adding insult to injury! Yesterday, the game's Korean Facebook page carried this message (translated by Kotaku reader Sang Kwon): "We are currently undergoing a server maintenance to increase capacity per your request. We expect a lot of fluctuation throughout the maintenance. Your feedback is important. Thank you for your understanding and patience." Okay, this is all rather innocuous. This comment is not the problem. Rather, it's what the EA Facebook page manager apparently wrote in the comments. The sticking point was that supposedly there aren't any servers in Asia—something that seemed perplexing for a game has always requires an internet connection. Full size Above, in the highlighted section, a commenter wrote, "Asia has one of the highest populations. Why aren't there any servers?" The EA Korea Facebook manager replied (once again, translation by Sang Kwon): "There is a lot of piracy in Asia, so it would be difficult for the time being." This, of course, set Korean gamers off. "It's so hard to legitimately play games even when you buy the official product," wrote one Facebook user, and another asked, "Haven't you learned anything from Diablo III launch?" Yet another quipped, "Change the company name to MA: Money Arts." Many asked where they could get refunds. The Facebook post now has over 700 comments. The whole brouhaha is all over Korean gaming sites like GameMeca, Game Donga, and Daily Game. The EA rep has apologized for the comments, saying this was just an unfortunate result of trying to be more proactive as Facebook users were complaining about the lack of communication from EA. -------------- Read the rest at Kotaku.com

I am not sure what Maxis is trying to say here. Does this mean they can monitor what you do? Scary ...

....I need more popcorn..... News on this game gets interesting everyday.....

.. SimCity (2013) news gets more and more interesting everyday... Who needs Hollywood movies?

"And so our magnificent players were having such a good time that they didn't want to live their real lifes anymore." That sounds so beautiful the way he says. When in fact, the obvious translation to this BS would be: "Yes, we did that stuff that some airline companies do: overbooking. We sold more than we could handle. We wanted to swell our sales. Who cares if there is no room in the servers for everybody?" Reading news about this game is more entertaining than watching movies.

At least North Korea's rockets got off the ground....

05 March 2013 • Story by: Julian Benson Surprising no one, the launch of SimCity was mired in problems as a result of both the game's always-on internet connection DRM and the lack of an option to pre-load game files. In response to all the issues surrounding the launch, EA are offering a refund to anyone who's been affected by the issues. Details below. For those of you living in the United States, you may have been looking forward to spending today wearing your self-made mayoral hat and robe whilst delving deep into constructing the perfect city in the newly released SimCity. Yet when the designated switch flicker over in EA towers flipped the heavy binary bar on the side of the US servers from "NO, thank you" to "YES, please", the servers quickly overheated from the traffic load and promptly fell over. The problem was two-fold. Firstly, EA hadn't allowed pre-orderers to download the game files before launch. Usually publishers using digital distribution let you pre-install the game so that on launch day you're all set to start playing. Because EA didn't it meant that everyone who was now able to play SimCity all tried to download a copy of the game at the same time, causing a massive server-stopping drain. Answering why there were no pre-loads, EA's Origin global community manager, Marcel Hatam, said in a complaints thread "pre-loads are very important, which is why we usually offer them (as we did for all of our last big releases like Crysis 3 and Dead Space 3). This didn't come together for SimCity unfortunately, for which I again apologize." Comforting words. The second issue was that once players did get the game installed they found that there was no space on servers for them to play. This caused numerous problems because not only did it stop people from playing, those that could get into a server often weren't able to get in with their friends, defeating the much-touted social aspect of the game. Also, players found that they could not play a city-build between servers. So if you built a city on one server, lost connection and were unable to get back in, you'd need to start all over again on a different server. It all sounds a little ridiculous. In response to the launch day trouble Hatam said " If you regrettably feel that we left you down, you can of course request a refund for your order at http://help.origin.com/contact-us , though we are currently still in the process of resolving this issue. " With the European launch due for the 8 March, hopefully EA are sorting out pre-loads now. Cheers, PC Gamer.

Such EXTREME Irony: BEFORE: Some months ago they told us about how FUN the leaderboards and online challenges were. They told us that this was one of the big reasons why the game needed to be always - online. They defended the necessity to be online and even their Vice President made a write up on it. NOW: They disabled the online stuff. People are forced to be on the internet for a 100% online game that has zero online stuff. Seriously EA, I dare you to argue and reason your way out of this.